A Guide to Engaging Staff with Digital Screens

Studies suggest there’s a big link between internal communication and employee engagement. We all like and want our employees to feel engaged but keeping them up-to-date and interested in what we have to say can make for a hard balance. Just like external comms, you don’t want to outwardly begin selling to your staff. Internal communications need to be more user-friendly and genuinely sticky if they’re to drive attention more than the smartphone or Facebook feed the employee also has access to.

This is where digital screens make a difference.

Simple software setup

The quickest way to ensure you can use digital screens (and not just leave blank ones up on the wall) to engage staff is to make it as easy for yourself as possible. We firmly believe in internal digital screens looking as slick as external ones, but that doesn’t mean spending a ton of money.

All you need to get a few office digital screens up and running is a smart TV or a regular TV enabled with a smart device or media player and simple software like ScreenCloud (which gets downloaded via an app store).

These few steps should take just a few minutes. Then, the next stage is making it super simple to create engaging content for staff.

With the ScreenCloud CMS, it’s super simple to add and edit playlists, schedules and presentations. So when you need to remove a slide or change an image, it’s as simple as slipping it out and adding in something new.

This means a staff music playlist can be dropped, images from last night’s event can go up, and you can delete an irrelevant presentation or add a new one in. The options are absolutely endless, which means there’s no excuse not to create engaging content for your employees.

Combat “set it and forget it” syndrome

A study found that 30% of companies across Western Europe and the U.S. use screens outside of meetings rooms to display information to staff.

But how many use them well?

Most digital screen campaigns start with good intentions, but before you know it, screens are left to theoretically rot away. Content becomes out of date—no one bothers to change it, after all, the screens are running right? And staff become immune to the power of them. It’s the same as static signs—when the eye becomes used to a view, it can see the view without actually taking in the finer detail.

Don’t let that happen with your office digital screens. To be engaged, staff need regular, updated content that makes for interesting reading. They need to know that new content is coming thick and fast and for that reason, it’s important to keep checking in on the digital screens.

Maybe you could even offer exclusive content that can only be seen on your digital screens and nowhere else?

Another motto we like is “keep it live to keep it relevant.” When you use live apps such as news feeds and social media, the content does the heavy lifting for you. You don’t have to keep reviewing and changing the content because the live sources do that for you.

Take a look at these examples for some inspiration.

Providing useful information

Screens don’t have to just sell company information. Your staff already know why you’re so great, so why not use genuinely useful information instead?

Travel boards which update in real-time, live news and social media are just a few examples of where your digital screens can better serve your audience.

You can add Trello project management dashboards for great upstanding meetings, or dashboards which pull together all of your company’s key data and present it in a more visual way.

Different content for different audiences

If you have a screen for every department, that’s great. You can segment your content by audience and make everything super relevant. If not, you can still break down different content for different audiences, just within the same playlist.

For example you could show the below:

Sales teams: company dashboards, sales figures, CRM, Slack updates

Marketing teams: social media dashboards, live news, review sites, website URLs

Project management teams: Trello boards, Slack updates, dashboards, design tools

This isn’t groundbreaking; it’s simply taking all of the materials you already have and putting them out to each individual audience. When content is relevant, it’s far more engaging to your audience, internal or otherwise.

You can also use digital screens to distribute the same, or varying, content across multiple offices. Why not offer to set up a digital screen and playlist that mirrors your own in the offices of your stakeholders? Digital signage is a great way to distribute information to the masses and will look seriously impressive up on the wall.

Complement the day-to-day

Sales figures can be difficult to get your head around, but digital signage makes them easy. Social media can be tricky to keep on top of all the time, but digital signage turns social updates into a digital viewing board that everyone can see.

Digital signage should complement the flow and information of the office that’s already happening. There are times for being “disruptive,” but providing great and useful information day-to-day is what internal communication is all about.

Don’t create screens for the sake of creating screens. Especially when creating good ones is oh-so-easy. Get started today at https://screencloud.com.