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 .

To view our Partner blog, click here

In part 1 of this blog we discussed some common missteps in the execution of employee signage and three areas of consideration in developing your content strategy. As discussed, shaping your corporate culture, focusing on your core objectives and reinforcing best practices and learning are great places to start. So let’s take that a step further.

It’s clear that the ROI of any Employee Signage platform is driven by its content. When care is taken in curating content, the results are positive and measurable across a wide range of business metrics.

There are two key elements in optimizing the value of your Employee Signage content:
1. Align your messaging and content strategy with your desired business outcomes.
2. Visually represent your content in a dynamic and engaging manner.

Think of your signage in terms of Content and Form. Messaging that is clear, concise, and on-point, coupled with visualizations that attract and engage viewers. These principles have been central to art and advertising for centuries.

Three Key Items to Consider When Developing Your Content Strategy

Engaging Employees – This speaks to the core benefit of Employee Signage. Engaged employees are critical to an organization’s success, with engaged employees outperforming disengaged employees across metrics including quality, reduced absenteeism, reduced medical costs, and improved employee retention.

If your company has invested in an Employee Engagement Survey, we recommend that you use it as your guide in developing your content strategy. We also recommend that – after implementing your content strategy – you repeat the survey. This will provide measures on the effectiveness of your content.

In lieu of an Employee Engagement Survey, some insights can be gained from common findings in other organizations.

Stagnation is a common complaint of employees in organizations with heightened levels of disengagement. These employees tend to feel isolated from company news and information and do not believe that their organization is invested in their personal and professional growth.

This is readily addressed by Employee Signage . Some recommended best practices include:

• Use the platform to highlight “good news” across a variety of departments in your organization. This extends beyond Human Resources, to include Sales, Operations, Learning, etc. This helps create a kinetic environment that directly addresses stagnation.
• Use the platform to promote Employee Wellness. This can include integration of syndicated feeds on healthy eating, healthy lifestyles, and personal finance.
• Celebrate your employees with content that welcomes New Hires, recognizes Employee Contribution, and celebrates Employee Milestones.
• Promote Career Opportunities and encourage participation in benefits programs, such as 401K programs and tuition reimbursement.

It is again worth noting that the quality of this content is a determining factor in its effectiveness.

Mitigating Risk – Employee Signage also adds benefit in helping mitigating risk in the areas of Cyber Security, Sexual Harassment, Trade Compliance, and Diversity.

We recommend that organizations plan campaigns throughout the year focused on creating awareness around these issues.

The benefit of these campaigns is achieved in avoiding occurrences of violations. In addition, should litigation occur, demonstrating that the company proactively engaged in these campaigns can help lower the costs of fines and penalties.

News & Information – Incorporating News and Information into your Employee Signage has multiple benefits. For starters, it helps keep your employees informed of events outside the workplace. In this regard, we do not recommend 24-hour cable news, but rather sanitized content feeds that are designed to avoid polarization and dissent.

We also believe in incorporating feeds that directly value your workforce. For example, having a live local traffic map displaying towards the close of the business day.

The other benefit of News and Information is that it helps ensure fresh content is regularly appearing on the display. This helps maintain the effectiveness of your corporate messaging.

It is all about the Content

When deploying Employee Signage, it is important to note the value of the solution is driven by the effectiveness of the content. Optimizing this value is best accomplished by:

• Aligning your content strategy with your business objectives.
• Understanding that effective signage requires impactful Content and Form. Quality graphics matter.
• Keeping content fresh and meaningful.

If you do these things well, you will soon realize that Employee Signage creates a positive Return on Investment, helping to drive superior business outcomes.

If you would like to better understand how an Employee Signage network can be integrated with your communications strategy to drive better engagement and performance, please schedule a 30-minute call with us here .

The post The Value of Employee Signage is driven by its Content: Part 2 appeared first on Blog by Convergent .

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