"How to Measure Your Communication Programs" by Angela D. Sinickas
copyright 2005 Angela D. Sinickas. All rights reserved. ISBN 0-9661757-1-9.11
Measuring Behaviors and Outcomes
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line. Proving the connection may be difficult, but not impossible. Dr. Daniel R. Denison* at the University of Michigan tracked both
financial performance and employee responses on attitude surveys
for 34 companies over five years. One of the attitude survey
categories he tracked against financial performance was "decision-
making practices," which includes the extent to which information
is shared across levels of an organization before and after decisions
are made. He found that the group of companies that had the higher scores on
good information-sharing practices performed better on both short-
and long-term financial measures: • Return on investment (ROI): After starting out fairly similarly at about 10% ROI, the companies that did better on their information-
sharing scores averaged a 15% ROI for the last three years while
the lower-scoring companies dropped to 5%. • Return on sales (ROS): After starting out fairly similarly at about 5-7% ROS, the companies that did better on their information-
sharing scores averaged a 15% ROS for the last three years while
the lower-scoring companies slowly dropped to 4%. • Industry rankings: To eliminate the possibility that certain types of industries simply had better financial years, and that they happened
to also get better attitude survey scores, Dr. Denison also tracked
how the two groups' ROI and ROS numbers stacked up against
other companies in their own industries. Here the results were
even more dramatic. On ROI, the companies with better
information sharing in their decision-making started out at the
60th percentile in their industries (only 40% did better) and steadily
moved their average up to the 85th percentile by the fifth year.
The other companies started at the 50th percentile and steadily
dropped to the 30th percentile, on average, in their industries.
On ROS, both groups started out about at the 60th percentile on
average. The group of companies that shared information better
again steadily rose to the 85th percentile while the others stayed at or just below where they started. However, for most of us at individual companies, it is difficult to
prove that communication creates a specific impact on an
organization's financial measures because so many other forces might
have played a role as well. It is much easier to track our
communication messages and media against specific actions or other
measurable outcomes that have a clear connection with an
organizational goal. For example, it may be difficult to prove that a communication campaign on workplace safety helped the company
reach its profitability target for the year, but we might be able to
track our communications against specific desirable employee
behaviors that our communications reinforced. Many measures of behaviors and outcomes are already being tracked
by the Human Resources, Finance, Marketing, Information
Technology, Quality Improvement and other departments in your
organization. If you obtain those numbers, you can track them
against your communication initiatives in either (or both) of two ways: • Over time, before and after your communication. • Across business units or different locations where you use various approaches (or no communication at all). "This chapter will show you a number of ways to track communication success against various measures of organizational success, in terms of desirable outcomes and the employee or customer behaviors it takes to get there. You will learn to: • Look at available data in new ways. • Track employee or customer behaviors against the communications
you use. • Identify which communication channels result in bringing in more customers. • Find horizontal communication "disconnects" among departments or locations in the operational work flow process. • Analyze communication connections in the decision-making process.(End of Excerpt).
