Measuring employee experience doesn’t have to be overwhelming. Whether you’re just starting to think about internal comms measurement or looking to refine your approach, this guide will help you build a framework that aligns with your organization’s priorities and demonstrates real business impact.
The stakes have never been higher. Gallup’s 2024 State of the Global Workplace report shows that global employee engagement remains stagnant at just 23%, with 62% of employees not engaged. Even more concerning, Gartner research reveals that only 33% of employees say their organizations consistently deliver on promises made to them. When you measure what matters and act on those insights, you’re not just improving communications – you’re directly impacting business performance.
Start with the right mindset for measuring employee experience
Before diving into metrics and dashboards, let’s address the elephant in the room: there’s no single “right” way to measure employee experience.
Here’s what matters most:
Measurement is deeply contextual. so what works brilliantly for a 10,000-person enterprise may fall flat at a 200-person startup. Your industry, culture, and organizational maturity all play a role in shaping the right approach for you.
The goal isn’t perfection – it’s progress and insight. You’re not trying to build the ultimate measurement system on day one but instead trying to understand what’s working, what’s not, and where to focus your efforts next.
Start small and iterate often, choosing a few meaningful metrics, testing them, learning from what you discover, and adjusting as you go. Think of measurement as an ongoing conversation with your organization, not a one-time audit.
Understand what leadership actually cares about
The most effective internal comms measurement strategies don’t exist in isolation – they connect directly to business priorities that keep your leadership up at night.
Here’s how to uncover those priorities:
Identify your key stakeholders. This includes your C-Suite, senior leaders, and department heads. These are the people who set direction and hold budget authority.
Review existing strategic documents. Look at OKRs, annual plans, and employee engagement survey results. What themes emerge? What problems are they trying to solve?
Observe what metrics leaders already track. Are they obsessing over retention rates? Productivity metrics? Engagement scores? These existing metrics reveal what they value.
Conduct discovery sessions with key leaders and influencers across your organization. Ask open-ended questions about their goals, challenges, and how they define success. Listen for recurring themes and pain points – they’ll become the foundation of your measurement strategy.
7 EX pillars to help decode what matters most
Employee experience is complex, but it’s not random. Every interaction, from onboarding to recognition, contributes to how employees feel, perform, and stay. That’s why we use the seven EX pillars as a diagnostic framework: they help internal comms teams move beyond surface-level engagement metrics and uncover what truly drives experience across the organisation.
These pillars – Communication, Self-Service, Tool Access, Knowledge, Community, Alignment, and Recognition – represent core employee needs. They’re not just categories; they’re lenses through which you can assess friction, identify gaps, and prioritise improvements. Each pillar connects employee expectations with business outcomes, giving you a shared language to collaborate across HR, IT, Legal, and beyond.
By anchoring your measurement strategy in these pillars, you shift from reactive reporting to proactive insight. You’ll be able to ask sharper questions, gather more meaningful data, and tell stories that resonate with leadership.
How do you measure employee experience? Use the pillars as your diagnostic framework
The employee experience pillars provide a comprehensive map of what matters to employees throughout their journey. Rather than guessing what to measure, use these seven pillars as a diagnostic tool to systematically uncover priorities across your organization.
Here’s the strategic approach:
Meet with leaders across every function – not just HR and communications. Talk to IT, Legal, Finance, department heads, ERG leaders, project managers, and frontline supervisors. Each brings a unique perspective on what employees need to succeed.
Use the pillars to guide your discovery conversations. For each pillar, ask targeted questions that reveal both current state and aspirations. Document the language leaders use, the metrics they mention, and the problems they’re trying to solve.
1. Communication: Keeping everyone informed and aligned
Who to talk to: Internal Comms, HR, C-Suite, Frontline Operations
Discovery questions:
- “How do you currently communicate company-wide news and announcements?”
- “Do you feel employees are well-informed about strategic goals?”
- “What communication channels get the best response?”
How to measure employee experience in this area:
- Strategy recall rate in follow-up surveys
- Open enrollment participation rate
- Percentage of frontline workers reached by key communications
- Engagement rate on strategic communications (clicks, comments, shares)
2. Self-service: Empowering employees to find answers
Who to talk to: HR, IT, Legal, Finance
Discovery questions:
- “What are the most common employee questions or requests?”
- “Do you offer self-service options for things like benefits, tech support, or payroll?”
- “Where do employees get stuck when trying to solve problems on their own?”
Internal comms measurement metrics:
- Support ticket volume before and after launching self-service content
- Completion rate of self-service forms (benefits, PTO requests)
- Reduction in repetitive HR/IT tickets
- Compliance rate for mandatory tasks like policy acknowledgments
3. Tool access: Removing friction from daily work
Who to talk to: IT, HR Onboarding, Operations
Discovery questions:
- “How do employees access the tools they need?”
- “Are there any access or adoption issues with key systems?”
- “How long does it take new hires to get fully set up?”
Measuring employee experience with tools:
- Survey new hires on ease of tool access during onboarding
- Login frequency and time-on-tool metrics
- Number of support requests related to tool access
- System adoption rate post-onboarding
4. Knowledge: Making information findable and useful
Who to talk to: HR, Department Heads, Learning & Development
Discovery questions:
- “How do employees find information or subject matter experts?”
- “Is institutional knowledge being captured and shared effectively?”
- “What information do employees repeatedly ask for?”
How to measure:
- Time-to-productivity for new hires
- Percentage of successful searches versus failed or abandoned searches
- Frequency of document reuse across teams
- Knowledge retention scores via quizzes or feedback
5. Community: Building connection and belonging
Who to talk to: ERG Leads, Team Managers, Culture and Engagement Leads
Discovery questions:
- “Do employees feel connected to each other and the company?”
- “Are there active communities or collaboration spaces?”
- “How do cross-functional relationships form?”
Measuring internal comms impact on community:
- Percentage of community-generated ideas that are actioned
- Percentage of employees engaging in cross-functional groups
- Peer-to-peer support rate (questions answered by peers vs. admins)
- Retention rate among active community members
6. Alignment: Connecting daily work to strategy
Who to talk to: Project Managers, Strategy Leads, Communications
Discovery questions:
- “How do you track progress toward business goals?”
- “Are employees clear on how their work contributes to strategy?”
- “What happens after you announce a new strategic initiative?”
Internal comms measurement for alignment:
- Engagement with strategic communications
- Time between strategy rollout and task adoption
- Project success rates and on-time completion
- Percentage of employees who understand how their work connects to company goals
7. Recognition: Celebrating contributions and values
Who to talk to: HR, Team Leads, Culture Champions
Discovery questions:
- “How do you currently recognize employee contributions?”
- “Is recognition visible and tied to company values?”
- “Do employees feel appreciated for their work?”
How to measure employee experience with recognition:
- Correlation between recognition frequency and performance review scores
- Employee perception of recognition impact via surveys
- Correlation between recognition and retention rates
- Percentage of employees receiving peer recognition
Translate discovery into actionable data
Now that you’ve gathered rich qualitative insights from across your organization, it’s time to turn those conversations into quantifiable indicators.
Choose a balanced mix of metrics. Combine quantitative data (email open rates, intranet traffic, survey scores) with qualitative insights (sentiment analysis, feedback themes). Numbers tell you what’s happening; stories tell you why.
Map each metric to a business priority. Every metric you track should connect to either a business goal or a specific communications objective. If you can’t explain why a metric matters, don’t track it.
Keep it lean to start. Focus on three to five core metrics initially. You can always add complexity later, but starting with too many metrics leads to paralysis, not insight.
Use data to tell compelling stories
Raw numbers rarely inspire action. Your job is to transform data into narratives that demonstrate the strategic value of internal communications.
Create a simple dashboard or monthly snapshot. Make your data visible and accessible. Leaders should be able to understand your impact at a glance.
Use storytelling to show impact. Instead of “Email open rate: 67%,” try “After we redesigned our strategy announcements, engagement rose by 24%, and strategy recall improved among frontline workers by 31%.”
Share both wins and lessons learned. Transparency builds credibility. When something doesn’t work, share what you learned and how you’re adjusting.
Sample monthly reporting snapshot for measuring employee experience:
| Metric category | Metric name | Value | Trend | Narrative insight |
| Communication | Strategy recall rate | 68% | ↑ +12% | After launching the new strategy video series, recall improved significantly among employees at all levels. |
| Self-service | Ticket deflection rate | 42% | → Stable | Self-service content is holding steady; next step is optimizing search functionality. |
| Tool access | Time-to-first-login | 1.2 days | ↓ -0.5 days | Improved onboarding communications helped reduce tool access delays for new hires. |
| Knowledge | Successful search rate | 76% | ↑ +8% | Improved tagging and content structure boosted findability across the intranet. |
| Community | Cross-functional engagement | 58% | ↑ +15% | New ERG campaigns drove broader participation across departments. |
| Alignment | Strategy adoption lag | 5 days | ↓ -3 days | Faster uptake after clearer messaging and manager toolkits were introduced. |
| Recognition | Peer recognition rate | 72% | ↑ +9% | Monthly spotlight campaigns increased peer-to-peer praise and visibility. |
Real-world example: King’s College Hospital NHS Foundation Trust reported that after launching its award-winning intranet – including a personalised onboarding homepage shown for two weeks after a new starter joins – and enabling mobile access, they saw smoother onboarding, fewer support requests, and a 75% positive rating in a pulse survey.
This is just the beginning: Continuous improvement in measuring employee experience
Measurement isn’t a one-time project – it’s an ongoing practice that evolves with your organization.
Revisit your metrics quarterly or biannually. Business priorities shift, new challenges emerge, and what mattered six months ago may not be relevant today. Build regular review cycles into your workflow.
Add complexity only when you have capacity and clarity. It’s tempting to track everything, but more metrics don’t automatically equal better insights. Only expand your measurement framework when you’ve mastered the basics and have a clear reason for the addition.
Celebrate progress, not perfection. Every improvement – no matter how small – represents real impact on employee experience. Share those wins widely.
Moving beyond static reporting
The challenge with traditional measurement approaches is that annual employee engagement surveys and quarterly reports provide valuable snapshots, but they can’t capture the dynamic nature of modern employee experience.
Static reporting has limitations:
- Annual surveys reveal problems six to twelve months too late
- Quarterly reports can’t respond to real-time challenges
- One-time measurements miss trends and patterns
Modern internal comms measurement requires continuous listening. Consider implementing tools and approaches that enable ongoing feedback:
Pulse surveys allow you to take the temperature of specific initiatives or topics quickly, gathering employee feedback when it’s most relevant rather than waiting for an annual cycle.
Real-time signals from your communication platforms – such as engagement patterns, sentiment shifts, and information-seeking behavior – provide early warning signs of emerging issues or opportunities.
Always-on feedback channels like digital suggestion boxes, monthly temperature checks, or integrated communication platform analytics help you stay connected to the employee experience as it unfolds.
The most effective measurement strategies combine periodic deep-dive assessments with continuous listening mechanisms. This approach allows you to be both strategic and responsive – understanding long-term trends while remaining agile enough to address immediate concerns.
Invest in software and platforms designed for ongoing measurement and employee feedback. These tools shouldn’t create more work – they should make it easier to gather, analyze, and act on insights that improve employee experience every day.
Start measuring what matters
Measuring employee experience doesn’t require a massive budget, a team of data scientists, or perfect conditions. It requires curiosity about what matters to your people, alignment with what matters to your business, and commitment to continuous improvement.
Start with one pillar. Choose three metrics. Build your first dashboard. Tell your first story about impact.
The journey from gut-feel communications to data-informed strategy begins with a single step – and that step can happen today.
