What’s the true cost of your internal comms?

How much does your internal communication cost? What’s your return on investment (ROI)? Want to find out?

I have a guest writer today who says keeping tabs on the true cost of your internal communication isn’t easy and she has a tool to help you calculate yours.

Have you done something like this before? Want to give it a go?

Susan Bowden is Head of Content at SnapComms and is here to tell us more. I’ll hand you over to her…

What’s the true cost of your internal communication?

Organisations find it hard to quantify how much it costs to keep staff informed – and what the return of this investment is.

There’s a new online calculator tool created to help internal communicators answer this.

The calculator, created by SnapComms, shows where the costs mount up – many of which are ‘hidden’ – and more importantly, how savings can be made.

This simple-to-use interactive tool factors in a range of commonly-occurring expenses, including many of those buried costs associated with internal communications.

How to use it

It calculates the amount for interruption and subsequent recovery time for unnecessary emails (and we can all relate to that!).

The calculation formulas are based on research data which are referenced as you progress through the tool.

It also includes the potential savings if better internal communications methods were in place that could substitute time-wasting general update meetings.  For example, could your weekly ‘general update’ meeting be replaced with a more efficient method of ‘information dissemination’?

What makes this handy ROI tool so appealing is the ability to make it your own i.e. you can input your own data, such as number of employees, approximate number of meetings, and average production costs for creating offline messages.

Upon conclusion, the calculator reveals the total sum of internal communication costs specific to your situation.

It also shows how much money can be saved using employee communication software to consolidate email communications and push important information out to staff via high-impact channels that bypass email.

It only takes a couple of moments to complete, but the results give Internal Communicators real data that’s incredibly useful for decision-making purposes and compiling business cases.

ROI Calculator results are available immediately via a customised report, which can also be shared via email upon request. The report breaks down the problem areas – such as surplus meetings and email – and the true cost associated with those efforts.

Do try the calculator and let us know what you think.

Post author: Susan Bowden, SnapComms @SnapComms.

Thanks Susan. What do you think? Could this work for you? Were you surprised by the results?

I’ve asked the SnapComms team to consider other currencies and am pleased to say they’ve taken my feedback onboard. The calculator should evolve over time and include currencies other than US$ in the future.

As ever you’re welcome to comment below or Tweet me @AllthingsIC.

Thank you for stopping by,

Rachel

Here’s some links to the research cited by this tool:

• Research shows it takes an employee 64 seconds to return to the work they were doing before the email interruption. Read the research: Email Duration, Batching and Self-interruption: Patterns of Email Use on Productivity and Stress.
• Research shows that 70% of employeesreact to a new email, regardless of its importance, within 64 seconds. In other words, they are distracted from what they were doing. Read the research.

Post author: Susan Bowden.

First published on the All Things IC blog 12 June 2017.