INTRODUCTION
Does your hospital have effective internal communication? It can help increase your employees’ job satisfaction, productivity, commitment, engagement and morale. Like any other communication effort, internal ones should be measured–in this case, it’s important to focus on outputs and outcomes.
HOW TO MEASURE OUTPUTS
First, make sure all your internal communication efforts can actually be measured. This is important because you will see if progress is being made toward achieving your goals through benchmarks or key performance indicators (KPIs).
For example, it’s hard to track the number of impressions a flyer in the elevator garners, unless you know or can estimate how many people ride the elevator throughout a given period of time. Meanwhile, you should be able to track the open rate of an internal email.
Similar to executing an external communication campaign, you will need to figure out the best methods for delivering your messages. From there, look at each tactic’s metrics–such as views, shares, engagement, etc.–for your past efforts and use the average as a baseline. From there, you should compare subsequent efforts to the baseline.
Keep in mind that managers and directors are frequently responsible for initiating internal communication and can serve as liaisons between hospital executives and employees. In a Go-Live, for example, you would set up meetings with a variety of hospital staff (e.g. senior management, lead surgeons, technical support) and discuss actionable items, timelines and reporting measurements.
HOW TO MEASURE OUTCOMES
What is the hospital trying to accomplish: Employee retention? Educate on new procedures? Merging with another healthcare system? Disseminating the brand value? Win a Leapfrog award?
Hospitals can measure outcomes in several ways. Short-term (daily) measures specific actions and the impact on the employee (e.g. understanding the message). Medium-term (monthly) focuses on the total function and strategic role of the employee (e.g. sense of belonging). Long-term (annually) relates to contributions to the hospital (e.g. behavior change).
Here are some ways to measure the aforementioned actions:
- Understanding the message (e.g. memo for team leaders to disseminate to their staff): track adoption of new messages and see how often messages are used/parroted by staff.
- Sense of belonging (e.g. monthly forums to gather employee feedback): HR measures employee satisfaction and engagement.
- Culture (e.g. nurses go above and beyond what’s asked): survey patients.
Lastly, think outside the box. For example, if your employees’ morale is down, change it. (See what the communication team in Vancouver did to boost the hospital’s ER employees’ morale.)
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