Listen, measure and track: how a large energy company began evaluating its internal communication
- Client
- Large Brazilian energy company
- Topic
- Internal communication and employee experience
- Method
- Online focus groups, web survey of employees and online community
The starting point
The company didn’t lack communication. It had established channels, a dedicated team and a steady stream of content. What it lacked was the answer to a question its metrics couldn’t reach: the open rate shows who opened a message, but not who understood it, trusted it or found it relevant to their work.
With thousands of employees, the gap between those two numbers can be wide, especially when part of the workforce is in the office and part is in the field, working shifts with little screen time.
- 16online focus groups
- 100+employees in the groups
- 5+locations
- 3linked stages
Three stages, one logic
To answer that question, Checon designed a three-stage study, with each stage building on what the previous one uncovered.
Stage 1ListenOnline focus groups
A questionnaire is great at measuring what we already know to ask. At the start, the company needed to discover what it didn’t yet know to ask.
We ran 16 groups with more than 100 employees from operations and administration, across more than five locations. Groups were organized by profile and region, so we could compare how the same communication reached different audiences.
In a group, one person’s story prompts the next. Disagreements surface and people’s real vocabulary comes out: what they call each channel, what counts as an “official announcement” and who they turn to to confirm information. The online format brought all these audiences together without travel and without pulling anyone away from operations longer than necessary.
Built on what stage 1 revealed
Stage 2MeasureWeb survey of employees
What came out of the groups was then built into a self-completion online survey open to all employees. This stage validated the qualitative findings at scale and mapped how each audience consumes information.
It also introduced a set of metrics and attributes designed to measure, in numbers, what increases or reduces the credibility of each communication channel. A perception that used to be subjective now had a yardstick.
Alongside stage 2
Stage 3TrackOnline community
In parallel, an online community with a smaller sample of employees tracked how internal communications were received as they went out. That made it possible to see, almost in real time, how each message was understood, not just how it was remembered later.
What the client received
- 01
An assessment of channels and formats, showing what works for whom.
- 02
A profile of how each employee group consumes information, built from the quantitative stage.
- 03
A map of the information gaps that create confusion and noise.
- 04
Recommendations to prioritize channels and adjust language.
What changed at the company
The study came to guide the communication team’s decisions about where to focus and how to tailor each message to its audience. It also left a lasting legacy: the company gained a way to track internal communication continuously, a tracking study it didn’t have before.
What we took from this project
Reach isn’t understanding. The same message, sent through the same channel, can be read very differently in the office and in the field. Whether people trust it depends as much on who says it, and how, as on what it says.
The other lesson is that listening only becomes management when you can repeat it. Listening once gives you a diagnosis. Measuring and tracking turn that diagnosis into a decision-making tool.