The New Role of Workplace Digital Signage for Improving Employee Safety

Most of the obvious perks of digital signage are sales and customer-facing. You know this because you’ve been that customer; selecting the daily special at a quick-service restaurant, or viewing membership options at the gym.

Readers familiar with more recent ScreenCloud content will know that a whole set of other perks can be won when workplace digital signage is turned inward, for employee-facing applications.

Readers familiar with more recent ScreenCloud content will know that a whole set of other perks can be won when workplace digital signage is turned inward, for employee-facing applications.

For example,

• to amplify employee happiness,
  
  
• support front and back-end operations in healthcare
  
  
• and as a tool for driving workplace-culture incentives.

Besides assisting work-culture incentives, employee happiness and operations, digital signage can also help tick what may be the most important box of all; employee safety.

“Do We Really Need Digital Signage for Employee Safety?”

Imagine you’re at work. The fire alarm sounds.

What do you do? Probably look around and check other people’s reaction. Maybe even keep working, unphased. It’s probably the bi-weekly fire alarm test.

What if it were a real fire? How would you know? Wait until you smell smoke, or see colleagues running for the fire exit screaming “FIRE!”

The point is, we all know workplace safety is critical. But critical safety events are the exception rather than the rule. Thankfully, that’s because most safety protocols work as they should most of the time to preserve employee safety.

When incidents do occur and someone gets hurt, hindsight is of little comfort.

Ok. Now imagine it were a real fire

Instead of looking at each other blankly to assess the seriousness of the situation, your entire workforce could have looked up to check workplace digital signage and industrial display screens.

A first-respondent would have updated your digital signage content team, and they would have immediately updated screen-comms informing everyone on site that it’s the real deal.

Within a few minutes, the entire site would have evacuated personnel, with everyone accounted for.

Fires at work aren’t the only employee safety concern

We’ll admit; short of asteroid impact, the fire example is one of the worst-case scenarios. If you’re wondering, no ScreenCloud technology can’t help you in the event of an asteroid impact. We’re working on that.

No matter how near-perfect your safety and accident prevention protocols, less dramatic workplace incidents cause harm to employees all the time.

These Zippa research employee-accidents stats from 2019 make for eye watering reading:

“There are about 2.8 million nonfatal workplace accidents and injuries in the United States’ private industry each year".

• Sprains, strains, and tares are the most common workplace injury, with 327,650 occurring in the U.S. in 2019.
  
  
  
• Overexertion and bodily reaction, slips, trips, and falls, and contact with objects and equipment are the highest causes of workplace injury in the U.S., accounting for 84% of all nonfatal injuries at work.
  
  
  
• Nursing assistants, heavy truck and tractor-trailer truck drivers, laborers and freight, stock, and material movers are among the most dangerous jobs, with 370, 360, and 350 injuries per every 10,000 full-time workers, respectively.”
  
  —Source: Zippa Research

We wish we could tell you that a ScreenCloud installation of workplace digital signage and industrial display screens can reduce these statistics down to zero. If only.

What we can tell you is that, in the hands of your content management team, ScreenCloud technology can significantly reduce workplace health and safety incidents. 

How Digital Signage Can Maximize Employee Safety

If you already have an inventory of digital screens, we can connect them into a single, seamless and secure network.

If you need to add screens to your workplace digital signage or industrial display screens  setup, we’ll ensure the right selection so that your environmental footprint and investment don’t exceed your requirements.
So, what are the perks?

Easily share safety rules and protocols

What’s the number-one safeguard for preserving employee safety? Strong communication both top-down from leadership, bottom-up from front-line workers and bilaterally between teams.

Digital signage tactically deployed in the right zones helps customize and propagate the right health and safety information to the right teams. This is particularly effective for deskless workers with limited access to remote communication.

Reinforce safety and emergency protocols

Teams can lose sight of the detail in safety and emergency protocols. Often through lack of reinforcement, poor onboarding and lack of ongoing training.
Even experienced workers can lose touch with emergency procedures over time.

Workplace digital signage allows management to clearly display and refresh emergency procedures that remain easily referenced, always relevant and always front-of-mind.

Celebrate safety gains made across teams and departments

Workplace employee safety doesn’t have to be about overbearing ‘dos and don’t’. When combined with digital screens, health and safety policy and incentives can actually become part of culture-building, team comradery.

Once you’ve rolled out your digital signage and hardware, impact on incident and emergency rate can be tracked and incident-reduction improvements can be actively celebrated.

Better still, employee-safety wins can be used to evidence proposals and advocacy for rolling out similar workplace digital signage incentives to other sites and regions.