When you lavish praise on people, they flourish. Criticize, and they shrivel up. Richard Branson, Virgin Group
Many companies are beginning to realize that creating high pressure, high stress work environments does not ultimately create financial success. Pushing people to breaking point to improve the bottom line often has the opposite result. A report entitled “Stress in America –Paying with our Health” by The American Psychological Association, found that 550 million workdays are lost every year due to stress on the job and over $500 billion is lost from the US economy due to this prevalence of workplace stress.
Promoting a Positive Workplace Environment
Another key area of concern is disengaged workers. A Gallup report, The State of the American Workplace, revealed that workers with low engagement levels had 37% higher absenteeism, 49% more accidents and 60% more errors. Their organizations displayed 18% lower productivity, 16% lower profitability and 65% lower share price over time. What employees all wanted was workplace wellbeing even above material perks. This is where digital signage comes to the fore as one of the tools for creating a positive workplace culture.
Using the screens as a communication vehicle to spread gratitude and greeting messages to employees can create positive emotions in employees. When people feel seen, respected, applauded for a job well done and recognized for their contributions they are more loyal to an organization and contribute to higher levels of organizational productivity and effectiveness. Digital signage content can be used to promote positive communication, employee appreciation and gratitude, promoting a sense of purpose, fostering team spirit, focusing on people’s strengths and celebrating wins.
If you are lucky enough to be someone’s employer, then you have a moral obligation to make sure people do look forward to coming to work in the morning. John Mackey, Whole Foods Market
A positive workforce is a healthy one. Optimism leads to less stress in the workplace. Here are 12 ways to use digital signage messaging to promote positivity…
- Celebrate employee’s birthdays, anniversaries, promotions, awards and honors. Show just how much you appreciate your staff member by acknowledging their birthday or special anniversary in bold, celebratory graphics. Let them know they are not just a cog in some corporation’s machine but a recognized contributor to the functioning of the whole. You can customize the message to the personality of the employee to really honor their uniqueness.
- Employee of the Month accolades. You can celebrate the achievements of a staff member or team with a digital signage message that details their contributions and highlights their successes. You want to show employees how much their service to the company is valued.
- Introduce the efforts of different departments. Many processes in the company seem to happen behind the scenes with many employees being unaware of what their colleagues in different departments contribute to the whole. Use digital signage messaging to showcase production elements in the company, field work operators or support function staff and how they help the organization in ship shape. You can also introduce different individuals with informative profiles on them and their careers.
- Give vital information that will make employees lives easier. Keep the staff up to date with traffic issues, weather concerns or deadlines for various programs that can help them to arrange their calendars more effectively.
- Broadcast Customer Reviews. Spread the good news. Put up great customer feedback for the whole company to see. If an employee is singled out in the review, highlight their amazing contribution to customer service.
- Spread productivity tips and tricks. Feed employee’s helpful hints, tips and tricks to make their work days easier and more engaging. Feature some key growth hacks or advice from older, more experienced employees that can really help new staff members. Sharing knowledge helps to promote a positive teamwork ethic.
- Share insightful thoughts for the day. Share some wisdom or thought provoking snippet to get employees contemplating life, love and everything else in between. (avoid humor which can be extremely subjective)
- Poll your workforce. Constantly seek your employee’s opinion on a variety of factors impacting the workplace –anonymity will increase engagement. Leverage the collective knowledge of the company to instigate growth.
- Let employees add to a community board. Create opportunities where employees can announce volunteering options, classes, events to their fellow employees. This fosters a great sense of community. (ensure you have posting guidelines for all to follow)
- Display employee benefits. Keep everyone in the know about changes to benefits, company resources, manuals or handbooks on offer – all made simpler on digital screens.
- Provide wellness guidance. Promote good health and general wellbeing with tips, recipes, diet plans, nutrition support etc.
- Promote Company wide volunteering. Show company volunteering initiatives and honor those who participate by highlighting their efforts on the digital screens.
Showing gratitude and appreciation for people will have a positive effect on the workforce and will go a long way to improving the culture of the company. The result will be mutual appreciation, respect and trust in the organization.
You can build a much more wonderful company on love than you can on fear. Kip Tindell, The Container Store
Our Aurora Digital Signage team have the expertise and experience to set up a digital signage platform for you and assist you with using our software to create the most worthwhile content that you can use to spread gratitude messaging. Give us a call today so we can walk you through your optimism generating options.
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