AI for HR: Engage Employees With ChatGPT + Digital Signage

Keeping employees engaged is a marathon. It requires constant attention, creativity, and iteration. And while employee engagement is a slog for every business, it’s especially tough on smaller teams with fewer resources. As the dust begins to settle on the AI hype machine, we’re starting to see profound effects on how it empowers HR teams to build positive company cultures and reliable internal communications processes.

We could write an entire book, no, a series of books, about using AI tools to boost employee engagement. So in this article, we’re going to narrow the focus to our favorite internal communications channel: digital signage. Even then, it’s a massive topic with a rapidly-expanding list of tools, tactics, and trends. The most important thing to consider is that getting an AI chatbot to reliably produce engaging and helpful HR content to display on digital signage is not hard.

For example, HR teams are now using AI-powered chatbots to automate responses, personalize employee interactions, and improve internal communications at scale.

How to display ChatGPT’s responses on digital signage screens

There’s more than one way to skin a ChatGPT. And at the rate that generative AI is evolving, there will be a dozen more before you finish reading this article. Thankfully there are three easy, evergreen ways to quickly put content from OpenAI’s platform up on digital signage. 

First, and most obviously, you can manually type in a prompt, copy the response, and paste that into a slide, spreadsheet, or any other document that syncs with your digital signage platform. You can even use Notion’s built-in ChatGPT to write something, then embed your Notion Dashboard in your ScreenCloud signage. Sometimes that’s the best option, but rarely.

A better way to connect ChatGPT to your signage is with Zapier. You pick a relevant trigger (e.g., new email, message to a Slack channel, Shopify order, anything, really), and route the first action through OpenAI (GPT-3 & DALL-E) with a Send Prompt action (Note: you’ll need your ChatGPT API key from platform.openai.com/account/api-keys). Then, it’s just a matter of adding a third action to determine where you want to save or see ChatGPT’s response to the prompt you triggered in step one. 

Webhooks are the best way to connect everyone’s favorite AI assistant to digital signage. If you (or one of your co-workers) can write some basic code, ScreenCloud’s Playgrounds is the most adaptable approach to customizing what’s on your screens. To send data to ScreenCloud with Webhooks, head over to our recent guide on the subject. Your options are practically limitless. Here are some to get you started.

Quick summaries of dense, complex updates

Sometimes, you can’t avoid getting into the weeds. It might be financial updates for investors, new HR policies for employees, or subscription changes to customers. Whatever the case, you have a long, formal, and probably dull document. You could send it out as a PDF and cross your fingers that your intended audience actually reads it…Or tell ChatGPT to: 

“Summarize the following text into a numbered list of most important information and takeaways: [text you want to be summarized]”

This is one of those rare instances when you might want to do all of this “manually” inside the ChatGPT interface. However, you could use Zapier to create a /summarize Slackbot. And if you need to update summaries on digital signage often, you could create another simple Zap to sync text from Slack to a PowerPoint or Slides presentation that is already connected to your digital signage. 

Tl;dr ask ChatGPT to summarize a document (in Slack) and update your digital signage presentation (via Slack) – zero context switching necessary!

Daily commentary on performance data

Digital signage content should always be straightforward. Anyone should be able to understand it at a glance. That’s why it’s best to attach high-level summaries to your graphs. A short sentence or two describing the overall trend will go a long way toward maximizing information impact and retention.

Assuming the data displayed in your graphs lives in a spreadsheet or database, ChatGPT can write a quick, on-brand summary in seconds. Imagine you’ve got two weeks of sales data. Add it to a prompt along the lines of:

“Here are my company's sales figures for the past 14 days. Generate a fun and conversational insight summarizing the overall sales trend in 15 words or less: [paste data here]”

Again, you could submit the prompt and copy the response directly into a slide or a dashboard app. But in 2023, why would you? Instead, create an automation (we keep mentioning Zapier, but Make.com or Microsoft’s Power Automate work as well) that grabs the most recent data every morning, sends it to ChatGPT with the prompt above, and adds the summary to your digital signage content via webhook. 

Moderate user-submitted content

Similar to asking ChatGPT to pore over sales figures, you can also get the AI assistant to weigh in on user-generated content. With a 24x7 gatekeeper, employees or customers can submit comments and photos for digital signage without a human reviewing every submission (Note: If you can trust users 100% to submit appropriate content, ScreenCloud’s Engage app is much easier to set up).

It’s more technically complicated than simply giving ChatGPT a list of sales figures, but totally doable thanks to OpenAI’s Moderation API. Set it up to filter out offensive content and send whatever doesn’t get removed to ChatGPT along with a prompt along the lines of “Which of these would be best to display in a [company breakroom, tradeshow booth, etc.]?”

This one’s a no-brainer if you want to put together a live social media wall for a church event, gym class, or quick service restaurant signage.

Office trivia and conversation starters

With a large language model that was trained on content from the likes of Reddit and Twitter (sorry, Elon!) humanity is this close to stamping out cringey workplace icebreakers. We’ve previously written about using ScreenCloud’s Noticeboard for office trivia, a quick and easy option for making basic text look great on digital signage. But like all of the internal communication hacks in this article, you could also get a colleague from IT to create a workflow that generates amusing conversation starters and puts them on a big screen without leaving Microsoft Teams, Google Workspace, etc. 

How good is our AI pal at breaking the ice? Let’s see…

Like any conversation with a bot, your mileage will vary. As long as you ask for several options (it’s bound to provide some stinkers) and give it some direction on what to avoid, you’ll get something usable on the first go around. Is your office culture one where people love talking about your product? Or would staff rather debate the merits of would-you-rather scenarios? Fine-tune your prompts and update your conversation-starter slide regularly (either manually or automatically with webhooks)!

Add variety to everyday celebrations

Ever heard of “banner blindness”? It’s when people develop and begin to associate certain cues with information that can be ignored (like a flashing advertisement at the top of a screen). No one’s coined the term “birthday blindness” yet, but it’s not hard to imagine a world where someone who sees “Happy Birthday…” every single day starts to disregard the message. Let’s see if ChatGPT can help!

Assuming you already have your employees’ birthdays in a calendar, getting all the necessary information to the chatbot and then onto digital signage with virtually no human intervention is a piece of cake. Pro tip: If you include employees’ interests, hobbies, and other factoids in the calendar event, you can add even more personalization to ChatGPT’s automated birthday messages.

Health and wellness tips for desk and deskless workers

Another HR effort that often gets lost in the noise is employee well-being suggestions and reminders. Fret not, however, because ChatGPT can come up with infinitely more health and wellness tips than you can. Just give it a brief description of your company’s working environment, employee tasks, and daily schedule. 

Since health recommendations should never be handled entirely by a bot, we suggest asking for a long list of recommendations and reviewing them manually. ScreenCloud’s Noticeboard app has a special feature for batching and scheduling messages, so pick 10 of your favorites and set them to run for three to five weeks. When they start feeling repetitive, feed them into ChatGPT and ask for new variations.

Create fresh and engaging employee feedback surveys

There’s nothing wrong with OfficeVibe’s survey templates or Lattice’s eNPS analytics. They’re just… not yours. With ChatGPT, a few sentences describing your company culture, and a succinct summary of survey goals, you can produce meaningful and actionable results 10x faster than before. Give this prompt a try:

My company is located in [location], sells [product/service], and employs [company size] people. The HR team’s biggest current struggle is [what you want to improve]. Help me come up with employee engagement survey questions to tackle these issues.

The more specific your prompt, the better, especially when describing the issue you want to confront. And if the first answer isn’t up to your standards, ask ChatGPT to adjust its response accordingly. 

Once you’ve got enough questions for an employee engagement survey, generate a QR code and invite employees to respond with ScreenCloud’s Ask A Question app. And after the survey runs its course, give ChatGPT a quick summary of what went well and what didn’t to iterate and improve future questions.

AI is making it ridiculously easy to level up internal communications and employee engagement. And anything you can get a bot to say can usually be synced straight to your digital signage without lifting a finger. 

Sign up for a free trial of ScreenCloud today and see for yourself. You won’t need any special hardware or paid accounts to start experimenting with automated digital signage content. Just a little imagination (and maybe some help from IT).

Image Credit: Header Photo by Jason Goldman via Unsplash.