Another year is lumbering to a close and the numbers are being totted up. How much revenue did your business pull in this year? As an employee, is there even the remote possibility that there is a bonus in your future come next month end, or will that year-end windfall become as obsolete as the ‘A’ or eight track tape.

As an employer, did the people you hire earn their keep? Whereas your sales department can “show you the money” that they brought in, do you think you received the best bang for your buck from your marketing, public relations or communications professionals? Or do you consider them so much dead wood? The truth is that there are certain job functions that employers and employees deem non-critical because they do not seem to deliver anything “tangible”. Think about it carefully.

We appreciate, welcome and embrace the work of the company’s accountant, particularly if he is the person who cuts our check, meager though it may be, at the end of the month. When you turn to the members of the Information Technology department you are even more grateful for their presence and work because they manage the upkeep of the company’s computers, software application and trouble-shoot when IT-related issues arise. You can see what it is they are doing, because when the ‘system’ goes down, they are the ones who fix it and get you back up and running again.

You look across to the kitchen at the ancillary workers and you are emboldened to praise them for their contribution to your work-life. After all you are barely human before Miss Gordon brings you that cup of hot coffee in the morning. The members of this crack-pot team keep the office surrounding clean and provide you with the refreshment (if company budget allows) that lets you work at full throttle throughout the day.

Now you take a note of the communications/corporate relations/marketing/public relations department in your office and you shake your head and sigh ruefully. “What do those people do?” This is the perennial question on the lips of employers and employees about this job function. These professionals neither fetch coffee nor fix computers, so how do they add value to the store. All they do is spend money. I am writing from experience and as a ‘victim.’

But my question to the managers is this. During the year while the communications professionals were spending the company’s budgeted ‘moola’ on advertising, ‘big splash’ and such delights, how did you measure their work and worth anyway? Did you ever take them aside (or in public) and demand that they show you that the money that is being invested in said ‘big splash’ has by some miraculous method found its way back in to the kitty? Or do you assume that they know what they are doing and unquestioningly but reluctantly draw that big fat cheque, month after month? There are some of our professionals who do not have a clue. There are those professionals who have more than a clue but because the upper echelons of management themselves are clueless about the power of communication and so they do not have much time or regard for the input of those professionals in their employ who know.

These are the times when companies are focused on getting the best financial return on their investments, particularly in human labor. However, tracking and measuring any marketing or communications program has always been tricky, time-consuming and sometimes difficult. Metrics can be even more hard to pin down for marketing communication, and, in many cases, measurement methods can be inadequate or misleading. This is why not many companies bother to take the time to try to pin down the impact of these measurements.

Angela Sinickas, ABC is the guru of communications measurements and she defines the ROI as “the financial value of changed behaviour versus cost of communication”. She suggests that in order to start the measurement process it is necessary to start with the total financial value of new sales, improved productivity and other areas of the company’s output and what they will use to measure performance.

Angela has suggested how we could measure the communications deliverables. She proposes that we measure the levels of outcomes before and after the communications intervention and have the audience identify the connection between your communications methods used and their behaviour. The formulae she suggests in this measurement is “to take credit for a per cent of the value based on the impact the audience attributes to the communication; divide this by the cost of communication and the result of this is a rough estimate of the ROI. Angela also recommends that the company works with the Finance department to see how they calculate the ROI.

It is about time that we try to measure performance in the area. What do you think?

Yvonne Grinam-Nicholson, (MBA, ABC) is a Business Communications Consultant with ROCommunications Jamaica, specialising in business communications and financial publications. She can be contacted at: yvonne@rocommunications.com. Visit her website at www.rocommunications.com and post your comments.