Is Digital Signage the Key to Employee Engagement?

We all want it, but it can be hard to find even in the best of times: employee engagement. It’s what keeps businesses on track. Getting it can be difficult, but Hussey Seating may have found a solution in an unexpected place: digital signage.

Hussey Seating has been around for 180 years, at last report, and turned to Mvix to bring in a new digital signage setup meant to drive better engagement at the company. Hussey is using the new signage as a means to improve communications, and make for more transparent management practices. This may sound like an exercise in feel-good concepts that go nowhere, but the evidence suggests otherwise; a Towers Perrin report notes that connected, informed employees on average lead to six percent higher net profit margins, and improving communications by as little as five percent can generate a three percent increase in sales. A Gallup study chipped in as well, noting that companies with “high engagement” tend to do better than similar companies with lower engagement, including better than 20 percent superior rankings in both profitability and productivity. It also tends to cut back on both turnover and absenteeism, which both generate bottom line impacts.

The digital signage tends to keep things simple, offering up company news and information about the company's goals. But this access also offers a clear connection for the employee between what that employee is doing and how it relates to what the company is out to do. That connection can spark engagement, and works to help get new employees up to speed as well.

Ron Bilodeau, marketing and product manager with Hussey Seating, commented, “Digital signage also provides the flexibility to quickly share messages that grab our employees' attention and increase awareness. It is helping us cut through the clutter from competing sources such as emails, texts, and social media.” Since some of Hussey's employees don't have ready access to email, according to Bilodeau, digital signage became the next big possibility, and one that had plenty of impact to offer.

It can be hard to generate employee engagement, particularly in slower economic times when the employee feels undervalued, and starts to lose the connection between work and reward. Having a clear goal in mind can be a help, though, and gives the employee the idea that he or she can work toward the company's goals, help the company achieve, and thus help turn around the company's overall picture. It's the kind of perception that should be followed up with appropriate reward, of course, but in the short term even knowing what should be done is a great way to make engaged employees.

Generating employee engagement might well be as simple as the use of digital signage. It may not do the whole job itself, but it's a step in the right direction. Backed up with other methods of generating engagement should prove to make a workforce that's more eager to head in the right direction.  

Edited by Kyle Piscioniere