When meeting with businesses to discuss Employee Signage , I often open the conversation with a slide depicting the typical content found on tens of thousands of employee-facing displays. After letting the slide breathe for a few seconds, I pose the question: “What’s wrong with this picture?”
The responses tend to focus on the display layout. “It’s too busy.” “My eyes don’t know where to look.” “The date and weather take up too much space.” “The video section should be larger.”
What I find most curious is that people tend not to question the content itself. Sadly, we have come to accept that weather, 24-hour cable news, and a smattering of company information is reasonable content for the workplace.
I then offer a critique of the content, pointing out items that include:
• The unintended consequence of 24-hour cable news in the workplace is that it introduces discord into an environment where you want to promote harmony.
• Items such as date and weather are readily available on smart phones, diminishing their value on the signage.
• Meaningful content – such as Employee Recognition and Company Events – is not being presented in a format that engages the viewer.
I conclude by pointing out that the Return on Investment (ROI) of this display is negligible, offering little value in engaging employees, or in driving successful business outcomes. Those I have met with almost unanimously agree.
Three Key Items to Consider When Developing Your Content Strategy
Content strategy is critical when it comes to Employee Signage (Part 1). Check out our perspective on three of the six areas to focus to drive better results: (psst: stay tuned next week for Part 2 where we unveil the rest)
Shaping Your Corporate Culture – Employee Signage is highly effective in helping establish and reinforce your corporate culture. Your content strategy for shaping this culture should revolve around items such as brand, vision, values, and heritage.
As these constitute foundational pillars of your corporate identity, we strongly recommend that this content be professionally produced. This will ensure that the content is dynamic and engaging, while conveying a sense of quality and importance that will translate into your employee’s performance.
Investing in corporate culture results in incremental improvements across a wide range of business metrics, with considerable data demonstrating that modest investments in your corporate culture produce sizable returns in business outcomes.
Focusing on Core Objectives – We recommend that part of your content strategy formulation process include meeting with your executive leadership. In this meeting, you should extract an understanding of the performance metrics that matter most to the company.
By understanding leadership’s dashboards and metrics, you can better design your content strategy for optimized effectiveness.
For example, increasing sales performance is a critical measure for nearly all commercial organizations. Designing Leaderboards – and other visualizations – that heighten awareness of these performance metrics have been proven to successfully motivate sales associates, resulting in better outcomes.
It is important to note that care should be given to the quality of tables, graphs, and other visualizations. You want them to appear in an attractive and compelling form. Simply rendering an exported file from your CRM or Microsoft Office may not optimize the content’s desired impact. This is easily remedied with the use of Motion Graphic Templates.
Reinforcing Best Practices and Learning – Repeated immersions of concise content is an excellent strategy in the reinforcement of Best Practices and Learning. Its effectiveness is measured by learning organizations in Knowledge Retention, producing outcomes in areas of reduced defects, lower operating costs, and other business efficiencies.
More advanced Employee Signage platforms allow for interactivity, adding elements of gamification to the learning experience.
Continue reading part 2 of this blog.
The post The Value of Employee Signage is Driven by its Content: Part 1 appeared first on Blog by Convergent .