Communicating with employees can pose a real challenge. Employee surveys repeatedly highlight that organisations lacking in effective workplace communication can suffer from lowered employee morale, employees become disengaged and productivity can be seriously affected.

There are many internal communication channels available.

• Electronic – Email, web casts, newsletters, intranets and wikis.
• Print – to cover any paper based communications including posters, magazines and brochures.
• Face to Face – Meetings, seminars, video conferencing
• Workspace – This includes the working environment such as notice boards or more recently digital signage; LED or Plasma screens strategically placed around the office.

Corporate Digital Signage for Internal Communication

We have worked with a large energy company that had 90 screens for communicating with employees. These were spread across three sites. We also work with smaller organisations including a sixth form college that has only six screens carefully placed across the campus in entrance halls, libraries and canteens.

Screens should be placed in the areas with the highest footfall, typically lobby, break out and reception areas. You could also consider screens for each unique department at each location, e.g. Finance, HR and Sales.

Content is the key, keep it moving and relevant to the audience. For example, in a lobby area you only have a few seconds to get your message across, so keep it short and to the point and change two or three times a week. Subtle repetition will ensure that your message is seen.

In areas where you have a captive audience you can publish the core message and then tailor the other content around it to specific times of the day with relevant departmental KPIs and information. The use of news, weather or travel feeds can help to guide employees to look at the screens.

Your digital signage solution should allow you to target specific messages to different audiences. This is not to mean that the traditional way of marketing through banners and signs is out of practice. On the contrary, this age has only given rise to many vinyl banner choices that one can choose from. So you could have one company wide message on all the screens and then department/audience specific messages as appropriate.

Pitfalls can include: too much text, use of small and unreadable fonts, too many messages on one screen, references to email addresses and web site urls, lack of brand compliance across screens. Keep content current, engaging and relevant, if not then your audience will quickly lose interest.

If you can connect to existing channels such a SharePoint, intranet, databases and RSS feeds you will have an even greater selection of content with the advantage of automated updates.

At Sabercom we specialise in getting the most out of employee communication using Digital Signage. If you would like to discuss a requirement or would just like some impartial advice, please give us a call +44 (0)1732 440035

For further information about how we can help your organisation, please visit Employee communication digital signage.