How to improve internal communication on the frontline: 10 tips to win

In April, Blink attended the American Ambulance Association Annual Conference & Trade Show (a.k.a. AAA)  in Nashville, TN. As the premier event in the ambulance industry, leaders gather at AAA to discuss the trends and pitfalls they face, find innovative vendor solutions, and hear from experts about the future of Emergency Medical Services (EMS). 

We had the honor of sharing the stage with a few of those trend-setting industry experts. Blink hosted a panel discussion, “Uncensored: Cutting The BS On Employee Communications,” with two of the industry’s most straight-talking COOs: Danielle Thomas (Lifeline Ambulance) and Meredith A. Lambroff-Brown (Armstrong Ambulance Service). 

Keep reading to discover some of the employee communications insights Danielle and Meredith shared with the audience. 

Why good employee communications matter for EMS agencies 

First, let’s set the stage to understand why frontline communications are so critical for ambulance companies. EMS frontline workers—paramedics and emergency medical technicians (EMTs)--play a critical role in society. Ambulance companies face a difficult task, however, when it comes to keeping a strong workforce and staying connected with them. 

Frontline roles in healthcare related industries are notoriously challenging to keep filled—and EMS is no different. Over the last few years, turnover rates have increased, with an average of 11% turnover in the US and a peak of 20% turnover in high response volume areas in 2022. The turnover problem is compounded by waning applicant pools, with nearly two-thirds of agencies reporting a decrease in applications. 

On top of that, EMS practitioners are a young and increasingly diverse workforce. In California, for example, the EMS workforce is younger on average than the rest of California’s workforce. In the US, more broadly, EMTs are one of the youngest workforces, with a median age of 29.7 years, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

What industry COOs are saying about employee communications

Against this backdrop, what advice and insights did Thomas and Lambroff-Brown have for companies struggling to communicate with a young, mobile, and diverse workforce? Here are a few takeaways from the talk.

1. Comms is a must-have, not a nice-to-have

In many ambulance agencies, the practice of communications is often viewed as an afterthought, rather than what it really is: one of the most powerful tools available. A good communication strategy has the power to educate, motivate, connect, and focus workers; a bad communications strategy can tear down people and workplace culture. 

‍2. Master the building blocks of communications

When working on your internal communication strategy, pay attention to the three main building blocks of communication—what you say, how you say it, and how you deliver it. Each company will need a different voice tailored to their audience, so play around with these facets to ensure your message is being heard. 

‍3. Create a relevant and sustainable comms strategy

Getting employee communications right is hard because language and culture are always evolving. What worked yesterday isn’t guaranteed to work today. That’s why leaders need to constantly ensure their comms are specific, set clear expectations, and provide a model for the rest of the workforce. In other words, “what you put up with, you end up with.” 

‍4. EMS leaders are scared to over-communicate, but shouldn’t be 

In any organization, the comms team will need to handle sensitive topics. Naturally, leaders are scared of over-communicating and causing uproar over certain topics. But, rather than letting the fear of an outcome shut down communications, focus on building trust with the workforce through constant communication. That way, you’re more likely to be given grace to make a communication misstep by employees who feel connected to you already.

‍5. Build the culture with your posts

Your communications strategy plays a critical part in building the company culture. This is especially important—and challenging—for frontline organizations where workers often work alone or in pairs. Don’t shy away from posts that may seem “fluffy,” and be sure to tailor those posts to your workforce. For the younger EMS workers, the COOs take advantage of videos in the Blink Feed, because that’s how that generation consumes information.  ‍

6. Control the narrative

Rumors and misinformation are an unfortunate part of managing frontline communications. Rather than avoid tough topics, the comms strategy needs to prioritize getting ahead of the narrative. Whether it’s discussing the disparity between racial representation in the workforce and in leadership roles or an emergency issue like an error with gas card payments, set the terms of the discussion early and provide clear next steps to fend off the rumor mill. 

‍7. Measure the operational impact of your strategy

Good comms are measured by more than anecdotes. Inefficient communications and misaligned technology hinder frontline workers and contribute to waste and high turnover. When Lifeline Ambulance switched to Blink for their communications and HR tool, the company saved $420,000 in the first year—nearly 10x more than their investment in Blink. Understand the operational cost of your current strategy, find new strategies and new tools like Blink, and measure the impact regularly.

In summary, a good frontline communications strategy is one of the most important things an EMS agency can do.  But communicating with a young, diverse frontline workforce can’t follow the same playbook as your office-based staff. Ambulance agencies need a communications strategy that is tailored to this mobile, fast-paced, highly-dispersed workforce.

If you can find what works for your agency, it can help reverse the turnover trend and help create positive employee engagement that propels the business forward.

It was a compelling, hour-long discussion with both COOs. This summary is just a fraction of the insights the audience walked away with. 

‍

From fairy tales to blockbuster movies to conversations with family and friends, we’re surrounded by stories — and have been since we were tiny babies. Stories are how we learn and make sense of the world.

Stories also have a powerful impact on the brain. Neuroscience shows that stories awaken our senses, help us remember information, and create a sense of human connection. 

Using storytelling for business is, therefore, a really effective way to engage employees with your messaging. It’s also a great way to convey information quickly and effectively to time-poor frontline workers.

We know not everyone is a creative writer. But we also believe that with the right approach, you can make business storytelling an integral part of your organization.

So in this article, we’ll walk you through some of our best tips for using company storytelling for your internal communications. Let’s start by looking at some common storytelling structures.

Some popular storytelling structures

Storytelling has existed since the development of language itself. As Yuva Noah Harari explains in his book Sapiens:

“It is the distinctive ability to believe in stories that separate sapiens from other creatures. You could never convince a monkey to give you a banana by promising him limitless bananas after death in monkey heaven.”

Storytelling is one of the foundational pillars of society. It’s shaped our understanding of right and wrong for generations. From 30,000-year-old cave drawings in France to Aesop’s fables to the urban legends teenagers share today, all cultures in history have told stories.

And despite there being stories about every topic and every character imaginable, stories tend to fall into a surprisingly small number of categories. Knowing these categories can help when you’re creating your own corporate stories.

The seven basic plots

Some people argue that you can put every single story ever created into one of these seven categories.

Rags to riches. A character finds power, money, or love, loses it, and then wins it back. Example: Cinderella.

The quest. The main character has to reach a location or fulfill an objective, conquering obstacles along the way. Example: The Lord of the Rings.

Rebirth. A character changes their ways and becomes a better person. Example: A Christmas Carol.

Overcoming the monster. A hero has to overcome an evil force. Example: Any James Bond movie.

Comedy. A story designed to make people laugh by subverting expectations and mixing the familiar with the absurd. Example: Bridget Jones’ Diary. 

Tragedy. The main character makes a big mistake or demonstrates a character flaw which leads to their undoing. Example: Bonnie and Clyde.

Voyage and return. A character goes to a strange land, overcomes the challenges there, and returns home with newfound experience or knowledge. Example: Gulliver’s Travels.

The hero’s journey

The hero’s journey is another popular story structure. A hero is living happily in their comfort zone when something unexpected happens and they’re forced into an adventure.

Here are some examples:

• Harry Potter lives with the Dursleys. Hagrid comes to take him to Hogwarts.
• Frodo Baggins lives with Bilbo in Hobbiton. Bilbo sets off on a journey leaving the ring to Frodo.
• Barbie lives in Barbieland. But when she starts behaving strangely, Weird Barbie sends her to the real world.  

This same basic template can be found across countless books, movies, and TV shows — and it tends to follow the same 12 steps.

A hero is called to an adventure. They experience tests, allies, and enemies. They reach a low point before finding a solution and returning back to their original lives as a hero.

How these popular story structures can support business storytelling

We’re not suggesting that you go and write a whole novel or screenplay about your organization. But there are a few things we can learn from these storytelling structures.

First, storytelling is not just a talent people are born with or without. There are structures you can follow and techniques you can learn. It’s perfectly possible for your internal communications team to tell compelling corporate stories.

Second, structures like the hero’s journey lend themselves beautifully to storytelling in corporate communications. Challenges intrigue your audience and get them to empathize with the hero. But the hero always achieves their goal. So success is another important and inspiring part of the story. 

By incorporating key story elements — compelling characters, emotional ups and downs, and a popular story structure — into your internal communications, you can create messages that engage your employees. You make your messages more memorable and create a sense of connection between employees and your organizational values.

How to supercharge engagement with internal communication storytelling

There are lots of ways to boost employee engagement with your internal communications.

You can give employees a voice with communication tools that support bottom-up communication. You can celebrate achievements and recognize hard work.

Simply giving employees the right information improves their motivation and morale. Employees who receive enough information to do their jobs well are 2.8 times more likely to feel engaged in their work.

Business storytelling is another strategy to add to your list. And however you choose to use storytelling for business, here are some tips that will help you make your stories more engaging for employees.

1. Make it easy 

Many organizations use outdated internal communication software that makes it hard to share stories. Some are still using email newsletters or paper memos as their only channels of internal communication. So storytellers find it hard to get their stories seen.

You can make it easy for everyone to tell corporate stories by assessing your internal communication tech and — if it isn’t streamlined and user-friendly — consider other internal communication software providers.

2. Share corporate stories as they happen

The more relevant a story, the more impact it tends to have. Workers like to see authentic stories that are happening in real-time, not stories about an event or accomplishment that happened weeks ago.  

Share corporate stories as they happen and employees are more inclined to respond to them in the moment. They’ll then amplify the story by sharing or commenting on it.

3. Mix it up

When storytelling for internal communications, you can get creative. You can use stories to convey all sorts of information. Here are a few ideas.

• Share a customer success story. Share a case study explaining a customer pain point, describing how a frontline team member supported the customer, and the outcome your customer achieved. Use quotes from the customer and a video or photos, so employees can put a face to the name.
• Share the story of your organization. Tell the story of how your company came to be. This type of story works really well during the onboarding process. Be authentic. Share the challenges founders faced, how they overcame them, and what their plans are for the future.
• Paint a picture. The characters in your stories don’t have to be real. You can use imagined characters to paint a picture for employees. For example, when explaining how a new process will benefit customers, create a customer character — let’s call her Sarah — and describe the process from her point of view.
• Celebrate an employee milestone. Rather than simply recognizing an employee for their hard work, describe the journey they’ve taken within the company. Start with their nervous first days and lead on to their current successes.

There are countless ways to weave stories into your internal communications. So don’t be afraid to mix it up and try new things.

4. Bring stories to town hall meetings

Whether you conduct town hall meetings in person — or involve remote and frontline workers by live streaming — starting with a story is a great way to build rapport.

When leaders tell stories — any stories — they come across as more human. This makes it easier for employees to trust the organization’s leadership and makes them more likely to contribute to the meeting with their own questions and comments.

According to Ally Bunin, Global Head of Internal Communications Stories at Russell Reynolds Associates:

“Starting with a story is the best way to open a town hall. We encourage our team to share a personal story, even if it's not related to the topic of the town hall meeting. A story makes them more relatable, and it's so important to be a human first.”

5. Be authentic

Stories are compelling because — sometimes — things go wrong for the hero. So don’t gloss over the failures or challenges involved in your stories, even those that come from senior leaders.

Stories told with honesty and authenticity are much more engaging for employees. Therefore, leaders should aim to tell their own stories, rather than relying on polished scripts.

Even if the business is struggling right now and you’re sharing bad news, you’ll make a better impact with a sincere story than with an airbrushed version of events.

The more open you are in your storytelling for internal communications, the more inclined your workers are to believe in what you say. And they’ll not shy away from lending their support.

6. Avoid information overload

When marketing to customers, a company takes steps to ensure that its messages are relevant to each segment of the audience. You should try to do the same for employees.

Corporate stories only resonate with employees when they’re relevant to them and their roles. So —as part of your internal communications strategy — be sure to segment your audience and personalize messages for each sector of your workforce.

This helps to avoid information overload. And because employees come to expect relevant internal communication messages, they’re less likely to switch off from your communication channels.

7. Use the power of repetition

While you want to avoid information overload, you need to make your most important stories stand out and sink in.

Stories tied to your mission, brand, values, and identity should stick in the hearts and minds of employees. To achieve this, you need to repeat those stories often.  

Take inspiration from Howard Schultz, the former CEO of Starbucks. Schultz often recited an anecdote about his travels to Milan. It was in Italy that he discovered brewed espresso for the first time and became convinced that coffee shops could be big business in the US.

Schultz shared this story at many different times, events, and locations. He did this to inspire workers, to show his human side, and to emphasize that the Starbucks brand is about more than just selling coffee. It’s about delivering an experience.

Search for Howard Schultz and his name is now synonymous with this story. Repetition has helped him to create a company legend that has engaged and motivated Starbucks employees for years.

Internal communication storytelling for your organization

Company storytelling is a powerful way to improve your internal communications.

Company stories are engaging. They prompt emotion in employees, which makes them feel more bonded to your organization. And while the corporate world tends towards numbers and charts, there’s scientific proof that stories live longer in the memory than even the most impressive stats.

These storytelling benefits can help you achieve your internal communication goals. You can encourage more employees to use your intranet or employee app. You can get more employees to read and engage with your content. You can ensure that important messages are being read and remembered.

In today’s modern workplace — with the help of internal communication tech tools, like Blink — it’s easier than ever to use storytelling for business. You don’t have to rely on edited corporate announcements that receive little engagement.

Instead, you can create and curate stories from across the organization. You can tell stories using engaging multimedia content, like video or live stream. Employees can comment on news feed stories — and create their own content, too. 

What’s more, because Blink is a mobile-first employee app, you can put business stories at the fingertips of every employee, whether they work in the office or on the frontline of your organization.

Find out all the ways Blink can transform internal communications at your organization. Schedule your free app demo today.

What makes her awesome?

Carla has been with Elara Caring since 2022 as an Attendant Coordinator at the Mount Vernon branch in Texas.

Carla is a wonderful frontline champion at Elara Caring. She is the first to step up to help or train others. Her ability to teach and lead is amazing — CTs and all PCs reach out to her due to her kindness and understanding and compassion. She is a wonderful person and has taken the time to help me and lead me when there was none other.

Carla sacrifices what she wants for others and it's a blessing. People call her from other offices and states for help because they know how valuable she is to this company. Her determination and leadership is what this world needs more of. She doesn’t just do a great job — she touches lives in every way and work and in the client's home.

I have watched her over 6 months of being at this company and thought, “Wow, we have a jewel!” She deserves to be recognized for her greatness and champion spirit. Elara Caring is better each day due to the fact we have a champion on staff — Carla Brewer is a great person, a great employee, and a treasure to this world.

How has Blink helped in her role?

Carla is a master at Blink and often helps with training. She uses it to talk with the attendants and takes the time to go slow so all learn how to use it.

What does she want to do next?

I believe that Carla wants an environment where all feel valuable and like they have a place. She uses her life to bring light to stressful places and I believe she will only soar in this next level in her life and this company.

Nominated by: Sissi Watts, Attendant Coordinator

Today marks the beginning of a new dawn in digital employee experience. In the next 12 months, 7 million workers will have to transfer from Workplace by Meta to another solution. This represents a fundamental opportunity for us to uplift the experience of 7 million workers, by migrating to a more modern, integrated digital platform for work. A platform that combines communications with broader connectivity to applications, information and workflow.

Workplace by Meta was a great product, but it hasn’t kept up with the developments in recent years as Meta prioritized and moved on to new projects. We’ve already helped many organizations migrate from Workplace to Blink, and they’ve experienced the benefits of our ‘super-app’ and integrated experience. This new approach appeals to all workers in a way ‘social at work’ never did, especially with deskless workers.

As a company, our priority right now is on the 7 million  Workplace users who will be losing access to technology over the next 12 months. Employees apps should never be “just about good enough" technology, they make the experience of being employed a simple and fulfilling one. Whether it’s communicating with peers, finding out news or accessing systems, these products, when built and implemented well, become indispensable to day to day working life, so to have that taken away will no doubt be disruptive for employees and employers alike.

My biggest disappointment in all of this though, is the decision to name a solitary preferred migration partner, which won’t meet the needs of many Workplace customers. Buying technology is a significant event for any business, and takes significant time and effort to choose what is right for you, and your people. So the decision for Meta to direct their users to a single platform on the mistaken assumption that it will meet their operational needs, is quite honestly baffling.  It’s made more baffling by the fact Blink and other vendors already have the proven capabilities to seamlessly migrate Workplace customers. And for many companies, the best solution for them won’t be the ‘default’ one.

One size fits all is never the correct approach in employee technology. You as leaders know your people and company, and likely spend weeks and months picking what you decided was best for you….to then wake up on a Tuesday morning in the middle of May and be told that you’ll be using a new platform next year? It just doesn’t feel right.  As leaders, you deserve the ability to choose what is right for you, and that feels like it’s being taken away. 

My advice to any leaders impacted by the closure of Workplace is to pause and take a look at the alternatives. This is an opportunity to upgrade your digital experience, not simply accept the like for like solution being offered. 

At Blink, we specialize in helping companies reach every worker - especially the hard to reach deskless workforce. Our in house, digital transformation consultants work with customers to ensure a frictionless move from one platform to another, and then partner with you to improve the metrics that matter to you, including engagement, retention and efficiency.

Visit https://www.joinblink.com/workplace today to book a migration consultation with one of our team. We want to give you the power to make the right choice for you and your team.

A 2022 Gallup report on the work environment found that businesses with engaged employees have 23% higher profits than companies with “miserable workers”. Such businesses also see lower absenteeism and higher customer loyalty.

Unfortunately, Gallup’s 2023 report goes on to tell us that only 23% of employees are actually engaged. 

The solution? Effective employee engagement strategies designed to help you create a better company culture, reduce staff turnover, and eventually boost your company’s profits. 

But before you can do any of that, you need to know how to measure employee engagement, and what measurement methods really work. 

Once you have the tools to measure engagement, you’ll have a solid foundation for improving your engagement levels and reaping the benefits that highly engaged employees bring.

What should you do before measuring employee engagement?

Understand your workforce

Each employee is different with their own unique preferences, needs, and motivations. As such, it's important to get to know your teams well — their needs, challenges, and everything in between — so that you can tailor your employee engagement strategy to work best for them.

Start by getting to know your workforce better: who they are, how they work, and what currently gets in the way of them engaging. 

For example, there is often a huge digital inclusion gap between frontline staff and their desk-based coworkers. This gap makes it very hard for frontline workers to engage with their organizations and roles – and even harder for business leaders to get to know them in the first place.

This is where engaging your first-line managers becomes crucial. By enabling first-line managers with the skills and tools to get to know their teams, you have a hotline directly to your frontline – and their engagement preferences.

It’s also important to consider the types of metrics you use for your specific workforce. Desk-based engagement metrics may not accurately reflect the engagement levels of people working in frontline roles. Transit, healthcare, logistics, or manufacturing workers (to name a few) will often have different requirements, channel preferences, and motivations for engagement than other employees.

Therefore, it's essential to understand the specific engagement requirements of your staff, track tailored engagement metrics, and create strategies to address them.

Agree on engagement goals and outcomes 

Once you know your workers’ needs, it is important to agree on engagement goals and outcomes with other stakeholders in your organization. This could involve gaining the buy-in of senior management, employee representatives, or other key stakeholders. 

Clearly defining your goals and desired outcomes will help ensure that efforts and metrics used to improve engagement are focused and aligned with your overall business strategy. Goal and outcome KPI could include:

• Goal: Increase employee retention by 10%
• Outcome KPI: Employee retention rate
• Goal: Reduce employee turnover by 25%
• Outcome KPI: Voluntary resignation rate
• Goal: Drive employee satisfaction by 15%
• Outcome KPI: Employee satisfaction survey or ENPS scores

By taking these steps before measuring employee engagement, you can ensure that you have a solid understanding of your workforce, metrics that reflect your business objectives, and clear engagement goals to achieve. 

There are a number of metrics and methods that can help you gauge a holistic view of employee satisfaction, productivity, and overall engagement in your company, 10 of which we’ll dive into in more detail below.

10 ways to measure employee engagement

Both survey and non-survey methods are available methods to measure employee engagement. Typically, it’s best to use a mix of both to get a holistic overview of employee engagement.

How to measure engagement with survey methods

Surveys help you reach a considerable number of employees at once. 

Running employee surveys can be a time-consuming, paper-filled process, but it’s still a great starting point for building the foundation of your employee engagement efforts. And with modern Employee Survey tools now available to streamline the whole process, it needn’t be such a laborious task.

Here are three survey measurement methods you can implement:

1. Annual employee engagement surveys

An annual employee engagement survey measures employees’ experience, motivation, and passion for their job and organization. It reveals how your employees go about their daily jobs and what you can do to improve their engagement on a large, long-term scale.

You can use these surveys to get ideas on areas for improvement and a basis for new recommendations and goals. 

Similarly, you can use employee surveys to evaluate your company’s culture and see whether the desired cultural values are practiced among desk-based and deskless employees. 

However, employee engagement surveys are only effective if you conduct them correctly. 

Here are four best practices for conducting employee surveys:

• Use a mix of survey questions: Ask both multiple-choice and open-ended questions. This helps your company collect the most insights into employee engagement without overwhelming respondents.
• Leverage mobile apps: Paper surveys don’t cut it. They’re time-consuming since you wait for employees to return the survey papers before you can analyze them, and they’re often disregarded by employees completely or inaccessible by teams that are not in the corporate office, such as frontline teams. Digital surveys take far less time to create and share, and the response is almost instant. So, create surveys that employees can complete from their personal or corporate devices from any location. 
• Share employee survey results: Share the survey findings with your office and your frontline workers and let them know what actions you’ll take. Managers and leadership need to assure employees that they’re listening and taking into consideration the feedback received. 

Identify the best time(s) to survey employees: It might be smart to run your survey during slower periods of work, so that employees have enough time to devote to the survey. Similarly, there’s solid advice to avoid conducting surveys during high-stress periods or bonus season. Such periods skew the survey results and give an unrealistic picture of everyday employee engagement and satisfaction.

2. Pulse engagement surveys

Employee pulse surveys allow you to send more frequent survey requests to your teams. Instead of the annual snapshot of data you gain from once-a-year surveys, pulse surveys let you measure employee engagement levels in real time.

This short survey format allows your teams to provide quick feedback on any aspect of the job or organization, from team dynamics and workflows to company policies and leadership. It’s a great way to learn more about what’s working for your employees on a daily basis and identify what could be improved. 

Pulse surveys are much shorter, providing less data than annual surveys but offering real-time insights into employees’ current feelings about the workplace and their job satisfaction.

As such, pulse surveys can be incredibly effective at identifying any sudden decreases or increases in employee morale and engagement, helping you spot them and take action quickly.

You can also tailor pulse surveys to navigate different occasions and identify trends in employee engagement year-round, instead of just once a year. For example, you could send a survey after an important organizational announcement or when there’s been a period of major change.

However you choose to use them, regular pulse surveys are a great way to measure employee engagement and ensure your workforce feels heard.

3. Employee net promoter score (eNPS)

Chances are your organization is already using the net promoter score (NPS) to measure customer satisfaction and loyalty. The same metric can also be used internally to measure employee engagement.

The employee net promoter score (eNPS) provides a solid basis for understanding employee engagement and loyalty in a cost-effective way. By tracking the eNPS scores over time, you can identify trends in employee engagement — which can help you understand how the changes you implement affect staff engagement. 

Expert tip: On its own, eNPS is not the most effective way to measure engagement.eNPS it tells you the ‘what’ but not the ‘why’ of an employee engagement score. Only measure employee engagement via eNPS if you can follow it up with more detailed methods, such as employee engagement surveys.

Further methods for measuring employee engagement

4. Implement an employee app with analytics features

Many leaders aren’t aware of the reasons behind the lack of engagement and increasing turnover rates in their business — especially frontline managers. Due to the nature of frontline organizations — varied work environments, conflicting shift patterns, and a historical reliance on paper — it is more difficult to engage with frontline workers and even harder to measure their engagement levels. 

As such, employee feedback and surveys don’t always provide the response rates you want, and employees don’t always provide insights you can act on.

To address this, you can implement an employee engagement super-app like Blink to create a digital space that invites a multidirectional, real-time conversation where frontline workers (and their desked counterparts) can speak directly to management — and to each other.

You can also use this technology to measure the outcome of their work environment and assess how your workers engage with your content, interact with other teammates, and participate in company-wide conversations. 

For instance, Blink offers Frontline Intelligence — an integrated analytics tool that measures employee engagement by tracking:

• Content metrics: See how your workers interact with posts, files, or pages you share. You can track important metrics such as reach, impressions, likes, comments, and link clicks. 
• Communication flows: View how many team members communicate with others using the employee app. Visualize the growth in communication and changes in relationships over time to keep a tab on your organization’s employee engagement.
• Internal trends: Get an overview of trending posts and topics in the employee feed to understand which content performs best and when.

This allows you to uncover who your promoters of engagement are, and who’s in line with your company’s mission and values. You can capture the insights that aren’t explicitly communicated to you – and integrate that into your next steps.

This data can help you detect feelings of disengagement early on and do a root cause analysis before they become a serious problem, affect productivity and quality of work, and increase your turnover rate.

Ensure that you also measure the adoption rate for your employee app. A high adoption rate can be indicative that your employees are engaged in their roles and understand the value that a new tool is bringing to the business. You may see differences in app usage trends between the office and frontline workers. If that is the case, add questions surrounding employee app usage in the next employee survey. 

If you’re looking for an employee app that’s designed for frontline organizations, check out Blink. This all-in-one platform gives:

• Frontline workers access to the people, processes, communications, and applications they need to do their jobs — all through their corporate or personal devices. 
• Leaders access to the data they need to improve the employee experience in meaningful ways.

5. 1-1s

1-1s are one of the most effective ways to measure employee engagement. 

These meetings allow you to have meaningful conversations with each of your team members about their performance, goals, and satisfaction levels. They also give employees an opportunity to provide honest and constructive feedback about their work environment, so that they can help influence real, positive change within the organization.

1-1s can be used as a more informal and frequent performance review, and they can give you detailed insights into the current state of employee engagement. By keeping track of these meetings over time, you can identify any sudden drops or increases in engagement, and take action accordingly.

6. Performance reviews and feedback meetings

As a more formal 1-1 process, performance reviews and regular feedback meetings can be used to make critical decisions on employee compensation, necessary training, and proposed career development. But you can also use them to gauge and measure employee engagement. 

Highly-engaged workers are more likely to perform well in their jobs. Gallup found that engaged workers are 18% more likely to have above-average employee productivity. 

To effectively gauge your employees’ performance and improve engagement, develop a continuous feedback process so that employees know how they’re doing and what’s expected.

Here’s how you can implement a reliable feedback process:

• Create a list of opportunities when employee feedback can give you critical insights into how your company operates, such as at the close of onboarding and recruitment or during quarterly and annual performance reviews.
• Use various methods and strategies to collect feedback to keep employees engaged and get the most relevant answers for the situation.
• Implement engaging and constructive conversations between managers and employees at least once every two months. Ensure managers are practicing active listening and that they are actually implementing change based on the feedback. 

7. Exit interviews

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OMZ89C2tYHw&ab_channel=HRUniversity

Exit interviews are an important component of any employee engagement strategy. They provide invaluable insight into the reasons why employees choose to leave your company, and can help you identify areas that need improvement in order to keep your best talent.

Some example exit interview questions to ask could include:

• Why are you leaving the company?
• What was the motivation behind your decision to search for a new job?
• Can you identify the factors that had a positive or negative impact on your ability to succeed in your role?
• Based on your experience, do you have any recommendations for onboarding new employees?
• How did you feel about the management of your role?
• Did you feel appreciated by your team, supervisors and/or managers?
• What were the most enjoyable aspects of this job?
• What was the most challenging aspect of this job for you? 

Not all employees are willing to offer honest feedback during an exit interview, so consider implementing a post-exit survey where you can ask more detailed questions about employee satisfaction and engagement while the person is still employed at your organization.

This allows you to better understand the motivations behind each employee’s decision to leave and take action to prevent similar situations from occurring in the future. 

If you want to stay two steps ahead of the exit interview, however, stay interviews can be a potentially transformative addition to your employee engagement strategy. Currently deployed by only 27% of US HR decision-makers, stay interviews help you understand how well your current employees’ expectations are being met when it comes to meaningful connections.

How to measure employee engagement through key metrics

8. Internal communication receptiveness

Effective internal communication can be used to bridge the gap between managers and employees, build trust in the workplace, and boost employee engagement. But it’s not enough just to communicate –  you need to measure how your employees actually react and respond to the content you share.

That’s where key metrics come in. From employee app usage data, to the amount of content employees interact with or create, there are a number of metrics that can give you valuable insights about employee engagement.

You can measure receptiveness to your internal communication by tracking how much of your content is consumed, whether it’s posts or newsletters.

Specific metrics like post likes and response rates, message opens, and even file analytics can tell you how receptive your teams are to internal communication efforts. If you’re using a super-app like Blink, you can track these metrics over time to monitor how well your internal messages are being received.

The data from these analytics can give you the confidence you need to leave certain channels of communication behind. If frontline workers are not engaging with email — or don't even have access to it! — then waste no more time sending email comms, for example. An accessible mobile tool like Blink can pave the way for greater internal communication receptiveness by giving everyone equal access to messages, wherever they log in from.

9. Voluntary turnover rate

If an employee voluntarily resigns from an organization, it’s voluntary turnover. 

Voluntary turnover is on the rise. According to the Institute of Corporate Productivity (i4cp) and Fortune’s global survey of 1,195 respondents in Q1 of 2022, 77% of large organizations experienced high voluntary turnover in 2021.

To calculate the voluntary turnover rate, divide the number of employees that voluntarily left your company by the average number of workers you had during that period.

These are the top reasons of voluntary turnover outlined in Microsoft’s 2022 Work Index report:

• Personal well-being or mental health (24%)
• Work-life balance (24%)
• Lack of confidence in senior management or leadership (21%)
• Lack of flexible work hours or location (21%)

In other words, a high voluntary turnover rate means your workers struggle to stay engaged with the company due to a lack of support and direction. 

If you notice high voluntary turnover, conduct a voluntary turnover analysis to know the exact cause:

• Check for trends: Compare your voluntary turnover rate to the previous period and look for possible trends and early warnings. For instance, if you see many employees leaving after two years, it may be due to a lack of career advancement opportunities. And if you see new hires leaving within the first year, onboarding might be the issue.

• Gather employee feedback: Collect qualitative data from surveys and exit interviews to determine why employees leave your organization.
• Prepare an employee turnover report: Translate the voluntary turnover data into monetary value. That’ll help you follow up with different departments and levels of hierarchy and develop an actionable plan to increase retention rates. 

Analyzing the voluntary turnover rates for the first year is especially important since new employees represent a lot of pure cost. A time-to-productivity analysis can tell you when an employee’s productivity has risen to a point where their contribution outweighs their cost. 

For example, if the average threshold productivity occurs at the six-month mark, any employee who leaves before that incurs a financial loss to the company.

10. Employee absenteeism rate

Absenteeism is the habitual failure to come to work or stay there during working hours, and it is often unplanned and unannounced.

It’s important to differentiate unexcused absences from legitimate ones, and to be aware of the disruption that absenteeism can cause to your organization. That’s because it will negatively affect anyone working with this individual and undermine trust between employees and management and the employees themselves.

A high employee turnover rate is a strong indicator that your company needs to make adjustments before this behavior impacts your workforce’s productivity and relationships. Absenteeism is often also a reflection of poor management, so your managers must be aligned on the appropriate policies and be upskilled to develop their leadership abilities. 

To measure the absenteeism rate, divide the number of unexcused absences in a given period by the total workdays. Multiply the result by 100 to get the absenteeism rate for that period.

As a rule of thumb, an absenteeism rate of 1.5% is considered healthy. Employees do fall ill and request time off for various reasons, so you shouldn’t expect a rate below 1.5%.

However, an absenteeism rate above 2% indicates issues. Your workers may be burnt out, feeling disengaged, or in conflict with their peers or supervisors. 

The best way to prevent employee absenteeism is to intervene early. 

Develop an action plan by:

• Asking your managers to arrange regular check-in meetings, especially with underperforming employees. 
• Implementing flexible work policies for employees struggling with personal issues. 
• Getting your managers to address the problems between workers who are having conflicts.
• Ensuring management forms meaningful connections with employees and their leadership style receives positive feedback.

Comparing employee engagement measurement methods

How not to measure employee engagement

Measuring employee engagement incorrectly often leads to unreliable results and an inaccurate view of how well your team is doing. Common mistakes when it comes to measuring engagement include:

1. Not setting KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) which can provide you with measurable goals to strive for. Without these, it can be difficult to determine whether the changes you've implemented have had a positive or negative impact on your employee engagement levels.
2. Relying on just one method to measure engagement, such as employee surveys. This can not only be a problem that stops you from capturing the full image of engagement for your employees but can also lead to the overuse and over-reliance on surveys to measure engagement.
3. Ineffective methods of communication. If you rely on a communication channel that employees aren’t engaging with today — like an intranet — then you're highly unlikely to capture the richness of data that you need. That’s why we would always recommend an employee super-app over a back-end intranet.

What should you do after measuring employee engagement?

Whatever your employee engagement metrics and methods show, it’s important to note that engagement is not an activity, project, or initiative. It's an outcome you earn from consistently offering value to your business.

Remember: as trends continue to change, so will employee expectations. Keep your finger on the pulse of employee engagement levels within your organization and take swift action where necessary.

There are many digital tools to keep a tab on employee engagement. However, the best solution is one that’s designed specifically for your employees, and can provide all of these solutions in one place. 

If you have a frontline-focused workforce, check out Blink. Blink offers interactive employee surveys, cutting-edge content analytics, and intuitive communication tools to measure and actively improve employee engagement.

Blink provides a solution to fixing the broken feedback loop and filling the knowledge gap between leadership and frontline workers.

“Prove it.”

If you’re in internal communications, you’ve heard that sentence more times than you’ve heard “quick question” (which, as we know, is never actually quick).

The shift is real. Five years ago, a lot of comms tech lived in the “nice to have” bucket. In 2026, it’s a boardroom conversation — and boardrooms don’t buy “nice.” They buy outcomes: efficiency, reduced risk, better retention, higher adoption of expensive tech investments, and measurable operational wins.

In our recent webinar, Proving internal comms ROI in 2026: Lessons from the other side, Ricky Sickelmore shared what he learned after 24 years in transport (including launching Blink at Stagecoach and introducing it at Arriva) — and what consistently held up when leadership came knocking for ROI.

Here are the six takeaways internal comms teams can apply immediately.

1. Ditch vanity metrics for outcomes

Email opens. Page views. Likes.

They’re not useless… they’re just not convincing.

Ricky’s rule: stop leading with activity metrics and start leading with business value. Executives don’t want to hear that “people saw the message.” They want to know: did anything change, and did it matter?

So translate comms problems into operational and financial realities:

• Safety reporting increases (e.g., digital near-miss reporting vs. “find the form somewhere and hope someone bothers”)
• Compliance improvements (e.g., “mandatory read” confirmation)
• Turnover movement (not because comms magically fixes attrition — but because comms can remove friction, improve onboarding, and drive consistency)

A useful gut-check: If your metric can’t be repeated in a budget meeting without you adding a 3-minute explanation, it’s not your headline metric.

Executives aren’t interested in open rates. They’re interested in the financial reality.

- Ricky Sickelmore, Blink

2. Start with hard costs and operational efficiency

If you want CFO attention, lead with the stuff they can smell from three floors away: tangible savings.

Ricky shared a simple example that’s painfully common in frontline-heavy orgs: printing and distributing documents at scale. One organization saved over £200,000 by moving payslips from print-and-post to digital distribution.

But don’t just stop at “printing costs.” The strongest ROI cases widen the lens:

• Printers and maintenance
• Paper, postage, distribution
• Staff time to print, collate, deliver, reprint
• Support tickets created when things go wrong

And when you talk about “time savings,” make them real. Not “we saved time.” Instead:

• “We reclaimed 10 hours per week of manager time previously spent manually filling shifts.”
• “We reduced password reset requests because employees access systems through one authenticated front door.”

Pro tip from Ricky: Do a basic “time and motion” study. Follow one process end-to-end and document every human touchpoint. That one form might bounce across 8–10 people, with delays that never show up on a neat process map.

3. Build a cross-functional case, not a “comms case”

One of the biggest mistakes internal comms teams make is trying to win budget alone — with a comms-only story.

Ricky put it bluntly: ROI gets easier when internal comms stops being “the comms team’s project” and becomes an operations, safety, engineering, and HR win.

That means stakeholder interviews early — not once the deck is already written.

Ask department heads:

• What’s your biggest friction point right now?
• What manual work is wasting your team’s time?
• Where do you have compliance risk?
• What’s the cost of not fixing this?

Example Ricky gave: if a safety leader can’t reliably get 20 drivers in a room for a briefing, that’s not a comms problem — it’s an operational risk. A digital “mandatory read” gives you trackable compliance without the logistics circus.

Make it tangible: Form a small steering committee with reps from the functions that will benefit most. When you go for sign-off, you’re not walking in alone — you’re walking in with allies.

You’re not in it alone — get the right stakeholders in the room early.

Ricky Sickelmore

4. Prove time-to-value through onboarding

Want a metric that operations leaders actually care about? Onboarding efficiency.

Ricky called this one “underestimated” — and he’s right. Onboarding is where friction shows up immediately, and where improvements are easy to translate into time, money, and productivity.

If employees can receive policies, procedures, training content, and day-one essentials before they even start, you can often get people productive an entire day sooner.

That’s not “engagement.” That’s time to value.

And onboarding improvements have a bonus effect: they reduce downstream errors, reduce manager time spent repeating the same information, and improve early retention (again — comms isn’t the sole driver, but it’s a meaningful part of the system).

5. Position your platform as the digital front door

One of Ricky’s biggest reflections: early on, it’s easy to think you’re buying “a comms tool.”

But the strongest ROI cases position the platform as the gateway to your digital estate — the place employees actually start their day.

This matters because most organizations are already paying for expensive systems (HRIS, scheduling, payroll, benefits, learning, etc.). The problem isn’t always the tool — it’s access and adoption.

If your internal comms platform:

• Uses SSO
• Reduces password resets
• Gives employees one place to find and access tools
• Increases self-service

…then your comms investment is also protecting and amplifying other investments.

Ricky shared a real pattern: Once access is simplified through a single front door, usage of other systems can jump dramatically — and suddenly your internal comms platform isn’t “another tool.” It’s the tool that makes the rest usable.

6. Establish a baseline — and sell the cost of inaction

You can’t prove improvement if you don’t know where you started. And you can’t create urgency if you can’t show what “doing nothing” costs.

Ricky’s advice: Baseline early — and don’t just baseline comms metrics.

Baseline business realities that leadership recognizes:

• Turnover / attrition
• Survey participation rates
• Safety reporting volumes
• Time spent on manual processes
• Printing, distribution, and support costs
• Operational delays caused by information gaps

Then translate that into the cost of inaction: the money currently leaking from the business because processes are manual, access is fragmented, and frontline teams can’t reliably get what they need.

When you can credibly say, “Here’s what it costs us to do nothing,” the investment stops feeling optional.

Common mistakes to avoid when proving internal comms ROI

A few “don’t step on this rake” moments that came up in the conversation:

• Don’t lead with outputs. “We sent 12 newsletters” isn’t ROI.
• Don’t build the case in isolation. Cross-functional pain points = stronger case.
• Don’t ignore hard money. The “soft” story matters, but hard savings gets you in the door.
• Don’t skip the frontline reality check. Spend time with frontline teams. Watch the work. Learn the friction.
• Don’t assume leaders know what to ask for. Often the first job is clarifying the real question behind “prove ROI.”

{{mobile-desktop-main="/image"}}

Be the change maker

Internal comms ROI in 2026 isn’t about becoming a finance team overnight. It’s about learning to translate.

Translate comms into outcomes.

Translate friction into cost.

Translate “this would be helpful” into “this will reduce risk, save time, and speed up productivity.”

Or, in Ricky’s words: Be the change maker.