Do You Need a Communication Audit? Nothing is more important in building trust and support between your organization and its key stake holders than the quality of your communication efforts. See if you can answer these questions about your organizational communication: Are you listening to employees and addressing their concerns? Are you communicating with middle managers effectively? Do managers understand what they need to communicate to their staff and how to answer their questions about the organization’s initiatives? Do employees understand the organization’s strategic goals and objectives and the reasons behind them? Are you successfully engaging employees and gaining their support regarding the key challenges of the organization? Do you know which of your communication vehicles, and styles, is more effective in reaching, informing, and inspiring your key audiences? Do you know if you are investing your communication dollars wisely, and whether you can achieve better returns if you make changes, and how? If you cannot answer any of these questions in the affirmative, you will benefit from a Communication Audit.

What is a Communication Audit? What Does It Deliver? It's a snapshot of an organization's communication strategies, activities and programs. It's an assessment of the effectiveness and credibility of current communication vehicles and media, including publications, web site, intranet, blogs, town meetings, face-to-face communication, and other communication media. It uses processes such as observations, analyses and evaluations, focus groups, interviews and surveys of employees and other key audiences whose support is needed to improve communication, understanding and collaboration in the organization. What Does It Deliver? A communication audit usually delivers some or all of the following: Review of existing communication policies, publications, and vehicles, indicating strengths and weaknesses of each. Summary of comments of focus groups and interviews. Report of the employee survey results. Recommendations for strengthening your communication strategies and programs.

The Eight Benefits of a Communication Audit Depending on its magnitude, a communication audit may deliver some or all of the following benefits to your organization: It helps build support for your communication / HR/ or organization change Initiative. It demonstrates your commitment to improving communication throughout the organization. It demonstrates your willingness to listen and to respond to employees and other stake-holders’ views - a key step in building positive relationship, creating credibility and fostering mutual trust. An audit will find out what major segments of employees / stake-holders think about the organization’s communication and initiatives. An audit will deliver practical recommendations for improving communication in the organization. An audit can save money and effort as you will be able to minimize, or eliminate, the programs that do not yield benefits and strengthen, or add, those that do. An audit can become the basis for creating an effective strategic communication plan for your organization, ensuring that you gain maximum benefits from your communication investment. An effectively designed and implemented communication audit can be a driver for culture change where you engage everyone in building a new work culture of open communication, credibility, and collaboration.

Advantages of HumaNext Do-It-Yourself Approach HumaNext offers a unique approach to communication audit. It is a “Do It Yourself” approach that yields more rewarding results than traditional audit services conducted by consultants for you. In the HumaNext Do-It-Yourself approach, HumaNext provides you with the structured process, tools, content (such as interview and focus group criteria and questions) and online survey content and mechanism to enable you to perform your audit. You take these tools and perform the audit in your organization yourself, under the guidance of HumaNext consultants. In particular, you conduct the interviews with key stake-holders, and the focus groups, using the questions we develop for you. Meanwhile, HumaNext reviews and conducts a comprehensive evaluation of your current communication strategy, policies, publications, messages, and media and provide you with the strengths and weaknesses of each with recommendations for improvement. In essence, the HumaNext approach gives you the tools to do the parts that you can do on your own with our guidance, while leaving the parts that must be done by an objective outside consultant, like the evaluation of your current communication efforts, for us to perform for you. This way you save thousands of dollars compared to hiring a consulting company that spends several weeks performing the audit for you at your organization. But the advantage of this approach is not just in saving you a significant amount of money. Conducting the audit yourself provides your communication / marketing, or HR staff, volunteers, or interns working with you an invaluable opportunity to get in touch with the organization’s stake holders, ask them the critical questions of strategic importance to the organization (that we help articulate) and hear directly from them in interviews, focus groups, and other venues.

The Seven Stages of a Communication Audit A communication audit involves a number of processes that are chosen depending on the organization’s needs. The steps involved in a communication audit usually include some or all of the following: 1. Planning: The Planning stage will identify and articulate the organization’s needs, the objectives of the audit, and the components and process needed to conduct an effective audit. All the elements of the audit will be mapped out in advance so that a clear picture of the process and its results will be agreed upon. 2. Launching: The Launching stage involves a special communication campaign you conduct to introduce the audit process to your organization using your current communication vehicles. The campaign will announce the audit in a compelling, credible way, explain its reasoning and objectives, and build employee support and commitment to it. We will give you examples of language to use and review your campaign and offer recommendations. 3. Observing & Evaluating: This stage involves the observation of your work culture – based on a list of items we provide you- and what it communicates to its inhabitants. It also involves conducting a HumaNext review of existing communication policies, publications, reports, vehicles and processes and organizes the results to be included in the Audit Report (Stage 7). The basic fee includes the evaluation of up to five communication vehicles for your organization (for example, a website, two internal publications, two marketing vehicles – or other combinations.) 4. Interviews: We will develop the set of criteria, procedures and questions you can use in your interviewing of top executives. This vital group requires a special attention and, with your input, we will carefully design a set of effective questions that are relevant to your organization. With the right questions, interviews can generate significant information about the organization, its culture, its goals, and how communication fits in all these. 5. Focus Groups: We will develop the set of criteria, procedures and questions you can use in selecting and conducting the focus groups that are representative of your audiences. Focus groups can generate more useful information than surveys alone because facilitators, with the questions we will develop, can probe the feelings behind the opinions. 6. Survey: We will develop and process a customized online communication survey – taking your input – for you to give to your employees and other stake holders to provide you with the larger picture of their views regarding your communication programs and processes. We process the online survey of up to 100 users. (Additional users are at a small additional fee.) 7. Reporting: The Reporting stage involves analyzing the information and data you generated from the previous phases of the audit and issuing a comprehensive report that includes recommendations for actions. Support and Consultation: HumaNext will provide needed consulting and coaching support to your staff throughout the process of development and implementation.

Communication Audit Information, Tools, and Services. Contact HumaNext at 1-973-427-3004 or email us at info@communicationideas.com

Communication Services By: Francois Basili, HumaNext's Founder and President Francois Basili, President of HumaNext, has served for twelve years as Director of Organizational and Marketing Communications, and Director of Training/HRD for a $1.3 billion healthcare organization in New York. His other corporate leadership positions include heading the commercial operations/ community service function for Bechtel's $20 Billion Jubail Project in the 1980s, the largest project in the world at the time. Basili developed several successful internal and external communication programs for organizations in the US and abroad, including marketing communications, branding, and informational campaigns that appeared in Time, Newsweek, US News, Sports Illustrated, and other media. Basili’s tools for strategic corporate communications, and his consulting and training services, have been used by leading American corporations including Safeway, CA, Dell, EDP, PearsonEd, NY Public Library, Mayo Clinic, the United Nations, and many others.