How does digital signage create effective internal communications?

Digital signage solutions provide a visual and engaging way to improve internal communications. It achieves multiple goals at the same time. It creates an inclusive and connected company culture, gets the information across in a simple and fun way, and improves employee productivity. Managers need to find solutions for effectively communicating with team members to maintain productivity and ensure that desired outcomes are being worked towards. Homogeneous and effective company culture can be a key strategic advantage and is achieved through communication.

Employee engagement & productivity

It doesn’t matter if you’re a small business that wants to engage 5 employees or a multinational corporation looking to align the communications that you share with thousands of employees across multiple continents, keeping your employees engaged and in the loop is a constant challenge. However, digital signage will do the job for you.

Employees that feel appreciated and involved are 20-25% more productive, which means your business will, in turn, become more productive and profitable. A key indicator of job satisfaction is communication. Implementing digital signage will create a greater return on investment from your employees. Show your employees what’s happening in the company – in their own office and others – and show their achievements, birthdays, and more.

Company culture

Internal marketing isn’t as well-understand as external marketing but is just as important. You need to promote your company’s objectives, products, and services to your employees, not just to your customers. You need employees that understand and promote your company’s offerings. And not only that, you need them to understand your company’s values. If you do this, then you can translate your brand personality into employee behavior.

A lot of companies try to do this through old methods: posters and emails. Emails aren’t out-of-date as a communications method, but the spamming that occurs to lots of employees’ inboxes means that a lot doesn’t get read. Or it does get read, but forgotten two minutes later when they’ve moved onto the next email. The solution is to stream important information onto screens across your frequented spaces using digital signage software. This is the best way to cut through the digital clutter and make sure your employees know what they need to know.

Lots of Available Spaces and Opportunities

Digital signage has lots of types of displays, media players, content, and installation. For your internal communications, you can use it in your lobby/entrance, meeting rooms, lifts, break room, bathrooms, walkways, and more, just use your imagination. You need to create a good first impression each day, and that’s easily done with a digitalized lobby. Show your employees motivational content, what’s happening that day, and whose birthday it is. Make the most of the spaces where your employees dwell the most. A break room is a prime location for digital signage, as your employees are likely to be sitting around needing stimulation.

6 Tips to improve internal communications with digital signage

1. Social Media Photo Wall

There are two great options for using social media in your internal communications.

Firstly, you can encourage your employees to share their lives inside and outside of work on their social media with a hashtag. These posts can then be filtered onto a photo wall or stream. If you include more into your playlist, for example, birthdays and celebrations of children and marriages, then your employees will feel more connected to each other and to the company. This is particularly true for companies with multiple offices. Having your employees in Amsterdam, London, and Berlin all shown in one display, which is seen in the same by all of them, will make connections and make them feel part of the bigger picture. And the pictures don’t have to be taken by the employees themselves, the company can add pictures too.

Secondly, you can use a similar method with your customers. Get your customers to share their experiences, reviews, and photos with your product or service and then display it. A video wall of your customer’s posts on social media will show your employees what their work is achieving and make it feel more worthwhile. As well as social media posts, share customer success stories, and contract renewals. Your employees will feel more motivated and happy, which is closely intertwined with productivity.

2. Metrics

Show your company’s metrics and overall performance on a dashboard to motivate and drive results. A leader board can highlight the performance of an individual, team, department, or entire office, which will be seen across your company’s other offices. Or you can be more specific with KPIs and recently closed deals. Live metrics that are important to each location’s growth and targets, and having them compared to data of the company overall or in previous years, will keep employees focused. Showing your employees across your locations the same progress to objectives and KPIs will keep them working to the same goals and become more cooperative.

In the same way that internal marketing can be overlooked, the importance of sharing your company’s accomplishments internally, as well as externally, can also be overlooked. Brag about what’s been achieved, who achieved it, and what it means for the company going forward. Employees will see the importance of their work and previous achievements and will be keen to achieve more. Their work won’t just be a paycheck.

3. Display Important Information

If your company runs an internal or external blog, then displaying the posts on your digital signage will keep employees informed about the latest content they can share with clients and prospects. The company always has so much information they need their employees to know, which is why email inboxes get so cluttered and ineffective. Important announcements need to be seen, not left unopened. Digital signage will allow you to create eye-catching visual animations and videos to get your information across and can do it to all your employees across all locations.

Put a digital signage display in your break room and a video wall in your lobby and your employees will see it every time. When your employees are well-informed, they will be able to have an input into what’s happening and never be left unprepared when it does happen.

Wayfinding is a very common use of digital signage. You can show your employees and visitors where to go for certain offices, lifts, events, meetings and more. This will streamline the process and prevent your staff from being distracted by directions.

A perfect example of digital signage streamlining internal communication is automatically updating conference room schedules. With digital signage, you’ll be able to avoid double bookings and wasted time. You can install tablets onto the wall to allow employees to book a room right there and then. Or you can connect it to your company’s Google Calendar or other similar software and your employees can book it from anywhere. There’s no reason it has to display the schedule constantly. Create a playlist and show other types of content intermittently, for example, KPIs, announcements, and upcoming events.

4. News & Entertainment

Stimulate conversations about world news in your break room and cafeteria. Make sure your employees are staying on top of what’s happening around the world. You can also keep it local by showing the weather. On the other hand, you might prefer to share industry news. Either way, your staff will be entertained and learn important information.

You can encourage employees with the digital signage itself through internal competitions. Have them compete to create content to be shown on the display with prizes and recognition for the winners. Be interactive in simpler ways with polls, which can be concerning serious discussions about the company or just for fun. When different locations are competing in these events it will bring them together.

If your business has lots of visitors, you can keep them entertained while they wait with tailor-made playlists of content about the business, sport, music, and more. Their experience will be improved and their perception of the time they spent waiting will be decreased. It’s another opportunity to inform, entertain and improve internal communications.

5. Events

Use your digital signage software to liven up your work events and parties. Get your employees to have fun by sharing their pictures of the event on social media with a hashtag, and then have it displayed on your digital signage. These pictures can then become part of your social media wall in the offices, thus stimulating happy memories and positive thinking.

Wayfinding will also be important for events. Make sure everyone knows where they need to go and how to get there. You’ll also be able to include schedules, so they can also know when things will be happening.

By scheduling your content into playlists, your digital signage will automatically update at certain times. For example, everyone will be reminded that a certain meeting will be happening in 10 minutes and should make theirs over there. And they will stop being shown information about something that happened a few hours ago, as it’ll no longer be relevant.

6. Advertising

A lot of businesses use their digital signage as an additional revenue stream through third-party advertising. Include adverts in your playlist that are relevant to your staff or messages from your partners. It’s also a great way to get your employees more engaged with the local community by including promotions from local businesses.

Evaluating your digital signage and internal communications

Once you’ve been using your digital signage for a while and your employees have had the opportunity to engage with it, they’ll be ready and willing to give some feedback. All your business’s operations are evaluated and digital signage is no different.

Ask your employees what they think of the content. Do they understand it? Did they even notice it? You will need to improve internal communications through their suggestions and feedback. If they haven’t noticed some content, then this may mean that the display needs to move. We’ve written a guide about digital signage installation. If they don’t like the content, then it won’t be having the effect you wanted. We’ve also written a guide about digital signage content.

Remember that employee feedback is critical for improving your company and its culture.

How Easyscreen can help

Digital Signage Content Templates

Our digital signage software has a vast library of templates and images that you can use to quickly design and upload content to your displays and improve internal communications. Check out some of our solutions, which we’ve just talked about:

• Social media TV will let you connect with your audience, anticipate what they say and stimulate interaction and engagement.
• Wayfinding TV templates will get your employees to where they need to be
• Team TV will allow you to bring your company information to life
• Meeting room TV will get your schedules clear and synchronized

We have news templates too. They use HTML and an XML feed, so all you need to do is choose your sources for the information to go into it, and then it’s ready to go.

Tagging

You can also tag your content and media players on your platform. This makes it quick and simple to play your content wherever you choose and however you choose. Tag your media players based on city, region, country, or however, you like. This makes it easy to add content to any display and playlist in just a few clicks.

Admin controls

Give different employees varying levels of rights and access. Only some users will be able to send content across your entire network, while others will be limited to only certain media players. This means you’ll be able to give access to multiple people and not have to worry about what they use it for.

Easyscreen: One-stop-shop Digital Signage Software

Here at Easyscreen, we are a one-stop shop, so we can help you every step of the way. We can provide you with your digital signage displays and media players, but also much more. We supply you with our platform’s content creation and management software and then take care of installation and maintenance.

Free Digital Signage Software Demo

We are confident that your company will experience the benefits of our digital signage software and help, just like our other customers across many industries already do. That’s why we offer a free trial.