Digital Staff Communications
How to curate, create and manage content
Organisations are struggling to get the mindshare of their staff – inboxes are overflowing, there’s the distraction of social media, mobile devices and a proliferation of collaboration tools. But ineffective internal – or staff – communications has significant implications for staff safety, productivity and happiness.
74% of employees have the feeling they are missing out on company news.
Only 13% of employees use their intranets on a daily basis.
In trying to address these issues, organisations are turning to digital signage, particularly if they have multiple sites or staff zones. Digital signage has many benefits:
- content is engaging, consisting of images, videos and animations
- multiple people viewing the same content at the same time encourages discussion and collaboration
- digital signage takes advantage of valuable dwell time in areas such as kitchens, meeting rooms and lift wells
- content on digital signage can be updated quickly and customised by location
Typically, communication wisdom says that content is more important than the medium, but when it comes to digital signage, organisations soon discover that content curation and content management are the critical success factors. The issues that need to be addressed include:
- how to curate and coordinate content from a broad range of contributors
- how to personalise content for different areas or different sites
- how to share a variety of content while maintaining a consistent look and feel
- how to update content in real time
- how to incorporate governance and approval in the publication process
Traditionally this has been difficult and resource intensive, however, new software tools can help solve these problems.
A cloud based content management system (CMS) facilitates the scheduling of content in different locations and at different times as well providing the ability to create custom approval workflows. And newer tools can automate the publishing of content through the updating of predesigned templates.
Digital signage is an extremely effective medium for staff communications, and as part of an integrated communications plan, it complements email, face to face briefings, Intranet and newsletters. A successful digital signage solution for staff communications consists of three critical factors:
- The physical infrastructure and hardware (screens and media players)
- Content such as company updates, upcoming events, staff promotions, safety/OH&S announcements, product launches, “in the news”, etc
- Processes and tools for managing the curation, creation, distribution, scheduling and publishing of content
Getting the last step right is the main challenge.
