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PortugalInternal Communication
How to conduct an internal communication audit of employees from HR
The internal communication audit serves to identify areas for improvement in communication within businesses. All the details on the blog!
Marcos Lopez
HR Consultant
26 of May, 2025
Internal communication in a company is one of the key pillars to maintain good cohesion among departments and workers. A good communication strategy can lead to business success. That鈥檚 why it鈥檚 important to perform an internal communication audit.
With it, it is possible to know more about the communication within the company and the different factors that affect it, facilitating the development of a good internal communication strategy.
Not sure how to do an internal communication audit? Here we leave you everything you need to know about it and the questions to ask in an internal communication audit.
What is an internal communication audit
An internal communication audit is a technique used to analyze both quantitative and qualitative aspects of an organization’s internal communication system. To conduct it, a systematic approach is required for easier evaluation.
While analyzing, you study channels, supports, and spaces, both formal and informal, to determine their effectiveness in the entire entity. Nowadays, with the rise of technology, these supports can be virtual or in-person.
Among them, certain specialized software created for HR can be encountered. At Sesame HR, we count with one of them, which features multiple functionalities as an internal chat of the company to improve the transparency of communications in remote work.
Why is internal communication important?
Human capital is undoubtedly the most important asset for our company, as without their talent the company will neither grow nor develop. However, for each person to reach their full potential, quality internal communication must be present.
To confirm this, it is advisable to carry out internal communication audits on a certain regularity. This helps to detect possible errors in protocols, procedures, and communication policies, as well as inefficiency in the channels used.
Poor communication management can affect performance by creating confusion among workers and impacting productivity. Hence, the importance of auditing internal communication.
Reasons to conduct an internal communication audit
The benefits of an internal communication audit are multiple, among them:
- Economy: it must be profitable for the company, requiring a budget.
- Strategic Reason: can cover aligning and preventive function. It’s useful to manage and prevent the changes or possible issues that may arise, as well as to align the workforce with the company鈥檚 goals.
- Effectiveness: it works as an integrator among the different departments and work teams, ensuring the achievements of the objectives, and a more competitive work organization due to collaboration among different areas in our entity.
How to conduct an internal communication audit
To successfully carry out an internal communication audit, it is recommended to follow these steps:
- Set SMART objectives for the audit. Before starting, be clear about what you want to achieve with it. The set goals should be in line with your corporate culture.
- Study the context and environment in which business communication is carried out. The aim is to learn about all external factors that may have affected your company.
- Evaluate your company鈥檚 audiences. Understanding the characteristics of everyone who interacts with the organization as customers or employees, noting the latter.
- Create a list of internal communication tools that the company has, to study their usage.
- Choose the method you will use to conduct the internal communication audit. These could be email surveys, employee interviews, etc.
- Prepare the type of questionnaire, with closed or open questions, and giving total freedom to the employee to respond. It is advisable to use the right questions.
- Draw conclusions and carry out improvement actions. Sum up the audit results and observe the measures that should be implemented. Once they are clear, make the necessary recommendations to carry out the changes.
Key questions for an internal communication audit
One of the key points for an internal communication audit to be effective is the questions that are posed. These can be divided into several types:
- Open-ended: allow employees to freely respond and express their opinions and experiences
- Closed: provide limited and specific responses. They help to obtain quantitative data.
- Multiple choice: they offer several answers for obtaining more detailed data
- Likert scale: use a specific scale to measure the degree of agreement or disagreement with a statement.
- Follow-up: that further investigate previous answers or request more examples.
- Situational: ones that pose hypothetical scenarios to evaluate the workforce in relation to specific internal communication situations.
Just as the questions asked in the questionnaire are important, to pose them the company must ask key questions. Some examples are:
- What are the objectives and goals of internal communication in our organization? Are they being met?
- Does a formalized internal communication strategy exist? If so, what are its key elements?
- What communication channels do we have to share news and what are their characteristics?
- Does the company encourages the feedback and participation of the workforce in internal communication and how it’s done?
- How is the management of internal communication conflicts handled? Are there barriers to it?
- Is there a training for employees or communication skills training available for the workforce?
These are just a few examples of questions that companies should ask in internal communication audits. Interesting, right? If you want to know more about this, take a look at the Sesame HR blog, your reference in HR software.
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