You know that lonely TV sitting in the corner of your office? Your company uses it for training videos now and then — maybe playing the news for background noise — but you cannot help but think, we could use it for so much more.
You’re 100% correct. Why waste a perfectly good television’s potential when you could use it as digital signage, a secondary monitor, a dashboard, a menu, or almost anything else? The possibilities are endless, especially at work. To make your job easier, safer, and to improve your company’s culture, here are a few ways you can put a TV screen to good use:
1. Display Digital Artwork
There’s nothing quite like a beautiful piece of artwork to liven up a workplace. Even if you work in an office that customers don’t visit, artwork contributes to your company’s atmosphere and makes your space feel more engaging.
Don’t worry if you can’t decide on a painting or photograph to hang on your wall. Installing a TV screen solves your problem because you don’t have to make a choice. TVs can serve as digital art galleries that rotate through different images, so your workplace is never boring. Plus, should any damage happen to your walls, you can’t fix a canvas, but you can fix a TV screen.
2. Use It As a Digital Bulletin Board
A digital bulletin board can bring your company together by enabling people to share their ideas, updates, and miscellaneous thoughts. Did you find a funny image you want to share? Put it on the bulletin board. Do you have a major life announcement you want people to celebrate with you? Put that on the bulletin board, too.
Speaking of celebrations, your employees appreciate being recognized for their successes. Expressing gratitude for a worker’s performance makes them feel valued, which is essential for creating a positive company culture. Don’t put someone on the spot during a meeting and make them uncomfortable. Instead, congratulate individual employees for a job well done through a screen (and acknowledge birthdays, weddings, and newborn babies) to boost overall morale.
3. Streamline Internal Communication
Imagine you need to let everyone in your business know about an important announcement. You send an email to the entire company and call a meeting, but someone inevitably misses the message. At best, it’s easy to catch this person up, but at worst, it throws your entire team’s operations out-of-whack.
TV screens, however, are attention-grabbing and can communicate information almost seamlessly — even across different locations. For instance, manufacturing company Southwire struggled to communicate effectively between its various plants, regional sales offices, and corporate headquarters. Southwire used Enplug’s digital signage software to streamline its internal messaging, which dramatically improves employee safety and reduces technical challenges. Manufacturing organizations like Southwire can even use TV signage to measure takt times from their Power BI dashboards to set expectations and maximize their efficiency.
4. Display a Company Dashboard
Data is the lifeblood of a company. Your entire workforce needs to be on the same page about data coming in and going out, such as sales metrics, online customer engagements, risk analysis, and supply chain status updates. Everyone’s work could go to waste if people operate with different data sets.
It’s possible to disseminate accurate information to your employees individually. Still, the impact of looking at data on a centralized big-screen is much more significant than using a small Mac screen. Consider placing a large TV — or even an entire wall of TV screens — somewhere for all employees to see.
Use these screens to display a company dashboard that depicts KPIs and other essential data. Making this information readily accessible helps employees perform their duties and aligns their work with everyone else’s. Displaying your company’s progress toward its goals helps identify problems, keep track of successes, and motivates everyone involved.
5. Market to Customers On-Site
Depending on your business type, some customers come to you knowing exactly what they want. People might meander through a retail store and can be convinced to buy things they didn’t intend to when they arrived, but banks, on the other hand, have a difficult time advertising their other products and services because customers usually enter for an express purpose.
To overcome this obstacle, the Washington State Employee Credit Union implemented TV screens with digital signage software to market its additional services to visitors on-site. It can still use online marketing techniques, but now the WSECU has further opportunities to reach its customers when it matters most.
6. Engage Visitors in a New Way
TV screens can enrich your customers’ experience. From eye-popping graphics to informative videos, your customers will appreciate effective communication that doesn’t make them work harder than they want to (the air of modernity helps, too).
One Holiday Inn in Los Angeles uses TVs to welcome guests with warm messages and inform them about local attractions while they check-in. The same screens also display social media posts from previous and current visitors, which serve as convenient testimonials. With digital signage, this Holiday Inn streamlines its check-in process and provides guests with visual representations of all they can see and do.
7. Implement an Emergency Alert System
An alarm alerts people when an emergency is happening, but it doesn’t tell them precisely what to do. Should they evacuate the building? Take cover? Move somewhere else?
TV screens positioned strategically around your business can inform both employees and customers what they need to do during an emergency in real-time. For example, if you live in a hurricane-prone area, digital signage screens can direct people toward the building’s safest areas.
TVs are still useful safety tools when a crisis isn’t occurring. Manufacturing plants, construction sites, automotive service technicians, welding companies, and other dangerous businesses can use them to relay critical safety information at all times. Though workers are required to learn basic safety protocols, constant reinforcement never hurts.
The potential for TV screens is vast. Don’t neglect the one that sits in your office underutilized — buy it some company, and use your televisions creatively to make a significant difference in the way your business works.