Digital Signage For Your Factory Floor

Manufacturing facilities must deal with unique challenges in sharing relevant updates, important announcements, and other vital communication. After all, many of the industry's employees aren't tied to email all day the way others may be. Using digital signage software provides significant benefits when installed on the factory floor. Let's look at several advantages digital signage software provides regarding amplifying productivity, increasing efficiency, and maximizing communication efforts.

Every company strives for high productivity. Factories however, are especially concerned with maintaining employee output.

• Share daily, weekly, or monthly reports. Regular updates helps your team stay focused on the results of their efforts. By going to them with consistent, important standings and comparisons like the percent of goals reached, you empower them with the motivation they need to keep giving 100%. Digital signage can share this information in charts, graphs, or by video so they pay attention to it and absorb it, unlike static signs.
• Highlight training videos. Employees who are well-trained and provided with ongoing ways to hone their skills are higher-performing team members. However, it’s costly and many times impossible to take them off the factory floor for all day, off-site training. Digital signage can offer bite-sized pieces of training through videos. Every topic imaginable can be covered in a video segment and broadcast at different times across the factory floor. This gives every team member the chance to watch and learn from this so they can increase their personal productivity and benefit the entire team.
• Underscore goals. If they are shared once and never mentioned again, goals aren’t going to do anyone any good and they probably won’t be met. Goals can be focused on easier and more often by scheduling them to show on digital signage screens frequently. Content that covers goals can be shared by text or video so they stay in the top of every employee’s mind. Clearly understanding what you’re working for helps you work harder to attain it.

Efficiency is closely tied to productivity. Employees who perform in an efficient manner cuts the time it takes to reach goals and achieve company objectives. Digital signage can help to promote and forge efficient processes and behaviors.

• Showcase safety protocols and instructions. Safety is key in avoiding time-consuming issues like accidents, clean-up, and general down time. Keep safety at the forefront of each employee’s mind with digital signage reminders. Announce the days worked since the last accident, offer tips on maintaining safety standards, and relay new or changing safety protocols. A working environment with minimal safety risks lets employees keep their minds on their jobs.
• Share schedules. Instead of employees needing to look for their schedules or ask their superiors, create a chart that updates them daily on their schedules. This can show overtime requirements and anything else regarding their working hours.
• Increase employee satisfaction. Digital signage gives leadership the ability to boost employee morale in a number of ways. One of the biggest ones is by announcing contests and who wins them. Singling out high-performing employees helps them feel appreciated, and also motivates other workers to try a little bit harder. In addition, digital signage can offer entertainment in the break rooms. Being able to play a game on an interactive screen, listen to music, or get updates about the trending topics on social media allows them to de-stress and relax so their fresh when they go back to their shifts.

One of the most common things companies of all sizes struggle with is communication. Sometimes it’s because the leaders don’t value it, other times it’s because they don’t have a workable vehicle that assists in accomplishing it, while still other times it’s because employees are disengaged and simply don’t want to take the time to hear it. Digital signage helps combat communication issues for a more well-informed company.

• Stream real-time live updates and notifications. One of the best parts of digital signage is the ability to change the message quickly. The sky’s the limit on the information that could be helpful for the employees on the factory floor to know. New accounts, an exciting product rollout, changes to benefits, new press releases, and upcoming vacation time are a few of the endless updates that can be shared via digital signage in real-time. Using this stamps out the feeling that the factory floor employees are the “last to know” about important announcements and information.
• Display excel, charts, XML and web URLs. Traditional company information that factory floor employees may have never been privy to can be shared easily via digital signage. This is a timely benefit, because the marketplace is evolving so that transparency is not only appreciated by employees, it's expected. Top notch graphics make normally difficult-to-understand or, well, plain old boring, data take on a new, more vibrant life than ever before. Digital signage screens can highlight publicly-traded company news, profit and sales information, and other data-driven metrics in colorful charts and graphs that are easier to absorb than a 10-page email. Employees can also be guided to where to go for additional information (websites, for example) with digital signage.
• Employee news. Company culture hinges on employees, and communicating well strengthens it. Every now and then it benefits organizations to step out of strictly professional information and share personal news. Sharing employee birthdays and anniversaries, birthdays, children or grandchildren births, and upcoming retirements are great ways to make each person feel like they’re part of a whole.

Communicating with employees in some industries is more than others, and factories definitely fall into the "more challenging" bucket. Digital signage can be a powerful tool that manufacturing facilities can use to help their factory floor workers feel more informed, included, and appreciated than other forms of communication. By sharing information about the company as a whole and specific employees in particular, digital signage content can build relationships, train employees, and keep them productive, safe, and efficient.