If you use digital signage for employee communication, does most of your content come from head office? Or do you try to get local offices or teams involved too?
▶️ It can be difficult to create content centrally that’s engaging for everyone, especially for large companies, so here we look at how you can take a glocal approach to corporate digital signage - that is, creating locally relevant content that still looks and feels part of one central brand.
❔ Why try glocal corporate digital signage?
It’s important for a company to have good internal communications so that employees are engaged and feel part of a collective. But it’s not always easy, especially in large organizations. In fact, the bigger you are, the harder it gets: more complexity, more locations, more people. There are language barriers, different time zones and cultural differences to navigate. Information that seems important to one office can easily feel irrelevant to another.
A central internal communication team for an international company can seem cut off from the realities of work ‘on the ground’ and can lose sight of what different teams need to know. This can create the feeling that communication is too high level and conceptual, lacking in the local details that gives information context and meaning.
This assumes that there even is an internal communication team - often it becomes part of another team’s role, one that’s worked on part-time and is under-resourced. Maybe it’s not a surprise then that according to Gallup, 74% of employees feel that they’re missing out on company information and news.
So what’s the solution? How can a company better share information with its employees? One way is to be glocal - think globally; act locally. Abandon a top down approach to communications and be more open to information-sharing.
🌐 Creating glocal content
Glocal content is a mix of news from both the local and global level, not just from head office, but also from local offices, factories and warehouses. It’s also content that has a global look - so consistency of tone and branding - but local detail. For example, for Cenareo client Diana Pet Food, which uses digital signage for internal communications with its 1,000 employees, it means this: “Our screens broadcast news about the business and projects under way, they share best practice, and announce new employees. They also give local information, like announcing when a catering truck will be in the plant’s car park.” Company research has found that 90% of employees are happy with the system.
👨💼👩💼 Involve more people in content creation
Abandoning a top down approach means getting more people involved; empowering employees to share local information and news. This has multiple benefits: it creates content that’s more interesting and engaging, it helps employees to feel seen and heard and have their successes celebrated, and it demonstrates that the organisation has a consultative communications approach.
It also reduces the burden on the central communications team to continually create content. When communication becomes local it also becomes more efficient. The role of the central internal comms team becomes more strategic. For Diana Pet Food, local sites can take control of their own communication: “At present, nearly 80 people have access to the management platform, enjoying user rights governed by the Head Office. Each piece of information can therefore be local (relating to a site), regional (linked to a content), or international (when it comes to corporate communication). The latter accounts for 70% of messages.”
🎨 Create coherence with templates and branding
Branding and corporate messaging unifies and brings coherence to a company’s communications, and a glocal approach doesn’t mean abandoning it. In fact, it becomes more important. By giving local content creators a template to use, you keep consistency and each message becomes a great example of corporate values made concrete. Using a content management platform set up custom branded themes to make sure that, for example, your company colours, company font and logo are fixed on any content that is developed for signage by any of your people.
🚚 Glocal delivery
Not every employee needs to see every message that gets sent out. Spamming your employees is a sure fire way to turn your digital signage into wallpaper. Decide the following: what news is relevant to everyone, what news is relevant to only one business unit, or department. Then deliver that news to those audiences, translated into local language. Use a digital signage content management system that has a targeted audience feature. For example at Diana Pet Food, “Sharing corporate content in English with Brazilian employees wouldn’t make much sense. Through the content management platform, it’s easy for us to feed each of the screens according to language, using the “screen groups” feature.”
While it may feel like a risk to allow more people to get involved in your internal communications, with the right technology in place - such as user rights management to automate the approval process - it will pay dividends. Moving to a glocal model of digital signage corporate communication will make your content more interesting, make your team feel more informed, and free your central communications team to spend more time on strategy, filtering and delivery channels.
