Digital Signage Is The Perfect Medium For Employee Engagement: Here’s Why

March 4, 2019 by guest author, sixteenninewpadmin

Guest Post: Samuel Mekonen, Seenspire

Samuel Mekonen

Even the most powerful message falls flat if delivered out of context, to a few readers, through an ineffective medium.

Organizations are learning to communicate differently – to speak a more relatable language and distribute content that addresses their employees’ and customers’ needs – but have been often uncertain about the most effective methods and solutions to evolve their internal communication.

Meanwhile, employee engagement is more important than ever. In the US alone, businesses lose $11 billion annually as a result of employee turnover. A united organization with shared goals, concerns, and interests will always rise above an organization of isolated individuals.

To turn communication strategies into energetic, dynamic, and engaging conversations, organizations need content that is diverse and relevant, visually stimulating and viewable across multiple locations: digital signage displays (DSDs) are the answer.

Engagement matters

We’re living in a time of information overload. Wherever your employees go, they’re inundated by non-relevant content, clumsily delivered through any number of devices and channels. This overload invariably leads to disengagement and a poor employee experience; with attention spans strained more than ever, audiences – your employees – are tuning out more easily and becoming more selective about what content they consume, and how.

Branded and employee-generated content delivered through digital signage help employees understand the what and why of their work. The price of working as a globally connected organization is a rise in employee disconnection; a disconnection that results in lower levels of engagement.

Individuals are empowered by meaning and identity. To know the why is necessary to feeling a sense of belonging, to be part of, not outside of, the conversation.

Changing the message isn’t enough

Email is still the medium for direct B2B communication, while an Intranet is a great tool for providing resources and knowledge. Meanwhile, collaboration tools – such as Slack or Microsoft Teams – are well-suited for co-creation and coordination. However, none of these offer the immersion and awareness-building of display communication – a medium that is often underused.

More often than not, employee-facing displays feature static images and fail to incentivize the retention or return of an employee’s attention. If employees stop expecting new, relevant information every time they look at a display, they’ll stop looking at the display. In an information economy, attention is our most precious resource; we will not continue to invest it if the returns are poor.

Jumpstart engagement with digital signage displays

Engagement requires a conversation, which means always-on, always-present, and always-relevant content. This is why digital signage – powered by a scalable, smart content engine – is the perfect medium to improve employee engagement and create a better employee experience. It is a vital step towards digitizing and connecting your workplace and the people in it, threaded by a shared vision, mission, and values.

Digital signage displays are windows and doors into your company’s workplace culture. By cutting through the clutter and delivering powerful and inspirational messages – alongside company announcements and employee-generated content – digital signage provides employees with a what and, more importantly, a why: what I am doing here, in this job, at this company, and why am I doing it.

We can understand this, as we feel it, too. A surplus of information is noise, and many of us get lost in that noise – unsure of our direction, our purpose, our meaning. Communal identity empowers us, and we perform better when we feel better.

Internal communication can no longer be considered an ancillary component of external communication; rather, it is its own discipline that warrants careful planning and an awareness of your employees’ needs. Communication must become a two-way conversation, and, as with every conversation, we’re responsible for including content that will be of interest to the other party: your employees.

Achieve this with digital signage. Give them a reason to engage, and to expect consistently diverse and relevant content that includes their voice alongside others. By making employees part of your conversation, you’ll make them part of your brand, and give them a reason to invest in it, to stick around, be productive, and, ultimately, stay engaged.

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