Four practical ways to start measuring internal communications

Open rates tell you something useful about list health, subject lines, and whether a message made it into the inbox. They tell you less about whether a message was trusted, understood, or acted on.

Usually, communicators are being asked to defend that part.

Grounded in PoliteMail’s data, the four practices below make the work easier to measure, manage, and improve.

1. Plan for a longer timeline than stakeholders will prefer

If the question is whether employees are clearer on strategy, better informed, or more aligned, you are not measuring something that settles in a week.

A realistic timeline might look like this:

• four months for messages to circulate and settle

• one month to draft a survey, secure approval, build the distribution list, and line up leadership support

• one month to field the survey and analyze responses

• one month to prepare a report and review it with senior leaders

The first pass can feel cumbersome. It usually does.

Here, a benchmark helps. PoliteMail’s benchmark report, based on more than two billion emails, gives you a reliable baseline for what normal looks like.

2. Earn the attention

Employees engage with a message because something about it earned attention: relevance, trust, timing, clarity. That shifts the question from “what did we send?” to “what did people take from it, and through which channel?”

Start with a few basics:

1. where employees are actually getting information

2. which channels they trust

3. what level of engagement is realistic in your organization

The average corporate email is about 500 words. Roughly two minutes of reading time in a working day already broken into fragments. That is one reason many teams have moved towards shorter messages, clearer hierarchy, more scannable formatting, and less trying to say everything at once.

Before changing any of that, it helps to know what normal looks like in your environment. What gets read. What does not. Which channels carry signal and which carry noise.

3. Use the data you have before inventing new systems

Most teams already have more signal than they think.

If you have been communicating with employees for any length of time, there is usually a backlog of evidence sitting in past sends, clicks, reads, and patterns of response.

Look back at previous communications and ask:

• which emails were opened and actually read

• which links employees clicked

• which messages prompted useful engagement

• which ones disappeared without much trace

• whether anything changed after a new platform, process, or channel was introduced

Then compare your strongest messages with your weakest ones.

The patterns tend to show up quickly. The weaker messages are often too long, too vague, or too broadly aimed to land cleanly. The stronger ones usually do one thing well: make a clear point, arrive at the right moment, and give the reader an obvious reason to pay attention.

If you use a quality score index, as outlined in Paine Publishing’s The Complete Guide to Measuring Internal Communications in 2026, it should become more precise over time. It should reflect what people actually read and respond to, not just what the team happened to publish.

4. Read the results in context

Policy changes, restructures, pay decisions, leadership shifts, and external uncertainty all compete with whatever message lands in the inbox that week. In some periods, even a well-made piece of communication will struggle.

That does not always mean the communication failed. It often means the environment was crowded, tense, or elsewhere.

So when you review performance, include the conditions it landed in, and ask:

1. what else was happening that week

2. what else leadership was asking employees to process

3. what else was taking up attention

Without that context, it is easy to draw neat conclusions from messy reality.

Making the case: What weak communication costs

Internal communications teams are often asked to prove value at exactly the moment conditions make value hardest to isolate. One of the clearest ways to make the case is to show what weak communication costs:

• confusion

• misalignment

• slower execution

• lower trust

• unnecessary friction

Measurement helps turn those consequences from intuition into evidence. That is usually when the conversation gets more serious.

Final thoughts — Keep comm and carry on 

You do not need a perfect measurement system to begin. You just need a clear starting point, a baseline you trust, and the discipline to keep learning from what the data shows.

Start small. Stay consistent. Improve what you can prove.

Related resource: For a practical guide to presenting internal communication data to leadership, see Presenting internal communication data to leadership.