Simplify Employee Communications with Digital Signage
A strong employee communications strategy contributes significantly to a company’s success. Ideally, your employees should be in the loop about everything happening in the company, from HR announcements, deadlines, company and department targets, open positions, and upcoming events and activities. Still, 60% of companies lack a long-term internal communication strategy.
Luckily, modern companies can leverage various technologies to improve and simplify employee communications. These tools include video conferencing tools, collaboration hubs, and chat apps. Most importantly, digital signage has revolutionized the way companies communicate with team members by allowing the real-time sharing of important information on dynamic screens.
What Is Workplace Digital Signage?
Workplace digital signage is the use of strategically-placed digital signs to streamline internal communication. You can place digital displays in the lobby, break rooms, hallways, conference rooms, and staff cafeteria.
Traditionally, companies relied on bulletin boards to inform employees. However, notices often got lost and ignored, resulting in disengaged employees. In contrast, digital signs engage employees with bright and lively content. You can stream different content, such as graphics, PowerPoint presentations, videos, text, and live streams.
How Digital Signage Simplifies Employee Communications
A digital signage system is an effective messaging tool in the workplace. Below are some ways you can simplify employee communications with digital signage.
1. Share Company Dashboards
One of the incredible benefits of digital signage in the workplace is the ability to show your company’s performance in real-time. Typically, companies track many metrics, such as production metrics, sales revenue, call volume, net profit margin, customer support wait times, and customer satisfaction rates.
While KPIs are vital in business meetings, they are crucial in regular office life. If your employees cannot see the numbers that matter daily, how do they stay motivated to play their part in reaching company goals? Indeed 97% of employees believe communication impacts their ability to perform daily tasks.
Thankfully, digital signage dashboards simplify the sharing of key company metrics. Data visualization of company targets on bright and engaging screens keeps everyone on the same page and facilitates decision-making. What’s more, there will be improved accountability since everyone can see how their department is performing.
If you want to share real-time data feeds, invest in powerful digital signage software that can pull data from other platforms like ERP or CRP. A live metric display that tracks the progress of critical metrics like social media followers and sales revenue keeps stakeholders informed and engaged.
2. Communicate Across Multiple Locations
Simplified employee communications is challenging for businesses with several offices in different locations, such as a chain of restaurants or multinationals. In particular, effective communication is vital for multicultural teams who speak different languages. It is essential to include all employees in company developments and promote the company culture, branding, and values.
A cloud-based digital signage content management system lets you manage numerous digital screens in multiple locations. The solution should support multiple users with different access levels to simplify content deployment.
In this way, communication teams in various locations can push both localized and company-wide notifications as needed. Multi-lingual support is another feature to look for in a digital signage network if you have offices in different countries. Additionally, scheduling capabilities let you keep digital signage content fresh and relevant to employees in other locations.
3. Update Meeting Room Scheduling and Booking
If you still tape “room reserved” paper signs outside conference rooms, you miss out on meeting room digital signage benefits. Digital signage is an excellent communication tool to streamline the process of booking meeting rooms in the workplace.
Essentially, screens placed outside conference halls show real-time availability to improve resource utilization in your company. Integrating your digital signage platform with the company’s calendar systems eliminates confusion as everyone can see a meeting’s start and end times and book the room in advance.
You can deploy meeting room digital signs as part of a larger wayfinding system that orients new employees and welcomes guests. Wayfinding is especially vital in sprawling campuses with many offices. In this case, meeting room digital signs will show how employees utilize conference rooms and the amount of underutilized space. Consequently, you better understand your space requirements to make the necessary adjustments.
4. Integrate With Other Applications
A robust digital signage software pulls content from other sources to entertain and inform employees. Data integrations simplify content creation as digital signs require a steady supply of dynamic content to excite audiences. These integrations include:
- Social Media Feeds
About seven in ten Americans share information, connect with peers, and engage with news on social media. Thus, you should share your company’s social media feeds on employee-facing digital signage to boost workplace communication. Social media feeds come alive on video walls as you can combine multiple feeds from different platforms like Pinterest, Vimeo, and Facebook.
- RSS Feeds
RSS feeds make it easy to integrate different kinds of news from multiple sites into your digital signage playlist. Select from various genres and industries, including tech news, lifestyle, health, life hacks, and sports. What’s more, you can use a custom RSS feed to show off the great content on your website.
- Event Listing
Tracking and updating all upcoming company events is challenging. Fortunately, integrating digital signage with an event listings app updates employees on scheduled activities and integrates with calendar applications to manage changes.
- Live Traffic
Live traffic on digital signs shows staff that you care about their commute home. The live traffic feed can show route conditions, estimated arrival times to various destinations, and live reports that show slow and alternate routes.
- Spreadsheets and Presentations
You can publish office documents and spreadsheets directly to your digital signs. The presentations don’t have to be boring as you can use photos, animations, and eye-catching animations to display the latest sales figures or other important information.
- Emergency Alerts
Digital signage makes it easy to deploy instant emergency alerts in case of fire, blizzards, hurricanes, gas leaks, and other emergencies. Additionally, you can show safety instructions, such as directions to the nearest exits or who to call.
5. Embrace Interactivity
Two-way communication is vital in the workplace as it shows employees that you value their ideas and opinions. While you may be tempted to use digital signs for one-way communication, you miss out on opportunities to let your employees interact with your digital content.
Interactive digital signs create immersive experiences that engage both employees and customers. For instance, employees can book conference rooms seamlessly on digital kiosks, submit accolades for fellow team members on break room digital signs, or show highlights of company events on lobby signs. Moreover, interactive digital signs collect feedback from employees on various ways to improve productivity.
6. Share Digital Notice Boards
In the past, managers stuck posters and sticky notes on paper notice boards to communicate, in addition to lengthy emails and newsletters. However, overcrowded notice boards are easy to ignore, and employee inboxes overflow with email threats, spam, ads, and other distractions. Hence, companies need clutter-free, digital communication channels to streamline and simplify employee communications.
Luckily, digital notice boards are fast and efficient in delivering essential notifications. Managers don’t have to print new posters to communicate new targets and deadlines or promote upcoming events. In addition to notices, you can publish welcome messages, achievements, employee birthdays, weather updates, local area maps, and engaging videos. Play around with different graphics, layouts, and templates to create stunning content.
Maximize the Benefits of Effective Employee Communications
Digital signage solutions help companies keep up with the rapid pace of employee communication. Traditionally, employee communications represented email chains, newsletters, too many meetings, and paper bulletin boards. However, you can simplify employee communications with digital signage, thanks to solutions like digital dashboards, meeting room digital signage, and interactivity.