Building HR Narratives Your Modern Workforce Can Trust, with Workplace Digital Signage

Central to permanently ticking those boxes is developing employee trust; something that lingers as a constant challenge for many businesses that seem to have tried everything. Without trust, workplace communications can often be brushed off and not properly welcomed or received.

Although team-building exercises can prove triumphant in bringing team members closer together, it’s going to take a lot more than a quarterly off-site or social event to embed workforce trust across the spectrum and throughout organizational structures.

Let’s explore firstly:

why employee trust is so important

and secondly:

what companies’ leaders and HR Teams can do to cultivate trust among their employees with the help of workplace digital signage.

How employee trust improves the employee experience

An employee’s experience isn’t only measured by their work-related tasks, but also by the company’s culture, values and priorities. These factors are especially important as the modern workforce is starting to hold companies accountable for their promises and the values they exhibit.

Words must match actions - and vice versa.

While the leaders of the company are the visionaries and decision-makers, the employees are what bring those visions to life. And when company leaders exhibit an honest and transparent culture while continuously enforcing the company’s values in the workplace – employee trust is gained in an instant.

Doing the opposite? Well, that can spark unhealthy cynicism among employees and have toppling side effects on employee engagement and satisfaction.

Let’s not do that, shall we? Here’s what can be done instead:

Create an honest and transparent employee experience

The simplest way to start building employee trust is to communicate clearly with employees. For example, 85% of employees have indicated that they’re most motivated when they receive regular updates on company news.

However, in the modern and deskless workplace, communication and transparency go a little deeper.

By explaining the company’s objectives, steps behind making a decision that impacts all employees, and how opportunities are developed, can help employees understand why a company does what it does - and messages can be better translated and received.

Improve internal communication with open dialogues

A trusting and open dialogue between employees and their management is essential for the development and satisfaction of both the employees and companies.

A recent report indicated that 37% of retail employees don’t feel heard and want to quit – that’s just one sector in the entire frontline industry. This evidence shows that an open line of communication becomes especially important among deskless employees and to help retain such talent.

By enabling employees to raise issues they face at the frontline and giving them a platform to ask important questions, can also enable the company to prove its commitment to addressing employee concerns.

Feedback is a powerful internal communications tool

Employees want recognition and feedback, they really do. 

A 2021 Performance Management report showed that 83% of employees appreciate feedback, regardless if it was positive or negative.

Evidently, feedback has become a fundamental tool for performance management in the workplace. However, many companies struggle to execute and maintain an effective engagement and feedback strategy which leads to a decrease in employee engagement.

One of the problems that managers face in providing timely feedback and recognition to their employees is, well, time. Although 210 hours are spent annually on performance reviews, 32% of employees can wait more than three months to get feedback from their managers.

Companies need to mirror the same values and promises of response times as provided to their customers - equally to their employees.

Technology to improve the employee experience

It has been established that there are tons of hours that go into internal communications, and while best practices have been discussed to build trust among employees in this article, company leaders and HR Teams don’t have to go at it alone.

With advanced technology to improve employees’ experience, digital signage solutions aid internal communications strategies by enabling employees to receive effective and centralized communications no matter where they are located. Digital signage solutions can help management teams to:

• Present the company vision, objectives and expectations daily to remind employees of the company’s purpose
• Communicate appropriate feedback or new implementations as recommended by employees
• Boost collaboration and engagement among employees
• Recognize employees’ and teams’ achievements
• Communicate effectively with integrated channels

Finally, boost employee retention

Although employee trust ticks the boxes to increase employee communication, engagement and satisfaction – that’s just the tip of the iceberg of benefits that trust in the workplace creates:

• Increased productivity and efficiency
• Energized employees
• Improved collaboration, creativity and innovation
• Healthier and happier employees

Ultimately, employee trust with a mixture of these benefits and digital signage is the perfect recipe for employee retention.

Contact ScreenCloud to find out how your HR and management Team can use digital solutions to develop longer-lasting, trusted relationships with employees.