Keep Employees Engaged With Digital Communications

Keep Your Employees Engaged With Digital Communications

Jenn Gvozdek
January 8, 2018

One of the biggest challenges for businesses is attracting and retaining good employees. According to a recent Gallup report, 70% of US workers feel like they are “not engaged” or are even “actively disengaged” in their workplace. But what if there were a simple way to increase productivity and profitability by over 20%, reduce employee turnover and absenteeism, and decrease safety incidents while improving product quality? Well, there’s good news. By creating an engaging work environment, your business is on its way.

TAKE ADVANTAGE OF YOUR WALL SPACE
While there are many ways to increase engagement, digital communication is one of the more interactive options available to employers in the modern workplace. Today’s LED panel technology can transform entire walls. At the Salesforce headquarters in San Francisco, the lobby was transformed into a 107 foot long digital waterfall, forest, and mountain range in an incredible work of art. Office walls that communicate with visitors can now display literally anything. They can enhance the process of sharing information with visitors to your office, but an often-overlooked benefit is the effect it can have on internal communication—you can share important information with via digital interaction more easily than sending out a stack of paper memos or a group email.

From real-time messaging, to news reports and company videos, to favorite works of art, this is just the beginning of digital communication. While date, time, and weather are some of the most popular pieces of information that can appear, the limitations are only that of one’s creative mind.

CREATE A NARRATIVE
People love a good story. It is important to create a narrative that draws engagement and makes a memorable impression. The longer people dwell on the message, the more certain they are to absorb it. Design your narrative the way you would a great novel—one that captures not only the attention of clients, but their imaginations as well. Craft your story so they can’t wait to see what happens next. It doesn’t have to be an epic tale: it could be something as simple as a character or mascot who evolves over time, facing varying tasks in a range of challenging situations. Think of Ronald McDonald, or the Travelocity gnome. We tune in because we want to see what is happening with these characters. The idea is to increase message saturation by showing the same basic information (sign up for benefits, or participate in the blood drive) in different ways. This increases dwell time — how long people spend looking at your messages.

Take the Idaho Forest Group for example. They wanted to create a narrative that would provoke discussion between employees. In order to do so, they decided to add digital signage to common areas such as the lunch room, which featured company information and news. As a result, it cultivated conversation between employees; bridging the generation gap and building a sense of community while fostering innovation. To further explore how IDG turned their vision into a reality, as well as next steps, see the full case study here.

Digital communications are for more than just attracting the attention of employees; it is an added opportunity to provide valuable information and foster interaction to a degree that it becomes an active part of one’s world. Don’t forget to keep your content fresh and share real-time updates on key information with your employees.