How often do you take stock of the internal communications tools that you’re using to communicate with employees? If you’re still relying on traditional internal communications channels, it’s really time you updated and embraced digital tools, such as workplace digital signage.
Table of contents
Why use corporate digital signage for employee communications?
How digital signage improves employee engagement
22 ways to use digital signage for internal communication
How DeskAlerts can manage your digital signage for employee communications
What is digital signage?
Digital signage involves using screens throughout your workplace to communicate information to employees. Whether it's an office, a retail store, a factory or a warehouse, wherever you have screens you can send important information, reminders, updates and more.
Why use corporate digital signage for employee communications?
The nature of digital signage is that it is visual and lively, which makes it attention-grabbing and highly engaging.
Digital signage of course isn’t the only way you should be communicating with your employees. However, by introducing it as part of a multi-channel approach to internal communications you can help to reinforce messages that you are sending to employees in other ways. By adding it to your internal communications you can be sure that it will be noticed.
Advantages of using digital signage for employee communications include:
- Quickly grabbing employees’ attention
- The ability to deliver information to many employees at the same time without relying on them opening emails or having to go to the intranet etc.
- The ability to create and deliver a wide range of content
- A cost-effective way of communicating with employees
- An efficient way of communicating with employees.
How digital signage improves employee engagement
Employee engagement describes the level of connection that employees feel with their company. Highly engaged employees are motivated, committed, dedicated and want to help the company succeed. When employees are engaged they’re likely to be satisfied with their work, will be more productive and efficient, take less days off and are less likely to leave the company.
Digital signage can help you with your employee engagement goals and help to build a solid corporate culture:
- Digital signage can help foster a sense of belonging – you can use your signage to enhance your internal branding and showcase your goals and values so that staff are aware of them at all times.
- Digital signage can be personalized - you can send targeted signage to different teams, different offices and even to individuals via their screensavers to provide a customized and inclusive experience.
- Digital signage can give employees a voice – you can use your digital signage to showcase employee opinions and feedback to help boost morale and let employees know that you value their contributions.
- Digital signage can recognize employee contributions – you can use digital screens as part of employee reward and recognition efforts in a way that broadcasts their efforts to their peers.
Download 15 internal message templates for free
23 ways to use digital signage for internal communication
If you’re not sure where to start with using employee digital signage, here are some ideas to get you on the way:
For HR departments
- HR reminders – let employees know about upcoming dates such as payroll closing or the need to commence or finish their annual performance management cycle.
- Health reminders – for example, information about COVID-19 requirements with masks and sanitizer, social distancing etc.
- Workplace hazard reminders – internal signage can let people know about any specific hazards in the workplace that they need to be aware of.
- Welcoming new employees – this is a great way to help your new team members feel welcomed from their very first day which helps with engagement and retention.
- Showcasing employee benefits – many organizations provide employees with a range of benefits that sometimes can be under-utilised because people don’t know about them or forget about them.
- Recognizing individuals - whether you have a reward and recognition system in place like “employee of the month” or you want to recognize other outstanding contributions made by team members, profiling them with their picture on digital screens outlining their accomplishments can help them feel valued.
- Inspirational or motivational quotes - this can help your employees to feel more motivated in the workplace.
Read more: Motivational messages for employees
For IT departments:
- Cyber security reminders - remind your team to be careful with passwords and to be vigilant about phishing and other social engineering attempts. (To learn more, go to our cyber security awareness email article).
- Alert of a cyber threat – if there is a security breach, your digital screens can be deployed to let people know as well as the steps they need to take to keep systems and data safe.
- IT reminders – if your systems are going to be down for maintenance, you can remind people on the screens. Learn more about IT alerting.
For emergency management:
- Emergency warnings – if there is an active emergency situation (flood, active shooter, natural disaster etc) your digital screens can be used in addition to your other alerting methods, such as pop-ups, to let people know and provide directions (for example, evacuate or shelter in place).
- Emergency preparedness – digital screens can help to keep people thinking about what they have to do if there is an emergency at work., For example, you can include instructions about what to do when there is a fire (calmly wait for the fire warden to evacuate you, use the fire stairs, never use the elevator). You can also include visuals such as maps of where fire escapes or fire extinguishers are.
For the communications department:
- As part of internal marketing campaigns – when you are conducting internal marketing initiatives, your digital screens can help to back it up in a visual way using your imagery and branding.
- Welcoming official visitors – if you have special visitors such as dignitaries, clients, customers, stakeholders etc you can use digital signage to make them feel welcome while it also lets your employees know that these people will be present on site so that they can ensure their behavior is exemplary.
- Reminders of upcoming events - remind employees about upcoming corporate events and celebrations. You can be creative with this and even include countdowns to the date.
- Your company in the news – have you recently made headlines or appeared on television news broadcasts? You can show your employees your good news stories on digital screens.
- Sharing industry news - when there are trends and statistics that are interesting or new regulatory requirements in your industry, you can share this visually with your employees.
For the corporate strategy team:
- Recognizing milestones - when key projects hit particular milestones you can celebrate this success by letting employees know on the screens.
- Information about change initiatives - when there is a major change within your organization it's important to use every tool you have to let people know about it and how it will affect them to ensure success.
- Company performance results – digital screens can be used to let employees know about how the organization is performing. This can include sales figures, profits and loss and any other financial information that is worth sharing with the team.
- Policy and procedure changes – when you have updates to internal policies, people aren’t always going to take the time to read them. Let people know the critical information that affects them.
- Display quiz questions - get people thinking about the company as a whole by asking trivia questions on the digital screens and providing answers later.
Displaying your company goals and values - there’s no point in having a company mission statement if you’re going to lock it away in a drawer and never look at it. Keep it front of mind for employees so they know what your company stands for, what it values and what it wants to achieve.
How DeskAlerts can manage your digital signage for employee communications
Digital signage is one of the tools offered by DeskAlerts to enhance your internal communications. You can create eye-catching visual displays that DeskAlerts will help you to send to any digital screen within your organization.
It’s a great way to reach members of your workforce who aren’t desk-based, as well as reinforcing messages for employees who have computer access but may be suffering from information overload.
DeskAlerts digital signage for corporate communications will allow you to display:
- Multimedia content including images, posters, flyers, photos and newsletters
- Virtual maps
- Embeddable videos using links to Vimeo and YouTube
- QR code’s for people to scan
- Advertisements for products and services
- Schedules and timetables.
Our digital signage software can be used to send signage to every single screen in the organization or to send information to specific, targeted screens. For example, you may have safety information relevant only to employees working in your factory: you don’t need to send this to office-based employees. Or there might be a corporate event happening for employees in one city that isn’t relevant to the rest of the organization across the country.
And with our enhanced screen management feature for digital signage, you can now split your displays into several different zones (up to four) to deliver more information to employees and attract more attention. You can end a combination of different types of messaging to screens such as video, images and scrolling text. There is the ability to manage the content queues separately as well as scheduling in advance.
A further setting provides you with the option to override the entire screen with emergency messaging.
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While there are some digital signage best practices to be mindful of, there are almost endless ways you can use digital signage within your organization to improve communication and engagement with staff. Our team of internal communications experts can provide you with a free demo showcasing what DeskAlerts can do.
FAQs
How do you promote employee communication?
There are many ways to promote employee communication. It basically boils down to establishing a culture within your organization where open communication and sharing of information and knowledge is valued and modeled to employees from the top down. Then you need to ensure that you provide timely and relevant content using a range of internal communications channels that people will take notice of.
How do you use digital signage?
Digital signage can be used to promote just about anything you want to employees by placing the information on digital screens. Internal digital signage best practices include using text, graphics, photos, video content, animations or a combination of all of these.
What are the communication tools in a workplace?
Workplaces are equipped with a range of communication tools. This can include
- Intranet
- Blogs
- Pop-up alerts
- Corporate social media
- Desktop tickers
- Web conferences
- Sharing platforms such as Teams or Slack
- Instant messages
- Video conferencing
- Telephone
- SMS messaging
- Digital signage in office
- Screensavers and wallpaper
What are the types of digital signage?
There are four main types of digital signage:
- Dynamic digital signage - content is displayed either on the entire screen or part of it and shown on a predefined schedule.
- Automated digital signage – content is displayed when it is triggered by something else, for example, a warning in a factory.
- Advertising digital signage – these visual displays are designed to promote products or services.
- Interactive digital signage – this is a type of digital signage that works with an interactive interface such as touch screens.
What is digital employee engagement?
Digital employee engagement is a subset of employee engagement as a whole. It involves carrying out engagement activities with employees using digital tools. This can include digital tools that have been implemented for the specific purpose of engaging employees, or using existing digital workplace tools in a way that boosts engagement.
What are the benefits of digital signage?
Digital signage has a range of benefits in the workplace. It can help to improve communication on just about any topic, can provide useful advice, guidance and directions, and can also be deployed to help improve employee engagement.
