The 4 big questions you need to answer during an internal comms audit

What makes an internal comms audit truly useful? It’s not a spreadsheet of all your channels. Or a collection of survey results. Or even the recommendations you can draw from it.

It’s the questions you ask going into the audit process.

Jessica Onick, former senior director of internal communications at GitHub and founder of Jessica Onick Communications, told Ragan that her starting block is always conferring with executives and asking a simple question — is there a shared understanding of the business and the strategy behind it between execs and communicators?

“My audits start before we ever look at communications,” Onick said. “My first step is always to talk to executives, but I want to deliberately not talk about communications with them. I want to understand the business. I want to know what their priorities are and what they are being held accountable for. What is their CEO telling them that they need to accomplish this year? What are they expecting from their teams right now?”

She added that this context is the lifeblood of any internal comms audit worth its salt.

“I think audits often fail before they begin because communications isn’t aligning with those business objectives,” Onick said.

The most successful audits focus less on channel and message analysis and more on communicators answering a key set of questions.

1. Are we aligned with leadership’s business goals or auditing in isolation?

Many audits start by diagnosing a problem, like sending too many emails or not generating enough engagement on intranet posts. While they’re real challenges comms pros face, if you don’t ground them in business aims, they’re just isolated symptoms of larger issues.

For instance, if an audit flags low intranet engagement or poor email open rates, that doesn’t mean a whole lot on its own. Without tying those issues back to business priorities, you can’t tell whether communication is actually failing or if it’s just not aligned correctly.

Onick pointed this out as a relatively common mistake communicators make.

“We go in looking for those channel or format problems,” she said. “And when you go in looking for them, you find them. So then you start solving, but without anchoring this audit to what the business is trying to accomplish, those findings are being measured against nothing.”

Onick recommended a three-step process to answer this first question:

• Define success within the lens of the business.
• Get aligned on the top priorities with leadership before diving into evaluations of comms activities.
• Use those priorities to frame every finding.

“These make up the north star of your audit,” Onick said.

2. Do employees understand the business strategy?

Once you know what leaders want to achieve, you can pressure test to see if there’s a gap in understanding between executives and employees. By asking this question, internal communicators can use an audit to determine if information is being shared but potentially misunderstood, or even completely missed.

“The reason internal communicators exist is to send messaging on behalf of the company that ensures that employees can do their best work in alignment with business objectives,” Onick said. “And they can’t do that if they don’t know what those business objectives are.”

Onick said communicators should go right to the source as part of the audit to see if messages are hitting home.

“I go right to a team manager or an employee and ask about how they understand the company’s business priorities as they apply to their role,” she said. “My goal is to gauge whether that’s consistent.”

For instance, if leaders think profitability is the main goal for a given quarter, but employees think it’s growth, that’s a classic misalignment that internal communicators can unearth in an audit. But it’s all fixable with messaging that stresses cohesion.

“If there’s not that shared understanding — and frankly, there usually isn’t — then that audit becomes the map for figuring out where the breakdown is,” Onick said.

3. Are our channels, messaging, and volume helping or hurting employee understanding?

Onick said that a big issue for a lot of companies is that they have too many messages going across too many channels at too high a volume. Information is out there for employees, but it’s fragmented and easy to miss. Audits help uncover the complexities of a comms ecosystem that needs refining.

“During our audit, we may find that the messages that we’ve been prioritizing are not actually the messages that the business needs us to prioritize,” she said. “And so it helps to understand that when we do our analysis. Are we seeing the same story across different channels? Is it landing consistently across different channels?”

Comms pros need to ask themselves if employees understand the same priorities in the same way regardless of where they get their information. If the answer is no, the issue is a consistency problem.

You might see this situation play out in the following ways:

• A strategy update comes from leadership in a town hall but is never reinforced elsewhere.
• Slack messages, emails, and manager comms talking points are all slightly different in tone and content.
• Two teams hear two different priorities in the same message.

If employees don’t hear the same message everywhere, they don’t hear it at all.

4. Are we solving the right problem or just reacting to employee feedback?

When you’ve gotten to this question, your audit has likely surfaced some gaps in understanding and clarity. The final step in the process is to decide what to do with what your employees are telling you through the audit.

This is where things get tricky. Employee feedback is essential, but it doesn’t always point to the right solution. Employees are great at identifying points of friction, but not always what causes them within the context of the company.

“One mistake that internal communicators can make is taking employee requests at face value,” Onick said. “It’s important to remember that communications functions on behalf of the business. Our job is to bring employees along on that business journey and to build that shared understanding, and employee preferences don’t always serve those objectives.”

Onick said that she’s looking to solve the needs of the employee rather than a specific request. For instance, if employees say they’re getting too many emails, they might not be able to tell what’s important in their inbox. Or if they claim leadership isn’t communicating clearly with them, they may not notice or trust the current comms channels. These are valuable information points comms pros can use to develop solutions.

“I’m looking at the underlying gap or the risk that a specific request points to,” Onick said. “What employee communications need is not being met, and what would actually address it within the constraints of the business.”

A strong comms audit shows much more than what you’re doing. It shows you what’s missing, too.

“Your audit should be a map for figuring out where your breakdowns are,” Onick said.

Sean Devlin is an editor at Ragan Communications.