Surgeons are recognized for their precision more so than for their communication skills—but there’s a lot we can learn from them about communicating with our employees.
Your communication program is a complex, continuously evolving entity. Much like the human body, the health of the whole is tied directly to the health of the individual parts. There may be times when failure on multiple fronts leads to such rapid deterioration that treatment is pointless. But, more often than not, a surgical approach is exactly what the doctor ordered.
Successful communication management, like successful surgery, requires the following:
- a clear understanding of the overall health of your communication program;
- an ability to diagnose problems before it’s too late;
- swift, precise corrective action; and
- careful follow-up.
Doing regular checkups on your communication program—using surveys and other feedback-gathering techniques—is just the first step. The real challenge is taking that raw data and turning it into actionable information that can be used to remedy problems quickly and efficiently. The good news is that, just as in modern medicine, computer-based analytics are making it much easier to do just that.
It doesn’t have to cost an arm and a leg
Free online survey tools, such as SurveyMonkey, not only help you gather valuable data to assess the overall health of your program but also allow you to analyze key trends in your data using frequencies and percentages, means and modes. A variety of “data-filtering” features can help you further refine your analysis and pinpoint key areas for change.
To further explore your survey findings, you can pump the results into statistical software tools, such as the Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS). In addition to organizing your data and producing easy-to-read outputs, SPSS allows you to enhance the validity of your analysis and distinguish what is statistically significant from what isn’t. You can even extract and analyze statistically valid trends derived from written responses (from an open-ended survey question) or verbal responses (from a focus group meeting).
Your benefits or pension plan’s website can also serve as a valuable diagnostic resource. Free Web analytics tools, such as Google Analytics, make it easy to collect and analyze data related to the use of your Website or intranet. This can help you better understand the hot buttons that are driving member behaviour and identify which messages may or may not be getting through.
Web analytics can do the following:
- measure the traffic on your website;
- identify the Web pages (and topics) that are attracting the most attention;
- track trends and patterns in site usage;
- identify the regional location of site visitors;
- help raise the profile of key information;
- better serve specific demographics; and
- measure the success of collateral communications in driving members to the website.
Eye-tracking technology—which studies the visual behaviour of individuals—goes even further, providing valuable information on how your employees read and interact with the Web. For example, if you find that a particular headline grabs your employees’ attention in less than one second, or that text works better than multimedia for certain types of information, you can determine what you should stop doing, continue doing and start doing.
Minimizing communications interventions
In a world of tight budgets and communication overload, minimizing communications interventions is a key objective. The more accurate the conclusions you yield from your employee research, the better equipped you are to nip problems in the bud, identify the least invasive corrective action and ensure your communication program remains healthy and effective.