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Learn more about the use of digital signage for different types of workforces: From Millenials and Gen-Z to deskless workers and field employees.

Digital Signage and different Workforces | ScreenCloud

It takes on average 4.5 days for the average frontline worker to receive important information, according to a study of frontline friction by Unily and ScreenCloud. As if that wasn’t bad enough, 27% of frontline workers feel that they receive conflicting information and that this impacts their decision to do their job effectively.

These challenges go beyond mere inconvenience. Our study estimates that frontline friction cost enterprise businesses $80.6 billion per year in the US alone. 

The study, ‘Disconnected and disengaged: The economic cost of frontline friction,’ is the result of a shared mission by ScreenCloud and Unily; to help enterprises identify and improve the challenges of managing large, dispersed teams across multiple departments and geographies.  

The challenges of managing frontline workers

Whether it’s on the factory floor, working hospital shifts, or keeping the wheels turning from the supply center to an airport, frontline workers are usually the linchpin of the modern enterprise. And while tools such as email and mobile devices might have made communication quicker and easier behind the scenes, there remains a huge disconnect between senior leadership and their frontline teams.

Bulletin boards and paper notices are slow to update, easily overlooked, and unable to provide the dynamic, real-time information that today’s fast-moving businesses require. 

This reliance on outdated methods creates a number of pressing issues for business leaders and their internal comms teams.

1. The digital divide: The most significant challenge is the fundamental communication gap. While office-based employees can access company intranets, team chats, and email with ease, their frontline colleagues are often left in the dark. This creates a two-tiered workforce where a large segment of the company feels disconnected, uninformed, and undervalued.

2. Lack of a ‘Single Source of Truth’: Without a centralized, accessible platform, important information becomes fragmented. Team leaders might relay corporate messages with inconsistencies, leading to confusion and errors. This is particularly problematic for safety protocols, operational updates, and procedural changes - all of which must be universally understood to ensure efficiency and compliance.

3. The rise of "Shadow IT": As our study showed, when official tools fail to meet their needs, frontline employee communications don't grind to a halt. Instead, workers find their own solutions. Using personal messaging apps like WhatsApp or social media to coordinate work is a widespread practice, but it's fraught with risk. It creates a massive security vulnerability for sensitive company data and makes it impossible for the business to govern or track communication.

4. The employee engagement crisis: Feeling disconnected from the company’s mission and having no voice in the organization directly impacts employee morale and retention. When frontline workers don't understand the "why" behind their work or feel that their feedback is ignored, they are more likely to become disengaged and eventually leave, contributing to high turnover rates that are costly to a business.

Unily x ScreenCloud: A shared vision for the frontline

With frontline workers representing the face of the company, or being intrinsic to its operation, everyone involved wants the best result. Whether this is the frontline workers themselves or senior management and leadership - ensuring the right tools and information are available to perform is essential.

Both ScreenCloud and Unily have moved to solve the problem of communication in the workplace. And while they both solve the challenge in their own way, the partnership underscores how both tools combine to provide a formidable platform.  

Unily is a comprehensive employee experience platform, going beyond the traditional ‘intranet’. And here at ScreenCloud we know that screens have the power to change how businesses communicate, surfacing siloed content and improving visibility for legacy communication channels (we’re looking at you pin boards).

How Unily is a hub for company communications

Taking the intranet from a passive platform to a broader employee experience platform, Unily serves as a hub for modern business comms. Accessible via desktop and a mobile-first app, internal communicators can create, manage, and distribute targeted content across the workforce. 

Targeted communications: Content can be personalized based on an employee's role, location, or department, ensuring messages are always relevant.

Social features: The platform allows for two-way communication, knowledge sharing, employee idetion, and peer-to-peer recognition, fostering a sense of community.

Seamless integrations: Unily integrates with a wide range of enterprise tools (like Microsoft 365, Salesforce, and Workday), allowing employees to access all their necessary resources from a single, intuitive interface.

For a frontline worker, Unily's mobile app becomes a pocket-sized intranet, providing a reliable and secure way to receive updates and connect with colleagues. However, for many frontline workers, accessing personal devices during their shift is usually off limits, meaning messages can be missed - highlighting the challenges faced by leadership teams.

Digital signage has become a ubiquitous tool across retail and hospitality, but increasingly global corporations are also seeing the value in screens for communication. Whether that’s sharing internal comms messaging across factories, logistics hubs and head office, or creating visible messaging in healthcare facilities, schools or mult-site facilities.

Passive, high-impact reach: Digital signage captures attention in high-traffic areas without requiring employees to check their phones or emails. It's a "broadcast" medium that ensures messages are seen by everyone who passes by.

Dynamic and real-time information: ScreenCloud can display everything from live data dashboards and operational KPIs to safety alerts and company news.

Ease of use: The platform simplifies content creation and remote management, making it easy for internal comms teams to deploy and update content across multiple locations from a central dashboard.

While digital signage is a useful and powerful tool in it’s own right, it’s at it’s best when connected to live data or feeds. And it’s when connecting communication or data sources, from internal comms tools such as Unily, to live dashboards, or social media feeds, where ScreenCloud can make the difference. 

The Unily x ScreenCloud partnership provides a solid solution for a diverse workforce. Unily serves as the personalized, interactive digital hub for every employee - the place for two-way communication, collaboration, and accessing personal information like pay stubs or schedules. 

Simultaneously, the content created and approved within Unily can be automatically pushed to ScreenCloud displays.

For the frontline employee who may not check their phone for company news, they can see the most recent corporate announcements, safety alerts, or a colleague's work anniversary on a screen in the breakroom. 

2. Real time data to enhance safety and productivity

The integration allows for the display of operational data and business intelligence on screens where it matters most. A business manager can use Unily to create an important announcement about a new quality control process, and that message, along with a live KPI dashboard from Power BI, can be automatically displayed on ScreenCloud monitors on the factory floor. 

This provides frontline teams with real-time, actionable insights that help them make better decisions, improve performance, and maintain safety protocols. Immediate access to information via screens helps to cut down on the 120+ hours lost per employee each year due to information-related friction.

For internal communications teams, the Unily and ScreenCloud integration is a massive time-saver. Instead of having to manage a variety of disparate systems for email, intranet, and digital signage, they can create content in a single platform. 

The integration automatically formats and pushes content from Unily to ScreenCloud, ensuring that visual assets and messages are always on-brand and optimized for the big screen. 

The partnership is a powerful tool for employee engagement. By using ScreenCloud, internal comms can visually celebrate wins, recognize top performers, and highlight team achievements. 

Content can be pulled directly from Unily's social feed, providing a seamless loop of recognition that makes every employee feel seen and valued. This is crucial for frontline employees who often feel invisible to leadership. 

The ability to see their own work, and that of their colleagues, celebrated publicly helps to reinforce a culture of appreciation and teamwork, which can directly address the dissatisfaction and turnover issues highlighted in our study.

You can read the full report by Unily and ScreenCloud here. 

If you’re ready to change how you communicate with your frontline, get started with a free trial of ScreenCloud, or book a free demo to find out more. 

Frontline workers are the linchpin of enterprise but poor communication often impacts their ability to do their job effectively, causing frontline friction.

Forging Better Frontline Communications with Unily x ScreenCloud

Whether it’s on the factory floor or keeping the wheels turning from the supply center to an airport, frontline workers are the linchpin of the modern enterprise. Tools such as email and mobile devices have made communication quicker and easier behind the scenes, but there remains a huge disconnect between senior leadership and their frontline teams.

Frontline workers are the lifeblood of enterprise businesses - the engine of your business. Yet, a new study by Unily together with ScreenCloud reveals that these essential employees are being held back by a critical communications crisis, costing enterprises billions in lost productivity and creating significant security risks.

The report, “Disconnected and disengaged: The economic cost of frontline friction,” looks at the challenges for frontline workers and the deskless workforce and how this impacts business performance. 

Produced by Unily in collaboration with ScreenCloud and market research consultancy Censuswide, the report surveyed 800 frontline workers across major North American enterprises with over 10,000 employees and more than $10 billion in revenue. The findings are a wake-up call for any organization that relies on its frontline staff to succeed.

The Staggering Cost of a Disconnected Workforce

The most startling finding of the report is the sheer financial impact of frontline friction. The study quantifies the annual cost of poor information access to employees at an astonishing $80.6 billion. This figure isn't just a number; it represents a massive strategic blind spot that is silently draining the bottom line.

The study breaks down this cost by looking at the specific time lost by a typical deskless or frontline worker each year due to digital underinvestment and a disconnected employee experience. Based on an average of 240 shifts per year, a single frontline employee could spend:

120 hours per year unable to work due to poor access to information or resources.

124 hours per year searching for information or resources.

132 hours per year having to redo work due to an initial lack of information or resources.

This equates to a staggering total of 376 hours per year—nearly ten full workweeks—of lost productivity for each frontline employee. It’s an operational breakdown that’s not just a minor inconvenience but a major drain on enterprise profitability.

Industries are not all affected equally. The telecommunications sector, for example, experiences these issues at a higher rate than the average, with workers spending more time on all three of the activities listed above. In aviation, 42% of frontline workers reported spending an hour or more per shift unable to work. These are not employees who are unwilling to work; they are simply unable to due to a lack of the right information and tools.

Beyond the quantifiable financial loss, the report uncovers a deep-seated cultural and operational breakdown. Frontline and deskless workers, who are the face of the brand and the primary point of contact with customers, are grappling with a series of significant challenges.

The Problem of Inefficient Information Access

A fractured information landscape is a clear pain point for frontline workers. The study found that team meetings are still the primary way for workers to get company information, with 58% of respondents citing this method. 

While convenient for in-person briefings, this method is slow, inefficient, and prone to human error and inconsistency. The data supports this, with 27% of respondents stating they received conflicting messages from headquarters versus their on-site teams.

For those with digital access, the situation isn't much better. A significant number of frontline workers find information difficult to locate, with 44% saying data is spread across too many systems and 40% finding it overly time-consuming to find what they need. 

This lack of a "single source of truth" means employees are often operating with incomplete or incorrect information, which directly impacts their ability to perform their jobs effectively and to their full potential.

A Pervasive Security Risk: The Rise of Shadow IT

In the absence of reliable, official tools, frontline workers are taking matters into their own hands. A staggering 71% of those surveyed admit to using personal devices or non-company apps to collaborate and share company information. This phenomenon, known as "Shadow IT," is a growing enterprise security issue. 

However, the report makes it clear that this isn't an act of rebellion. Almost a third of workers know their actions could have serious consequences but are simply "doing what's necessary to get their job done". 

The risk is tangible with almost 40% having shared sensitive company data through unofficial channels because there was no convenient official alternative. In telecommunications and healthcare, this figure rises to nearly half. This is not just a technology issue; it's a direct result of inadequate support and a clear sign that official tools are not meeting the needs of the frontline.

The research also highlights a clear cultural breakdown. Nearly three-quarters of frontline employees do not have a strong grasp of their company's strategy. Additionally, only 24% feel their feedback or ideas ever reach leadership. This sense of being ignored and uninformed is a significant problem. It’s impossible for a business to pivot at speed and deliver exceptional customer experiences when its frontline isn’t aligned with the company strategy.

This disconnect also impacts morale and retention. Under 40% of frontline workers report being happy in their current roles, and just over 20% are looking to leave in the next 12 months, with many considering moving to a company with a more modern digital workplace. This shows that investing in digital tools is not just a matter of efficiency and security; it is a critical factor in attracting and retaining talent.

The report concludes with a powerful message for enterprises. This isn't just about a minor productivity issue; it's a strategic imperative. The performance champions of tomorrow will be the ones who invest in connecting and empowering their frontline workforce.

As Sharn Kleiss, Strategy Partner at Gallagher's Communication Consulting Practice, stated, "The expectation that employees - especially those on the frontline - should tolerate outdated, clunky systems is no longer acceptable". It’s time for enterprises to recognize that providing a modern, seamless digital experience is a competitive necessity.

The challenges faced by frontline workers are clear: a lack of efficient tools, poor information access, and a feeling of being unheard. However, the solutions are also within reach. By investing in integrated communication strategies that include robust EXPs and digital signage, enterprises can bridge the gap between their corporate strategy and the daily realities of their frontline teams.

Find out more about the economic costs of frontline friction, the challenges of the frontline workforce and the detailed solutions that can help and download the full report below. 

Download the full report, "Disconnected and disengaged: The economic cost of frontline friction."

A study by ScreenCloud together with Unily looks into the challenges of frontline workers in enterprise companies and the impact in terms of cost, security and productivity.

Tackling the Challenges for Frontline Workers - A Study

Tackling the Challenges for Frontline Workers - with Unily

A field employee is someone who works outside a traditional office environment, typically at changing locations for varying periods ranging from days to months. Instead of reporting to the same office daily, they move from one job site to another as the project requires.

Field employees, also called field workers, may often report to a central office or headquarters, but their day-to-day work isn't tied to any one office. Instead, they go wherever their skills are needed.

For example, construction workers are field employees who work on-site at different building projects. In transportation, truck drivers spend most of their time on the road. Other industries with field employees include manufacturing, warehousing, retail, and logistics.

Field workers are flexible, mobile, and work hands-on with tasks that keep businesses running in real time.

What challenges do field-based employees face?

When you work in an office environment, you generally follow a routine: arriving at the office at a certain time, taking a lunch break at a certain time, leaving at a certain time. Other parts of your routine that you may overlook include having a fixed commute and coworkers, something that may not be relatable to field-based employees.

Field-based employees have their own specific set of challenges:

Field-based employees often have to go to different places every day, which could be in remote locations without the same access to computers or internet as office-based workers. Alongside this, field-based employees often need to set up a temporary base of operations at the site where they are working.

Field-based employees may have to meet and work with a new cohort of people nearly daily, therefore needing to put in more effort into communicating with those people and building rapport. Continuously rotating coworkers can also make figuring out who to report and send updates confusing.

Field-based employees often don't have fixed timings. They may need to start their shifts earlier or stay later than standard business hours. For example, truckers usually drive through the night, and a portion of restaurant or retail workers work past 5pm.

Field-workers face a lot of physical and mental demands; they may have to work outdoors where it might be hot, humid, rainy or cold. They might also be required to travel long distances which can take a toll on them.

Often, field-based employees who are working heavy machinery face several safety risks, including potential life-threatening accidents; this happens in fields like construction, agriculture, manufacturing and transportation.

construction-workers-looking-at-plans-2024-06-25-20-41-53-utc.jpg

How do you manage field workers effectively?

Managing field employees comes with its own set of challenges. They’re not in the office every day, and their work environment changes frequently. Keeping them connected, motivated, and productive requires the right approach. Here’s how to do it.

The right technology makes a big difference. Scheduling apps, GPS tracking, geofencing employee tracking and mobile-friendly work platforms help managers coordinate shifts, assign tasks, and monitor progress without unnecessary back-and-forth.

Field roles often come with physical demands and environmental risks. Providing protective gear, access to health monitoring tools, and regular safety check-ins shows employees that their well-being is a priority; a successful field worker is first of all, a safe field worker. Some companies have introduced wearable devices that track hydration and temperature, helping workers avoid heat exhaustion on job sites. You can also use our Air Quality app to keep an eye on environmental conditions.

Training programs can help field employees stay sharp, especially when their roles involve handling equipment, interacting with customers, or following safety protocols. Many field roles also require specialized training, and this is where your business can leverage digital training platforms. These let your workers access learning materials from anywhere, whether it's a quick refresher or a deep dive into new processes. Short, mobile-friendly courses can fit into their workflow without pulling them away from the job.

Field workers often go unnoticed because they’re not in the office, but their contributions are just as critical. Public recognition, performance-based incentives, and simple shout-outs go a long way in making them feel valued. Even a monthly spotlight featuring top performers can help build morale and improve the team's productivity.

Tracking key performance indicators like task completion rates, customer feedback, and safety reports helps managers understand what’s working and what needs improvement. Data-driven insights can highlight training gaps, optimize routes for efficiency, and even predict scheduling needs to prevent burnout.

Field employees rely on clear and timely communication to stay informed. A mix of real-time messaging, video updates, and easy access to company announcements can help keep them in the loop without overwhelming them with emails. But it's not as easy as sending a few emails as we'll see in the next section.

Improve communication with field-based employees, step by step

team-of-engineer-railway-under-checking-under-trai-2024-12-25-14-01-14-utc.jpg

We've seen that communication is a huge contributor to field operations success. But, one of the most daunting challenges field-based employees face while on the clock is the lack of communication channels with supervisors or head offices. Given that field-based employees are often out in the field, it's not possible to supervise what they're doing step by step. 

If you run a company which employs many field-based workers, then it's necessary for you to keep in touch with them on a regular basis to check in on their well-being and pass on information that might be useful to them. You'll also need to get updates from them regularly to make sure the project is going as planned. 

Here are some tips for managing frontline worker communications:

Daily check-ins: It's a good idea to have check-ins with field-based employees every day, if possible. As with the challenges that comes with being a field-based employee, it’s important for colleagues in traditional office settings to be flexible in the timing and delivery of check-ins.

Scheduling/planning: If the field-based employee is working on a long-term project, then it's a good idea to come up with a strategy before the project commences to avoid last-minute changes with a field-based employee’s less flexible schedule.

Channels of communication: There are many ways of communicating with field-based employees, such as calling, video-calling, texting and emailing. Our personal favorite, digital signage for manufacturing, will be discussed in detail below.

Meetings: Even if the employee works in the field, it is sensible to touch base with them in a more structured meeting on job duties whether in-person, over a phone call or through a video meeting.

Site visits: Site visits alleviate some communication burden on field-based employees; a designated employee can come up with an agenda for a site visit and field-based employees can treat the visit as a direct channel to their colleague that does not intrude on their daily schedule.

Learn more about how corporations create better communication systems for hybrid teams.

Communicate with field employees using ScreenCloud

When considering traditional methods of communication, such as email or employee messaging apps, it's important to note that over eight out of ten (83%) deskless employees do not access to a corporate email account and six out of ten (60%) of companies have little to no flexible technology solutions their deskless workers. 

So while these might be highly effective in traditional office settings, your field workforce has a different set of needs. Especially if they are spread across multiple locations from construction projects to delivery routes.

ScreenCloud's digital signage solution is perfect for reaching your field team, wherever they are. You can use your displays to improve various aspects of your

Safety: You can quickly indicate safety measures and point out hazardous locations.

Real-time updates: Share simple information like your daily agenda and weather updates with just a few clicks; broadcast your more complex data to track movements towards wider organizational goals.

Company culture: News, updates and promoting events are all fit for digital signage to strengthen your employees' experience and engagement.

Recognition: Motivate employees and boost employee morale with positive affirmations. Use digital signage to let employees know when it's time to take a break, go to lunch or go home, and even encourage them to use their employee benefits.

Whether you call them field-based, frontline or deskless, the ever-changing locations and responsibilities of these employees show how difficult it can be within their role.

ScreenCloud's digital signage solution can help your business manage your field workers, whether it's improving communication, sharing critical information, or improving recognition.

See what you can achieve with ScreenCloud, start a free trial today. All you need to do is sign up with your email; no credit card information required. You can also book a demo here.

Discover what it means to be a field-based employee, the challenges they face, and how you can help overcome them for bigger productivity and output.

Managing a field based employee workforce

Try ScreenCloud digital signage free for 14-days. No credit cards required. Or get a product demonstration.

Ready to get started with digital signage?

Why engaging hard-to-reach employees is critical to business success, and how digital signage can help.

eBook: Employee Engagement & the Deskless Workforce - ScreenCloud

Driving employee engagement by building a modern, connected workplace

Improving recall of your most important information

Increasing employee retention by celebrating achievements and building culture

Discover how and why digital signage is an appropriate and effective strategy for:

Employee Engagement & the Deskless Workforce

This eBook explores how content across various devices and display sizes is received by your eyes, and how your brain processes and remembers the things you see.

eBook: The Neuroscience of Visual Media - ScreenCloud

This eBook explores how content across various devices and display sizes is received by your eyes, and how your brain processes and remembers the things you see. We'll discuss:

How secure data-sharing inspires employees and helps companies grow.

White Paper: Unleashing the Hidden Dashboard - ScreenCloud

Employee engagement: What are we missing?

Try ScreenCloud free for 14-days. No credit cards required. Or get a product demonstration.

Ready to start communicating through screens?

A comparison guide to 20 of the top corporate communication tools for 2019, such as Slack, Yammer, Bonusly and Kissflow. Helping you to invest in the tools you truly need.

Corporate Communication Tools Comparison Guide - ScreenCloud

How to determine what a "successful" tool looks like and whether it's needed.

Comparison of BambooHR, Charlie, Kissflow, Gusto & Namely HR tools.

Comparing Slack, Yammer, Workplace, Jostle and Basecamp for communication.

Differences between Slido, 15Five, Bonusly, Just3Things & Kudos.

5 tools that help surface data and information.

Your checklist of which tools fit, where.

Review HR and central communication tools

Understand tools that surface information

Discover what your tool map should look like

A comparison of 20 market-leading communication tools for organizations.

With so many options available, it can be difficult to know which purpose certain tools serve, and how they fit alongside side each other. This guide is designed to help you make sense of different categories of tools including: HR tools, corporate communication tools, employee engagement tools and tools that surface information. Comparing the cost, use and benefit of 20 different tools like Slack, BambooHR, Kissflow, Bonusly and more. 

How do you know which communication tools your organization really needs?

Office communication comes in many shapes and sizes. From a high-five (remember those?) to a post-it note left on the desk, these in-office methods have long been the foundation of fostering work culture; communicating with your colleagues doesn’t always have to be limited to incessant emails and meetings. 

And this raises two points: 1) an over-saturation of communication methods, and 2) how can you foster a company culture via a global internal communications strategy (that doesn’t give in to point #1)?

With the aid of communication tools like Slack, Zoom, Google Docs etc., it’s easier than ever to communicate on a global scale.

However, just because you can send a simple Slack message to your colleague on the other side of the world doesn’t always mean it’s the best way to communicate. For many organizations, bridging the gap between offices is one of the many challenges faced in their internal communication strategy. From engaging remote workers to sending out a message to all offices at the same time, global communication can be tricky.

In this guide we’re going to walk you through the politics surrounding a global workforce, and the communication strategies we believe can help solve them. 

Global workforce communication is exactly what it sounds like. But that's as simple as it gets. Sharing ideas, managing projects and internal communication requires planning and having solid processes in place; you can't just peer over your colleague's shoulder to check that they're saving your shared doc in the right place.

Problems associated with global workforce communication

IBM – a pioneer of remote working – made headlines in 2017: it axed remote working policies for 2600 marketing employees. According to IBM’s then-chief marketing officer, getting marketing employees back into core hubs and working shoulder-to-shoulder would increase collaboration and allow the company to work more agile. 

Which, even though this was less than five years ago, feels incredibly outdated.Now, employees may be more likely to send a Slack message than to communicate face-to-face with colleagues – even if they're sat next to them. 

This has led to some experts calling out the distracting nature of online global workforce communication tools. In a post titled “Slack, I’m breaking up with you”; onboarding expert Samuel Hulick outlines how he believes Slack is more distracting and actually increases the number of messages than his pre-Slack email inbox. Calling Slack: 

“A conversational melting pot that is neither fully real time, nor fully asynchronous”. 

With so many ways to communicate, from email to instant-messaging tools, company intranets to video-conferencing, this poses the question: just how many communication tools are too many?

How to improve global workforce communication 

In our guide to corporate communication tools we talk about tools which improve communication, but also the tools that you may not need. Shock: more tools don't = greater efficiency.

Just some of the corporate communication tools we looked at in our ebook. 

In order to improve interoffice / global communication you need to look at minimizing all areas rather than adding more layers. You can figure this out by asking your organization:

What are the least amount of tools we can employ to support communication?

What is our communication etiquette and what should people not do? (Buffer’s guide to its internal use of Slack is a great example of this). 

Can you make everyone into Slack power users? (Read more about turning your teams into power users.) 

How can we reduce the distraction of communication during deep work, but make communicating during collaborative periods more effective? 

What’s the most effective way of broadcasting messages one-to-many?

Benefits of digital signage for global communication

When it comes to employee communications, we believe digital signage is key to engaging employees and helping to get important messages seen. A strategic approach can help cut through the noise of mass communication so that your content has 100% impact.

The benefit for distributed and global teams is that all screens can be managed from anywhere – and from a central location. For Enterprise and franchise customers, there is a slightly different approach.

Some of the ways digital signage benefits interoffice communication specifically include:

You only have to look at digital signage statistics to see that when it comes to digital screens, information gets seen; it has a recall rate of 83%. Instead of important messages getting lost in amongst an overflowing inbox, presenting them on a screen increases its impact as your team is more likely to see it as they will be exposed to the content but multiple times throughout the day or week.

From new global safety measures to birthday announcements, treat your digital signage as a real-time digital notice board and get that message noticed, without waiting for everyone to open their email. Controlled by a central CMS, these global announcements can be created and scheduled in accordance with varying time zones to show up during office hours. 

With a quick “Cast to screens” command, every screen, in every office, can be showing a live feed of what’s happening. This can be used for Head Office broadcasts, company events and even singing happy birthday in LA to your colleague in Japan.

Often, global workforces struggle to build empathy with their interoffice colleagues because they don’t know anything about them, other than their email addresses. And it can be hard to foster company culture. Digital signage is an open canvas where teams can paint a picture of who they are behind the avatars. Show social media posts, run a photo competition or broadcast a yoga class. 

Three global workforce communication case studies

Seeing examples of digital signage in use for internal communication helps to spark new ideas about how you can use digital screen networks to challenge and improve your traditional interoffice communication flow. Here are a couple of examples:

1. ScreenCloud’s plan to “Meet the Team” 

When I first started planning out our company digital signage channel one piece of feedback came up time and time again: we want to know the rest of the team. With four key hubs, across three continents and around 15 team members working remotely, our team didn’t feel like they were getting to know everyone in the team.

They wanted to know what the team in Bangkok were working on, the details of life in LA, who our new marketing people were. Basically, more about the people behind the email address. So we came up with a few different strategies. Using Meet the Team app we dedicated a portion of our digital signage to surfacing photos and job titles of every person in the team.

We also created a deck in Google Slides that introduced our development team in Bangkok and their specific relation to a big product update we were tackling.

A Dropbox Gallery folder of images then contributed to a more fun view of who are team are. People doing yoga in the office, team pets, our Head of Finance swimming with sharks… you get the picture.

2. Communicating training information to various locations

For Granger Waste Services, communicating well to its employees is a key consideration, given that it has four different locations and that some of the associates are only onsite for around 10 minutes each morning before they head out to serve customers.

By putting up digital screens in break rooms and throughout each of its four locations, Granger makes use of the key times its employees are in the office. Sharing training videos, company announcements and customer feedback through scheduled content. 

3. Surfacing information when inboxes are too full

3M recognized that employees already had an abundance of communication methods – but that the key announcements weren’t getting through. This led them to creating a strategic digital signage journey. With internal updates happening all of the time, they began using digital screens located throughout their 150 offices to surface the stuff that was most important.

3M also pioneers using the digital network to share photos and snapshots of its team and events that are happening locally, and reports that its team loves seeing this type of personal content. 

Start communicating with your global workforce today

Get cracking with our 14-day free trial of ScreenCloud. You don't need to enter any card details. Or have a screen for that matter. Otherwise, book yourself in for a demo here.

When your workforce extends not just beyond your head office, but globally, using effective communication strategies like digital signage is even more crucial.

A global workforce is just that – global. And while distance makes the heart grow fonder, it also makes communication harder. Which is where digital signage comes in…

How to Communicate Effectively with a Global Workforce

Ready to start creating your employee channel?

Your handbook with new world methods on engaging employees and making them love the way you work.

Your handbook on new world employee engagement methods.

How it works:

Workforce

Forging Better Frontline Communications with Unily x ScreenCloud

Tackling the Challenges for Frontline Workers - with Unily

What is a Field-Based Employee?

Employee Engagement & the Deskless Workforce

The Neuroscience of Visual Media

Unleashing the Hidden Dashboard

The Internal Toolbox For Corporate Comms

How to Communicate Effectively with a Global Workforce

Guide to Employee Engagement in 2020