How often have we all looked at some comms and thought ‘why on earth are we sharing this?’ Over the last few months my life has been consumed by the American drama Scandal. It’s a fabulous series created by the writer of Grey’s Anatomy, Shonda Rhimes – I highly recommend you check it out.

The programme is centred around a character called Olivia Pope – she manages a problem-solving agency with a team she calls ‘the Gladiators’ – they fix problems and make them disappear – very similar to an Internal Comms department but we probably deal with fewer murders (hopefully!)

There is one question that Olivia askes her clients when they ask for her help ‘What do you want from this?’ and this got me thinking about our roles as communicators. If we asked this question to anyone who requested comms to be sent out or even to ourselves would it help us think more effectively about the outcome rather than just the output?

Knowing how many people clicked on a news story and read the information will certainly help your dashboard. It will also allow you, to an extent, understand the level of interest but would you really know what the overall outcome was? Would you able to demonstrate or measure where and what behaviours have changed due to the comms that was sent out?

You’d be able to do this if you knew what the aim was of the comms – is it to stop people calling in sick? Is it to improve safety performance? Is it to get people to log onto a programme more often? Once you know this, you can then find the relevant data set to help you but without this – it’s just another piece of comms that disappears into a black hole.

As Internal Communicators I don’t think we should know all the answers -though at times it may feel like it. We should be leaning on our leaders a bit more to find out exactly what they want to achieve from the messages they want to distribute and ask – “What do you from this?”

I’m not an advocate of sending out comms if it doesn’t align with the overall business objective or add any value to the strategic aims of the organisation. If it doesn’t contribute to any of these factors, then should we really be sharing it to the wider workforce?

I know it can be challenging for us at times, especially as we’re in busy roles that are non-stop and it can be a bit difficult with some senior leaders but what have you go to lose? The next time someone asks you to just send something out and you’re not sure of the value it will add, then step back and ask them “What do you want from this?” and see if it helps get the results you need.

Let me know what you think, you can catch me on twitter @advita_p or Linkedin.

FYI: Dr Kevin Ruck, from PR Academy wrote a great formula on measurement which is definitely worth a read if you haven’t seen it before : https://www.prplace.com/blog/posts/2014/october/a-new-standard-for-internal-communication/