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Hey Reader,

Each week in this newsletter I answer a question from a reader. This week’s question comes from an Internal Comms & Employee Engagement Manager, let's call her Lucy, who asks:

When I read this question in my inbox I had just come across a new diagnostic tool online so I replied to Lucy and said “hey, wanna jump on a call and do a quick diagnosis experiment together?” I was happy to get a “hell yeah” in return [extra marks for enthusiasm].

What caught my attention about this particular tool was that it seemed designed to move beyond the usual vanity metrics we often rely on in internal comms. Instead of just measuring opens and clicks, it promised to assess whether our communications were actually creating the outcomes we want (things like understanding, connection and genuine engagement). Plus, it was free and would only take a few minutes, so I figured we had nothing to lose.

So in this newsletter let me walk you through what we did and how we diagnosed some of the problem areas in Lucy’s organisation using this quick diagnostic quiz.

The diagnostic quiz

I got on a video call with Lucy and pulled up the new Communications & Culture Maturity Quiz from Workvivo. I hadn’t explored this quiz fully yet and was interested to see how it would work in real time with an in-house internal comms pro. Would it give us some useful insights?

This quiz measures four key dimensions in your organisation:

• Informing (how clear and accessible your communications are)
• Connecting (whether employees can connect with each other)
• Engaging (recognition, inclusion and purpose)
• Listening (listen to employee feedback and acting on it).

As we worked through the questions together, some patterns started emerging:

The informing gap

Lucy spotted a problem in her company pretty quickly. The quiz asked: “Are communications accessible to everyone, regardless of role or location?”

“Oh,” Lucy said, pausing. “Our frontline workers don’t sit at desks and don’t have their own computers to check emails… but now that I think about it, most of our comms are based around email. We send all-staff emails, we link to intranet articles via email, we distribute video messages via email.”

Simply having this conversation together helped Lucy consider that her frontline workers were pretty cut off from most company communications. The system was not designed with them in mind.

This was the first thing Lucy wrote in her notebook as a challenge that the internal comms team could begin to tackle.

The connecting challenge

We kept going in the quiz and when we got to questions about cross-functional interaction and social connection, Lucy found her company scores dropped significantly.

“Do employees have dedicated spaces to connect beyond their immediate teams?” the quiz asked.

And again, Lucy paused. “We have a company intranet,” she said, “but honestly, it’s pretty dead. The same five people always comment on posts. And our workers are spread across different sites so they are never together in person either.”

We dug deeper and Lucy identified cross-team interaction and connection as a bit of a cultural challenge in her company. There was a bit of an unspoken expectation that you came to work, do your job, stay in your lane and don’t stray outside your own team.

Now is this something the internal comms team can fix? No I don’t think so. But Lucy could document this finding, gather some further insights from employees and present these insights for leaders who can lead the charge on improving the company culture around connection outside of your immediate team.

The listening revelation

When we got to the next section of the quiz, Lucy realised her company are ahead of the game when it comes to employee listening. When asked “How effectively do you act on employee feedback?” Lucy said that her company is really good at following up on feedback in a visible way.

“We do annual engagement surveys,” she said, “And we always get a very high response rate because employees know that our leaders take the feedback really seriously and are committed to making changes based on what they hear. They even do in-person roadshows around all the different sites to talk to employees face-to-face about what the survey results said and what action they’re taking as a result.”

[Colour me impressed!]

No actions for Lucy to take in this section, her company have got this nailed.

Rating the quiz

Doing this quiz was really quick, easy and surprisingly fun (maybe I just love quizzes). And it was worthwhile because the results gave Lucy some objective data about gaps in her organisation that could do with improvement. This gave her concrete, specific issues to raise with her boss and with leaders by using this quiz as a diagnostic tool.

“Having this kind of external insight helped me see patterns I was too close to notice,” Lucy told me after we discussed her quiz results. “I feel more confident in being able to diagnose problems in my company rather than just relying on gut feelings.”

If you’re feeling like Lucy did, sensing that things could be better but struggling to articulate exactly what needs fixing, try this diagnostic quiz for yourself.

If you find this useful and want me to help you unpack any of your results, just hit reply and let me know. I’m here to help!

Thanks for reading and stay curious,

Joanna

Find me on YouTube, TikTok, LinkedIn and check out my book​

Want to work together?

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