Is Internal Communications Measuring What Really Matters?

The apparent success of an internal communications campaign can conceal its actual failure.

Imagine a company announcing a new strategy to improve operational efficiency, simplify its organizational structure, and give its teams greater ownership. Following the internal communications campaign, surveys show that 80% of employees can name the three strategic priorities and 70% say the strategy is clear. But what have they actually understood, particularly when it comes to improving operational efficiency? To senior executives, “operational efficiency” may mean streamlining processes; to middle managers, cutting budgets; and to employees, eliminating jobs.

Just because employees remember strategic priorities and consider them clear doesn’t mean those priorities are properly understood across the organization. Repeating the messages isn’t enough. They need to be explained and translated into concrete terms, both vertically – at every level of the hierarchy – and horizontally – within individual teams and across interdependent teams. Otherwise, awareness of strategic priorities can mask the risks arising from conflicting interpretations.

The right question to ask after an announcement, therefore, isn’t “Do you understand the company’s new strategy?” but “Can you explain the strategy in your own words?” An affirmative answer to the first question can create a false sense that the message has been understood. Only a meaningful answer to the second can demonstrate that the communication has served its purpose, particularly by making the strategy understandable to everyone concerned across the organization.

The medical field offers a useful lesson here through a technique known as teach-back. Rather than simply asking patients whether they understood what their doctor told them, healthcare professionals ask patients to explain the information back using their own language. The same technique should be applied to internal communications, even if it would increase the cost of measuring effectiveness. However, artificial intelligence could help analyze the open-ended responses.

This is where managers play a critical role. They are best positioned to help their team members move from understanding a message to making it relevant to their own work by connecting corporate announcements to day-to-day activities. In doing so, they enable employees to answer a third question: “Can you explain which decisions and ways of working your team will need to change as a result of the company’s new strategy?” This is the question that ensures the message translates into action.

Against this backdrop, it could be valuable to track three metrics that internal communications rarely measures:

• Genuine understanding rate: The percentage of employees who can accurately explain a message and its essential implications.
• Operational translation rate: The percentage of employees who can connect the message to their own work and identify its concrete implications (when these have been defined).
• Misinterpretation rate: The percentage of employees whose interpretation of a message could lead to decisions or behaviors that run counter to the organization’s objectives.¹

Another important benefit of these three metrics is that they serve not only to measure communications effectiveness but also to listen to managers and employees. And in communications, listening is the foundation of effectiveness.

Furthermore, employees will increasingly turn to generative AI to make sense of their employers’ announcements. Gartner predicts that, by 2028, 75% of employees will use chatbots to access relevant internal communications. This additional layer of mediation will introduce another potential source of misunderstanding, especially since AI assistants take into account the information they have collected about their users. While this personalization may help individuals better absorb corporate messages, it could also widen differences in interpretation and make it harder to maintain a shared understanding across the organization.

The reality is that organizations have sophisticated tools and methods for measuring how widely their messages circulate, how well their content is remembered, and how managers and employees feel about it. Yet, they are far less likely to assess whether their intended audiences actually understand those messages.

And a misunderstood message can be more dangerous than a forgotten one: It creates the illusion of alignment while fostering conflicting perceptions.

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¹ An employee can fully understand a strategic direction and still disagree with it. Such disagreement does not constitute a misunderstanding.