Use your comms data to explain your strategy to your leaders

Measuring engagement data isn’t enough. It needs a connection to business outcomes.

During Ragan’s Employee Experience Conference last month in Nashville, Veronica Blankenship, chief people and communication officer at Talking Rain Beverage Company, said that her company created an engagement scorecard to help figure out where gaps existed and how to explain the causes to leadership.

“When I stepped into this role, this was the question I couldn’t put down,” Blankenship told the audience. “Not whether people were happy day to day at Talking Rain, but really, how are we building the workforce that we need to take us to the next stage of our business growth?”

Talking Rain’s employee engagement data revealed some concerning insights. Internal mobility, which indicates employees moving to new roles within the company, sat at 5.4%. If people wanted to grow, they felt they had to leave, Blankenship said. In addition, cross-functional collaboration also got low scores on the company’s engagement survey. These findings led Blankenship to create the scorecard.