How to Measure Internal Comms Without Drowning in Vanity Metrics

The dashboard is not the strategy

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Internal comms people have suffered for years from a very particular workplace illness: dashboard obsession. The email got a 72% open rate. The CEO video had 1,900 views. The intranet article was clicked, ‘liked’, ‘loved’, ‘applauded’ and possibly blessed by a passing consultant. Marvellous. And yet half the business still thinks the transformation starts next month, three teams have invented their own version of the change story, and one manager is explaining the strategy using a screenshot from last August.

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This is the problem with vanity metrics. They look busy. They look presentable. They make a slide deck feel satisfyingly numeric. But they do not necessarily tell you whether your communication actually worked.

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That sounds harsh, but it is also liberating. Because the goal of internal comms is not to win a beauty pageant for newsletters. It is to help people understand, trust, adopt, act, align and, ideally, not descend into total organisational chaos every time something changes.

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Start with the goal, not the graph

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The first thing to get straight is that measurement is not about collecting every number you can find and hoping one of them looks impressive enough to wave smugly at the leadership team. Proper measurement starts earlier than that. AMEC’s Barcelona Principles 3.0 put it plainly: setting goals is an “absolute prerequisite” to communications planning, measurement and evaluation, and measurement should identify outputs, outcomes and potential impact. In other words, before you start counting anything, you need to know what success is supposed to look like. Revolutionary stuff, I know.

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This is where a lot of internal comms measurement goes slightly feral. Teams measure what is easy to count rather than what matters. Opens are easy. Clicks are easy. Views are easy. Reactions are easy. But “Did people genuinely understand what this change means for them?” is harder. “Did managers feel equipped to explain it?” trickier. “Did this campaign actually reduce confusion, increase confidence or move behaviour?” trickier still. And yet those are the questions that matter.

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The trouble with vanity metrics

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Take email open rates. We are absolutely not saying that they are completely useless. If your open rate is dreadful, something is probably off. Your subject line may be dull, your timing may be poor, or your audience may have developed a survival instinct around (read: complete avoidance of) all-company emails. But open rates can also be a tad flimsy. Mailchimp warns that Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection can inflate opens and reduce the accuracy of related data, and explicitly says clicks and purchases are stronger indicators of engagement than opens. That is in marketing, yes, but the lesson applies beautifully to internal comms too: a reported “view” is not the same as real attention, and real attention is not the same as understanding.

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Even the word “engagement” can send us off down the wrong corridor if we are not careful. In digital analytics, “engagement” often means something far less profound than communicators might hope. Google’s own GA4 documentation defines engagement rate using “engaged sessions,” and a session counts as engaged if it lasts longer than 10 seconds, triggers a key event, or includes at least two page or screen views. Useful? Yes. Proof that your message landed, made sense and changed behaviour? Absolutely not. Someone spending 11 seconds on your intranet page is not exactly a ringing endorsement of strategic clarity.

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Internal comms is supposed to change something

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And that distinction matters more than ever. As we reported in out last blog, Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace 2026 report found that global employee engagement fell to 20% in 2025, the lowest level since 2020, and estimated that low engagement cost the world economy about $10 trillion in lost productivity, or 9% of global GDP. Gallup also makes the point that engagement is a much higher bar than satisfaction or a simple “percent favourable” score. So, if your internal comms measurement is built entirely around whether people vaguely noticed a message, you are measuring the corporate equivalent of someone nodding politely while thinking about lunch.

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What should you measure instead? Start with the question behind the communication. Not the channel. Not the format. Not the campaign title dreamt up during a workshop involving too many Post-its. The real question. Are you trying to build awareness? Improve understanding? Equip managers? Shift behaviour? Increase confidence? Support change adoption? Reduce noise? If you do not know which of those you are aiming for, your metrics will end up as random as a pick’n’mix.

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Awareness is not understanding

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If the goal is awareness, then yes, reach matters. Views, opens, visits, attendance and basic readership all have a role. But they are only the first layer. They tell you whether the message had a chance to land, not whether it landed well.

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If the goal is understanding, then you need evidence that people can explain the message back in their own words. That might mean pulse surveys, manager feedback, quick knowledge checks, listening sessions or even analysis of the questions people are asking. Because the questions people ask after a communication are often more revealing than the communication stats themselves. If 3,000 people watched the town hall but 600 still asked whether the old process applies, that is not success. That is just confusion at scale.

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Behaviour is where the truth lives

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If the goal is behaviour change, vanity metrics become even less helpful. This is where internal comms has to get braver about following the trail beyond the message itself. Did people complete the action you asked them to complete? Did managers hold the cascade conversations? Did employees sign up, switch system, attend training, use the new tool, change the process, stop doing the old thing, or adopt the new behaviour consistently over time?

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If not, then the communication may have been visible without being effective. A beautifully branded failure is still a failure.

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For change comms, the measurement sweet spot usually sits across a handful of layers. First, did people receive the message? Second, did they understand it? Third, did they believe it? Fourth, did they act on it? And fifth, what friction showed up along the way? That last bit is crucial, because change rarely fails in one dramatic explosion. More often it leaks to death through misunderstandings, patchy manager confidence, mixed messages, unclear timelines and people quietly deciding that whatever the official line is, they will wait it out and see if it goes away.

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Do not forget the managers

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Which brings us to managers. Poor neglected managers. Gallup found manager engagement has dropped sharply in recent years, falling from 31% in 2022 to 22% globally in 2025, while 79% of managers in best-practice organisations were engaged. That should be setting off klaxons for anyone measuring internal comms. Because managers are not just another audience segment. They are often the point where communication either becomes real or dies in a meeting invite. If you are not measuring whether managers feel informed, confident and equipped to communicate with their teams, you are missing one of the most important predictors of whether your messages will survive contact with real life.

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Smaller dashboards, better questions

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This is why the best internal comms dashboards tend to be smaller, not bigger. Slightly less “look at our rainbow of widgets” and slightly more “here are the few things that actually tell us whether this worked.”

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A sensible dashboard might include some output metrics, because reach still matters. But it should also include outcome signals: employee understanding, sentiment, confidence, manager readiness, action completion, repeat questions, search terms, adoption data, and qualitative feedback from the places where comms meets reality. In short, not just what people clicked, but what changed.

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Qualitative data is not fluffy

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And yes, qualitative data counts. In fact, sometimes it is the thing that stops you making a complete fool of yourself. If your numbers look strong but managers are telling you the messaging is too jargon-heavy, or employees are saying they still do not understand what the change means for their team, that matters. AMEC explicitly says measurement and evaluation should include both qualitative and quantitative analysis. Which is helpful, because sometimes the most valuable measurement is not a percentage at all. Sometimes it is the sentence that makes everyone in the room go very quiet.

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For organisations using Office 365, this is also why we often recommend Amplify. One of its big strengths is that it gives internal comms teams a much clearer picture of what is actually landing across Microsoft channels, rather than forcing you to cobble together half a story from scattered stats in different places. Used properly, it can help you move beyond “well, some people probably saw it” territory and towards a more joined-up view of reach, readership and engagement trends, which is rather more useful when you are trying to prove value than waving around a heroic open rate and hoping nobody asks a follow-up question.

By the way, we’ll be looking at Amplify in more detail in our next blog.

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Channels are containers, not outcomes

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The other trap to avoid is measuring channel performance as though it were communication performance. Your intranet may be doing one job. Your leader video another. Your manager cascade pack another. Your email summary another. The channel is not the objective. It is the container. If you judge the success of internal comms only by which container performed best, you can end up optimising for attention rather than effect. That is how organisations end up very pleased with a wildly popular leader video that told employees approximately nothing.

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A better approach is to build your measurement around a simple chain: what did we want people to know, feel and do, and what evidence do we have that those things happened? Once you have that, your metrics start behaving themselves. Reach tells you if people had the chance to see it. Understanding tells you if the message made sense. Sentiment tells you how it landed. Behaviour tells you whether it changed anything. Business indicators tell you whether it mattered.

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Measure what moved, not what glittered

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And that, really, is the heart of it. Internal comms does not need more numbers. It needs better questions. Because if everyone opened the email but nobody changed their behaviour, you do not have a communications success story. You have a very efficient way of distributing word salad.

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So, by all means keep your opens, clicks and views. They are useful servants. Just do not let them become delusional little tyrants. The point is not to prove that employees glanced at a thing. The point is to prove that communication helped move the organisation from confusion to clarity, from hesitation to action, and from “What is this all about then?” to “Right, I know what I need to do.”

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That is measurement worth bothering with.

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