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Employees are people too
- Loren Bucklin
One of the most popular deployments of digital signage is the lobby display at a company facility. The content displayed includes video of the company story, welcome messages, news, weather, etc. This is very powerful and certainly creates a good impression of the company and its capabilities.
Meanwhile, back in the employee break room ... the corkboard is covered with various announcements and descriptions of items for sale. Pretty much a hodgepodge of junky stuff. No rhyme or reason to its placement or consideration for the type of message content.
I've worked with companies that have had the "ah ha!" moment, and their HR staff will get with the program and use digital signage to post creative information in a timely fashion — even using multiple languages for added effectiveness. More advanced programs will allow staff to post announcements and pictures for consideration using SharePoint or other methods.
So here's my observation: many of our customers have a very nice lobby display running, but no other use of digital signage involving staff is present in their operations. The disconnect is twofold. One, the initiators and purchasers of the lobby systems do not have any real connection to the rest of the operation. Public affairs departments or even marketing/sales are often the leads on the lobby projects. Their thinking is limited to their usage.
Two, in most companies, employees don't use the lobby! Almost all the staff enters through the non-public doorways near the parking lots. Lobby displays that would be noted and possibly drive the further deployment are not noticed because the staff never gets exposed to them. I've been in countless meetings where a customer will give an example of a sign in place at one of their facilities and others in the same organization express surprise that they never knew of its existence.
So unless the project is being championed from the top down in an organization, this compartmentalization seems to occur. The challenge for our industry is to cross-promote the usage of digital signage in all its forms and in all its verticals. It's the wild, wild west out there!
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