Most organizations heavily invest into measures that improve productivity. Over the last few decades, those measures, ranging from open offices to flex work, have changed how people work.
Today, most of us are aware that communication is one of the most pressing issues behind office productivity, productive teams, and happy employees.
As a result, employers are integrating smarter and better tools for communication, including real-time data-sharing tools like Slack, smaller teams who work in Agile ways, and more recently, digital signage.
With studies showing that digital signage is more effective at sharing information than posters or emails, more versatile as a tool, and applicable into numerous situations, it’s a good investment for many organizations.
If you’re looking for an office solution, it is important to calculate costs and possible return on investment. In most cases, digital signage boosts communication, collaboration, and productivity in the following ways.
Internal Communication
Offices push dozens of messages each day. These range from day-to-day communication relating to shifts, work hours, meetings, and goals to new information like changing company policies, growth, new initiatives, safety training, or preparation for an audit. Organizations routinely push internal messaging using tools including email, social media, word of mouth, and posters throughout the office.
Digital signage steps neatly into this role, offering digital billboards that update employees when they step into the lobby, when waiting in elevators, and strategically placed around coffee machines. Some good examples of these include:
- Team assignments and updates
- Company news and goals
- Safety messages and training
- HR messages
- Shifts, “Who’s at work”
- Employee recognition
- Progress towards goals
- Introducing new employees
- Deadline updates
Here, using appropriate management and offering team leads control of digital signage near their teams is critical.
How might this system look in your office?
Susan walks into the lobby and checks into work using a digital touchscreen. She immediately sees who else is there and that one of her team called in sick. Walking to the elevator, she stops to wait, and while doing so, sees an HR campaign promoting the new online payrolling system the organization is switching to. She scans the QR code with her phone and reads more about it on her way up. The screen in front of her team’s desk is alive with changing graphs, detailing progress, upcoming deadlines, and their Kanban board. She can glance up at any time throughout the day to see where the project is at, with relevant updates from interdependent teams.
Good communication improves productivity because people always have the information they need to act. Whether acting means enrolling in an employee development program, taking advantage of work perks, or understanding where a project is at on any given day entirely depends on the office and the situation, but digital signage updates in seconds to seamlessly display any of that information and more.
Equipment and Room Management
Offices notoriously have problems with resource management, where projectors, offices, and meeting spaces are difficult to delegate and manage. This often results from not making booking information visible to the office as a whole, so that someone must plan to use something and go to the person in charge of booking before finding that it isn’t available.
Digital signage helps in multiple ways. Booking software allows employees to reserve rooms, projectors, digital displays, auditoriums, and even cars with a few clicks. Using digital systems means the employee can choose an available time slot, take the resource out of the calendar for that period, and check it back in when they’ve finished. So, someone looking for meeting space can always check a display to see when and if a room is booked. Someone looking for a projector can check it out, use it, and then check it back in with a note that it is in need of maintenance.
Inspiration and Motivation
Offices regularly use motivational information ranging from empowerment and recognition programs to sharing key performance indicators and results across offices. Digital displays allow you to do so in real time, at whatever scale fits the office.
Modern digital signage links to real-time data, meaning you can share stock values, customer feedback, number of sales, progress towards goals or production, progress towards percentage completed, or whatever else you want. Most importantly, this data can be curated on a screen-by-screen basis, so every team sees information that is relevant to them.
Digital dashboards and video walls can offer real-time inspiration and motivation. They can also seamlessly be repurposed for presentations, management, and for meetings and kickoffs as needed, adding value in more ways than one.
Team Collaboration
Good collaboration is critical to productivity and digital signage can help you get there. Digital signage can share goals, help team leads assign roles and tasks, keep teams updated on progress and priorities, share sprints and boards in easy-to-view settings, and allow teams to collaborate on a large, visible space.
Digital signage is cheaper, smarter, and more efficient than ever before. However, you should take the time to review your office, assets, total investments, and total possible payoff to calculate how and where to invest in signage.
In some cases, a small solution will work. In others, you might benefit from a large video wall and digital door signs across the office. An in-depth analysis of options and benefits is critical to making good decisions when planning your digital signage solution.
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