I've recently seen many communicators seeking benchmarking comparisons on staffing or budgeting for various aspects of communication. If you're in that group, you need to take into account many factors if you want to compare numbers from other organizations meaningfully with your own. For example:

• Service companies with large numbers of employees having direct customer contact need more employee communication than manufacturing companies.
  
  
• The geographic reach of the company, whether it's publicly traded, and if it's in a heavily regulated industry, can all increase necessary communication costs.
  
  
• Some communication activities have a large "sunk" cost to create the communication for the first employee receiving it – such as a publication, an intranet or a brochure. For companies with a large numbers of employees, that cost per person is relatively small, and for small companies that per-person cost is rather large.
  
  
• Company structure also plays a role in evaluating cost comparisons. Companies with many business units may do a lot of communication at the business unit level and less at the corporate level. Many of the benchmarking studies look only at the costs at the corporate level since it is logistically difficult to obtain similar numbers from all business units to add to the corporate numbers.

Finally, be careful to compare what communication activities are included in other companies' programs and how that compares with your own.

I had one benchmarking project where my client's communication budget included the annual HR engagement survey, though none of the other comparator organizations included similar surveys as part of the communication budget. Once we eliminated the HR survey budget from the comparison, she went from having the largest per-employee communication cost to the smallest.

See you next time.

Angela Sinickas
President, Sinickas Communications, Inc.
measurement@melcrum.com

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