Spotlyte | How Digital Signage Improves Employee Communications

Comms and HR teams know the challenges of keeping employees informed. Modern offices are now turning to digital signage screens installed around the office to engage and communicate with employees.

Some great uses for office digital signage include:

• Company News
• Upcoming Events
• Lobby Signage
• Internal Team Metrics
• Live Social Media Feeds

With traditional signage software the management of digital media content across your screens can be a difficult and labor intensive task. However, with modern digital signage software all your content is uploaded and managed on the cloud quickly and easily. Content is managed remotely and screens can be scheduled independently.

Organizing Your Screens

Decide if you will have different categories of screens each showing different content. In the simplest case, you'll have a few screens all showing the same set of content in a loop. However, in larger organizations you may have different areas of your building such as public vs internal spaces, different departments, and central public spaces. In even larger organizations, you may have several different offices around the country or world that may show region or office specific content.

So first step when designing your digital signage content strategy is to figure out how many different groups of screens you will have. These will correspond to your digital signage software's screen groupings.

Organizing Your Content

Now that the screen groupings have been defined, let's re-examine the use cases that were mentioned above. What goals are you trying to accomplish with your digital signage solution, what communication gap currently exists in your organization, or what types of problems might be addressed with a bit more awareness. We've all been in organizations where statements such as "I didn't realize that was the new goal", or "The deadline for signing up passed!?", or "Why didn't someone tell me it was Pizza day?!" have been spoken. These are breakdowns in your existing communication channels with your employees.

Once you identify your organization's main communication breakdowns, than you can move to identifying the categories of content you need to create. For example, you might create, a global category for all internal messages from HR for important sign up dates and deadlines. And then another category for regional office communications. Each category of content can be managed by the teams responsible. Creation and uploading of content is performed by the group responsible and the screens that have been assigned to display that content will automatically update as new content is published.

A great thing with modern digital signage software is the ability to schedule in dynamic or real time content into your feed. These may include up to the date News regarding your organization, or social media walls from your current marketing campaign, or even a live feed of your internal sales metrics.

Styling Your Screens

You want your global communications on your signage whether it's for internal or public view to have a consistent theme and look. Create consistency and harmony with templates that your teams can use. This will help employees who are walking throughout the building quickly recognize important communications from HR, or simply some fun or interesting update from the marketing team.

• Choose legible fonts, avoid mixing more than 3 fonts in your messaging. A good rule of thumb is typically at least 20-26px for the main text, and possibly 40px or larger for headers and large announcements.
• Use quality images
• For social media feeds, choose templates that highlight the best content
• Most screens are typically widescreen which translates to a 1920x1080 resolution.

Beyond the images and slides themselves, you also need to decide on the animation and transitions of content. Keep slide transitions between 8-15 seconds, anything longer and you risk your screen feeling too stale. Use title slides or transition pages to mark the transitioning of one content category to another.

Tips For Digital Signage and Social Media

Adding dynamic content such as social media will transform the way you view and manage your signage content. Remember that you can also categorize different types of dynamic social media content on your digital signage. You might create different categories for:

• Official Social Media Content ( this might simply be a feed of the corporate Twitter, Instagram, or Facebook accounts )
• Employee Engagement Campaigns ( this might be an internal hashtag campaign run by the Comms team to highlight employee activities to promote the team culture )
• Influencer Posts ( these might be a set of highly curated posts from your Marketing team highlighting celebrities or prominent figures talking about your brand )

As with all social media and dynamic content be sure you have powerful moderation tools that enables members of your team to quickly scan through and moderate content.

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