Measure What Matters Chapters 9 and 10

Chapter 9 of Measure What Matters is focusing on measuring relationships with local communities. These are the people that are near your business in more ways than just distance. These people are your stakeholders and influence your business heavily. They can be vendors, customers, partners, advocates, and nongovernmental organizations. With local communities, the important thing to remember is these people can deny you government funding though taxes and are close enough to protest in front of your building. Having a good outreach program and staying involved is key. The agency I interned for took a day out of the office once a year and volunteered for a local business. The seven steps to measure your relationship with your community are:

1. Determine goals that are your bottom line. You will want to know your strengths and weaknesses of your reputation. Once you know your problem then you will want to know what the organization will look like if you overcome that problem.
2. Define your public. Anyone that is a stakeholder and plays a key in the success of your business. Focus on anyone who has a lot of influence as well because they can do both good and bad to your company.
3. Who or what are your benchmarks? You will need something to compare your results to this could be other communities or an organization of similar size and industry.
4. Set your audience priorities: who and what is most important to measure? Make a list of how important your stakeholders are. Have other people in your company that will be effected have input.
5. Choose your measurement tools. Relationship surveys are best with different questions to measure the community’s senses of control, trust, integrity, and satisfaction. Also consider local media and see if your organization arises at any point.
6. Analyze the data. Determine if your community messages are being communicated and code any articles your company comes up in. Is it good or bad? Is the coverage accurate to your organization?
7. Apply what you’ve learned. You may need more involvement or media attention. Get the community involved in the way that with strengthen your ties with them.

Chapter 10 of Measure What Matters is focused on what your employees think. They are your number one stakeholder and can be your biggest source of advertisement. The internet has made it easier for employees to know things. They can tell when their company is not doing well or if their competitors did something big. The employer can no longer keep that quiet and filter what their employees know. These are the seven steps to measuring what employees think, say, and do because of your internal communications.

1. Understand the environment and where they get information. Are they reading all the emails and memos or are they just deleting them? Do an audit to see who gets the emails, what is being said through the messages, and what are they doing with them? Also determine what channels the employees trust. Is it online or in person?
2. Agree on clear, measurable goals. Top management needs to determine the end goals. Tell them your benchmark studies and make sure they want to know the results and have a way to fix them or uphold them.
3. Select a benchmark to compare to. They should at least compare year to year but it is best to do twice a year.
4. Define the criteria of success. This is where you define your success and commit to achieving it. Be sure to make sure the goal is attainable.
5. Select your measurement tools and collect data. The main tools to focus on are message analysis tools, outcome measurement tools, and surveys to determine what employees think.
6. Analyze and take action. Examine what messages are being delivered and in what formats. Break the analysis down into segments.
7. Make the changes necessary to improve employee relationships. Your employees will expect a change based on the results of the survey so be sure to implement the best practice.