Human Resources faces the immense task of organizing, improving, adding to, and communicating to the vast body of employees at its given organization. This task, while made easier with the advent of communication tools like email, internet, and social media, is by no means an easy one.

HR teams often struggle with individual awareness, motivation, onboarding, and reach, especially in larger organizations where the number of employees can exceed thousands.

Digital signage is one solution that can reduce those challenges, fitting into many of the everyday challenges faced by HR. In this article, we’ll look at some of the ways digital signage can scale to tackle these issues, helping HR staff to

What are HR Challenges?

XpertHR interviewed over 800 HR professionals to reveal the top challenges listed

  • Ensuring employees and supervisors have the necessary skill sets now and for future responsibilities (52%) (Development)
  • Creating a succession plan (50%) (Leadership Planning)
  • Increasing employee engagement, morale and satisfaction (49%) (Employee Retention/Productivity)
  • Employee retention (40%) (Employee Retention/Productivity)
  • Managing performance and providing professional development opportunities (47%) (Development)
  • Aligning the talent retention strategy with business objectives (43%) (Effectiveness)
  • Handling employee mergers and acquisitions (40%) (Change Management)

The Survey of Global HR Challenges: Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow, conducted by PricewaterhouseCoopers on behalf of the World Federation of Personnel Management Associations (WFPMA) identifies these as the top HR challenges:

  • Change management (48%) (Change Management)
  • Leadership development (35%) (Leadership Planning)
  • HR effectiveness measurement (27%) (Effectiveness)
  • Organizational effectiveness (25%) (Effectiveness)
  • Compensation (25%) (Employee Retention/Productivity)
  • Staffing, Recruitment, and availability of skilled local labor (24%) (Recruitment)
  • Succession planning (20%) (Leadership Planning)
  • Learning and development (19%) (Development)
  • Staffing: retention (16%) (Employee Retention/Productivity)
  • Benefits costs: Health and welfare (13%) (Effectiveness)

These fall into 6 groups: development, leadership planning, employee retention/productivity, change management, effectiveness, and recruitment.

Development

Employee development, including ongoing training, ensuring that employees continue to meet skills requirements, and ensuring that individuals have the option to engage with development opportunities is critical as part of business strategy, employee retention, and productivity.

Digital signage may function as a portal for learning, but more often, should function to communicate and share opportunities and possibilities. This might include sharing development programs, reminding teams of deadlines to sign up for workshops or courses, inviting individuals to make appointments with coaches, sharing links to digital education platforms, and announcing business changes and any training that will go with it.

Leadership Planning

Leadership planning and development are critical for ensuring the organization has future leadership. Implementing it inside the organization means creating awareness of programs, delivering training, and fostering good leadership practices.

Digital displays are less useful here than with development, but can function in many of the same ways, sharing information, inviting individuals to coaching sessions, and pushing awareness of what leadership is.

For example, digital displays can easily push short info bites relating to interpersonal skills such as emotional intelligence, communication, time management, etc., which may help to remind whole teams of desirable behavior and improve interaction on everyone’s part.

Employee Retention /Productivity

Employee retention and productivity are primarily linked through engagement and motivation, which is why both typically use the same general tactics. An engaged and motivated employee is one who stays in the company. Engaged and motivated employees are also more likely to be productive.

Digital displays fit nicely into this niche, allowing HR to push data relating to productivity, team goals, company goals, and performance management. Teams that can see what they’re doing and its effects are more likely to stay motivated.

Here, a dashboard showing daily updates and progress towards goals is likely to be effective because people care about what they are doing. A dashboard showing company stock value is likely to be less effective, because people don’t care how much money their company is worth, unless that’s directly their job or they are profiting from it.

Digital displays also function to offer employee and team recognition, to remind individuals of perks and reward platforms, and to offer perks such as daycare, flex work, etc. In terms of pure productivity, digital displays integrate with work rosters, allowing employees to see (at-a-glance) which of their team members are working from home or are in the office.

Change Management

Change management is a complex process of delivering new information, delivering training, restructuring, and managing how people feel and react to change. Depending on the organization, change could be an acquisition or merger, a new business direction, a new operating system, or the removal of a business department.

HR’s job is to communicate this change and what it entails for employees, to ensure transparency to prevent individuals from leaving the company, and to ensure everyone has the chance to learn new information or skills required of their role.

Digital signage allows you to deliver targeted information to teams including:

  • What the change entails for them
  • What they have to learn
  • Where to find resources
  • What their options are

So, if your organization were removing a business department, such as merging sales with marketing, digital signage could first push this information to both departments, push clear step by step processes of what the change will entail, and offer resources and opportunities for existing individuals to engage in personal development to prepare themselves for the new role.

Effectiveness

Effectiveness typically includes HR effectiveness (performance management, leadership planning, recruitment) and business effectiveness. While digital signage won’t help track metrics, it does allow you to link KPIs and real-time data from databases to create dashboards, where key people can see metrics and achievements.

This might include data on performance management, employee churn rate, retention rate, progress towards business goals, etc. In some cases, these displays can be situated throughout the organization because they may motivate employees, providing the numbers are good. In other cases, data should be kept in HR, where it’s relevant.

Recruitment

While digital signage offers limited value for some recruitment efforts, it offers a lot of value for others. Here, HR can push recruitment posters across relevant offices, allowing teams to recommend people they know, offer references, and essentially fill roles themselves.

Digital signage also comes into play during the interviewing and onboarding process, where displays can deliver targeted information, branding, and culture. Here, displays function to add to recruitment efforts, informing the individual of who and what the company is, giving them a better idea of total experience, and delivering important information during onboarding. And, when a new recruit signs a contract, digital signage can be used to introduce them across the organization, making it faster and easier for them to integrate into the organization.

Digital displays make information accessible in numerous ways. While you need digital signage software that links to databases and offers HR an easy way to update content, and quality displays placed in key locations around the office, long-term, it’s more visible than email and digital alerts because people see displays throughout the day while working. If you’re considering implementing digital signage for HR purposes, perform a use case to assess potential return on investment, assess potential costs, and determine from there if digital signage is right for your organization.