"How to Measure Your Communication Programs" by Angela D. Sinickas
copyright 2005 Angela D. Sinickas. All rights reserved. ISBN 0-9661757-1-9.12
Section II:
How to Conduct a Communication Audit.
very useful "quick hit" measurements. You can diagnose what's
working and what's not in a highly focused way, with little commitment
of time or money, and take immediate actions. However, if you need to develop an overall communication strategy,
the stand-alone measures may have limited usefulness. They may
suggest solutions that are the equivalent of taking aspirin to combat
a fever when the fever is caused by pneumonia. Similarly, in managing a communication program, it is easy to look at a symptom and embark on a quick fix that might not have any effect on the underlying problem of the symptom. You might be conducting a readership survey on your main publication and making it the very best publication it can be. However, you would not find out through a readership survey if your employees want to get certain types of information face-to-face but only 25% of them have access to staff meetings. Every few years you may need to make a more comprehensive
assessment of your communication program through a full-scale
communication audit, or you may leap to the wrong conclusions about
the strengths and weaknesses of your overall communication
environment. A story: Here's an example from a service company that had been
relying on the chain of command as a conduit of downward
information flow; however, the front-line troops didn't seem to be
getting all the messages. Top management at this company believed
that the problem was that their supervisors weren't comfortable
communicating with their employees and needed to undergo an
expensive and time-consuming series of training sessions in various
written and oral communication skills. Further investigation of this
issue in employee and supervisor focus groups during a
communication audit indicated that supervisors, by and large, had
fairly good communication skills that they tried to exercise as much
as they could. The problem, as employees saw it, was that top
management wasn't passing enough content of information down
the pipeline. No amount of supervisor training would have solved
the real problem. In This Section: When you hear about a "communication audit," people are generally referring to a series of steps that start by broadly defining the major areas of communication successes and problems, and little by little narrowing down to getting finely tuned measurements of very actionable aspects of communication with the highest potential payoff for the organization and its audiences. Personally, I'd recommend using terminology other than 'audit' to avoid making people feel defensive when you ask for their involvement. (Audits tend to remind people of tax returns.) Better alternatives might include 'conducting a needs analysis' or a 'baseline study.' Be creative; use whatever similar terminology your company uses in other aspects of its management processes. For purposes of this manual, I will use 'audit' because it has become so deeply entrenched into organizational communication jargon that it serves as shorthand. While this section of the manual gets into very tactical detail on each step of an audit, it might help to start with a quick overview of the sequential steps in the process to see how they fit together.(End of Excerpt).
