Lessons learned improving employee engagement with Digital Corporate Communication. It’s all about the culture.
The lack of employee engagement is one of the biggest problems in Corporate America. Part of the problem is today there is a magnitude of communication channels coming at us and we are more likely to get distracted and harder for corporate communication to compete with all the noise. Therefore it begs the question, how does an organization go about improving employee engagement.
Case and Point
One of our clients (undisclosed due to confidentiality) had multiple locations a sales office in New York, Los Angeles, Toronto and production facilities throughout Texas.
They realized their traditional communication of; Newsletters, Intranet, and Static posters/Memos were no longer getting through to their employees. The corporate communication team became increasingly frustrated as they were losing their ability to communicate their message. For a large organization with thousands of employees working in different time zones, Strong communication was essential to their success.
Here’s what they did for improving employee engagement.
They were looking for creative ways to engage employees, they started by using large digital screens with PowerPoint slides cycling throughout the day. Deploying the content was a bit primitive, using USB Flash drives.
Better than printing posters I suppose.
Having said that, they started to see some positive results. One thing I noticed, they had a substantial amount of screens, probably more than I would’ve recommended, being honest. Although the strategy was brilliant, less is more.
Their digital signs were very simple a continuum of messages that was stemmed from the previous display down the hall. Their corporate communication objective was a sort of corporate direction map or propaganda program and that became their best practice for employee engagement.
They believed the shorter and more concise the message, the easier to remember. Although a new problem emerged, the monotony and laborers task of running around the facility to exchange the USB flash drives was cumbersome at best.
NO KIDDING.
Evolution
They realized using USB flash drive approach was very limiting, they needed to evolve to a Digital Signage Network. It works quite simply, it renders content on a media player or PC. All of the media players are networked to a content management server. This acts as a repository for all the content and they can schedule it creating a playlist.
They can also create multiple different channels and assign each individual player accordingly. The corporate communications team was now able to send content to all locations across the country and schedule timely content. Kudos to them! Relevancy is what makes digital signage successful for improving employee engagement strategy. It’s all about delivering content at the right time and place.
GOODBYE USB FLASH DRIVES!
The power of templates
The MyMedia digital signage deployment team, quickly got our client up and running with a series of templates. This allows them to quickly change the content just by filling out a form field like the headline, body text, and picture.
It took the average user about one minute to create a new sign by using a digital signage template. Their creative team in New York was still able to upload more sophisticated Digital signage content by uploading JPEGs and a multitude of different video formats.
The Best
I called them about two weeks later, just to see how things were going.
They were ecstatic, the Communication Manager blurted out over the phone “This is the best digital signage solution ever!”. I think his exuberance is also partly due to the fact, that it was Friday afternoon and the fact he witnessed the New York Rangers winning the hockey game the previous night.
AND NO, I DID NOT BUY HIM THE HOCKEY TICKETS IF THAT’S WHAT YOU’RE THINKING. IF I DID, I WOULD’VE BEEN THERE WITH HIM DRINKING OVERPRICED BEERS.
They’re currently working on adding digital signage dashboards in their New York and Los Angeles sales offices. We are going to integrate their CRM, and invoicing application onto one display dashboard.
The final phase of this project is going to be dashboards in manufacturing facilities in Texas to display orders and real-time.
This is going to save them time and paper as they are currently faxing all the orders to their Texas facilities.
Faxing? Like who does that anymore? HEL-LO’ O!
In my last visit to their new york office, I noticed their digital signage content was very creative by putting a lot of personal information such as; employee accolades, Birthday notices, fun facts, funny pictures of the company baseball games and other fundraisers events.
I noticed the company culture felt more like a small community as opposed to a large cold Corporate environment. I’m sure this is a feeling we can all relate to; lacking the warm fuzzy feeling, just punching o’clock.
LIVING THE DREAM.
I want to be clear, I’m not stating Digital Signage was the source of their success. What changed was the company culture.
If the digital signage communication channel was the seed that sparked improving employee engagement, then I will interpret that as a success and claim my own private victory.
YAY ME! 🙂
Call Us Today – 1-866-636-0636
