Communication Maturity Assessment

Whilst working for a large FMCG, I always struggled to find a way to measure the maturity of communication channels and initiatives. I thought there must be a way to measure the maturity of communications at a specific business location and thus compare it with the other locations.

After trawling the web for a simple tool and not finding what I was looking for, I approached our internal Lean Specialist Coach to understand how he was assessing the maturity of a manufacturing site against the lean metrics. Together with our communication champions, we developed a formula and process for a communication maturity assessment, that assessed each site against 5 key metrics. The level of metrics can vary but we chose 5 that ranged from site communication channels to participation in the employee survey to keep it simple.

The result of conducting the communication maturity assessment for each site led to a sharp improvement in communication channels & initiatives for that site - driving employee engagement.

Now I know this is not an exact science nor does it directly measure the return on investment for your communication initiatives, but what I believe it does do is bring a focus on how communications are progressing across the business. It's about ensuring all sites across your business are ideally meeting a minimum standard and have a plan to drive employee engagement.

One main advantage is once the assessment have been completed for all sites across the business, you can see which sites are leading the way and identify the ones where extra effort & support is required. It also helps provide a structured framework, credibility and confidence for internal comms professionals to share with senior leaders and challenge them on driving the employee engagement agenda. Sharing a graph with the maturity score for each site to senior management normally prompts them to act - no MD wants to see the site they are responsible for having a low maturity score.

So, if you are keen to drive comms for your business and want more information, get in touch or send me a quick email and I'd be happy to tell you more.