I’m not usually a numbers person.

But I am fascinated by what numbers can tell you. Seventy per cent of change management projects fail to achieve their objectives – that’s a telling stat.

In my own research I recently examined twelve leading academic and consultancy studies representing 10,928 respondents. What I found is that general employee satisfaction with internal communication ranges from 53 per cent to 64 per cent. Around 60 per cent of employees say they understand where the organisation is headed. These are great benchmark figures that can be used by all practitioners as the basis for objective setting and measurement in their own organisation.

Because of the disparity in a lot of existing survey tools, my supervisor at UCLan, Dr. Mary Welch, has developed a new organisational communication survey that is based on academic theory. I’m going to be piloting it in the autumn and we’ll see how it goes. The aim is to develop a widely accepted, robust, survey that includes linkages between internal communication and employee engagement.

In the meantime, I’m doing some practitioner based research about internal communication with the CIPR Inside group. This incorporates a survey asking practitioners about the way that internal communication is currently practised and what they’d like to focus on more in the future. We’ve already had more than 300 responses and some interesting trends are emerging. The survey is being combined with focus groups and interviews and the initial findings will be revealed at the CIPR Inside Conference on 6 October. The full report will then be made available later in the year.