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Communication at Work
COMMUNICATION AT WORK
Six behavioral science insights to help you connect with your deskless employees
Most lack access to a company email and intranet, leaving the bulk of manufacturing’s front-line deskless workers out of reach of traditional internal communication methods. In fact, 84% of deskless workers say they don’t receive enough direct communication from management. However, advances in digital signage technologies offer a powerful channel to engage the deskless workforce.
The solution’s on the wall. The screens on the walls of your factories and break rooms are one of the best ways to communicate with your deskless employees — cost-effectively, dynamically, and at scale. The fact is, digital signage receives 400% more views than static media.
While critical information is often prevalent in a manufacturing environment, it is only as valuable as its ability to reach its intended audience. With digital signage, all of your workforce can have access to the right data at the right time. To learn more,
download the eBook Unleashing the Hidden Dashboard
A research partnership between award-winning digital signage provider ScreenCloud and the Department of Psychology at Durham University reveals new behavioral science insights employers can leverage to better connect with deskless employees. “We know about the cognitive processes that drive decision-making, how to influence behavior, and what engages people at work, but few people have combined these ideas and applied them to the deskless workforce.”
– Dr. Andrew Marcinko, Assistant Professor of Psychology at Durham University.
Processing Fluency and Framing
Best practices:
- Share the most important information at the top of the screen
- Consider either a loss or gain frame (e.g., a loss frame is best for communications related to compliance; a gain frame is best for anything growth and development-related
Avoiding Abstraction and Establishing the Norm
To navigate complexity, our brains rely on schemas, or socially shared scripts that kick into gear in response to a specific environmental cue.
For example, digital highway signs around the world show this message: “Tiredness Kills. Take A Break.” It’s clear, it’s concrete, and it works. Radar speed guns often display a smiley face when you’re under the speed limit, and a frowning face when you’re over. This is even more effective as it eliminates language barriers, and people instantly recognize expressions of approval or disapproval.
In the workplace environment, instead of saying, “Stay Safe,” which is vague and puts the onus on your employees, provide clear step-by-step instructions. Use emoji in health and safety messaging for an “easy get.”
When people talk about workplace culture, what they’re really talking about is a set of norms — in this case social — that guide employees’ behavior. Norms guide behavior interpersonally, too — we seek out leaders and role models we admire. These individuals can stimulate similar behaviors, as can the simple knowledge that other people are behaving in a particular socially/morally desirable way — also known as social proof.
Top Tips:
- Highlight dynamic trends (“A growing number of people ...”)
- Positively frame the information by emphasizing contextually high numbers (“98% of employees wear proper personal protective equipment.”)
- On-screen, provide visual examples of individuals whom workers view as similar to themselves demonstrating a desirable behavior or attitude.
Example in Practice: Attentional Spotlight
Engineering firm Ramboll trialed placing small mirrors at construction entrances with the message, “Who is responsible for safety today?” at the new headquarters for Carlsberg Group in Copenhagen. The mirrors turned the workers’ attentional spotlight onto themselves — they viewed themselves from someone else’s perspective. This motivates us to conform to important group norms. Zero accidents occurred on-site during the project.
When thinking about how powerful a social norm might be, consider the lightbulb analogy — to increase brightness you may increase the number, strength/wattage, and proximity:
Just World Bias and Us Versus Them
Top Tips
- Include images of people similar to those you want to influence — “If the consequences are relevant to this person, they could be relevant to me.”
- Build empathy among colleagues by promoting birthdays, anniversaries, and other informal accomplishments. Research shows that empathy can reduce the just-world attitude that “bad things happen to bad people.”
Social Exchange Theory
This theory suggests that a person will weigh the cost of a social interaction (negative outcome) against the reward of that social interaction (positive outcome). Engaged employees trust their organization and their colleagues. According to social exchange theory, companies must establish a “psychological contract” with their employees to build this all-important trust.
Our “social brain” helps with forming and maintaining social relationships, including relationships with colleagues, by organizing and compartmentalizing the world into boxes, categories, and silos to create meaning and structure.
Top Tips
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Use collective language to create a shared identity, more “us” and “we” and less “they” and “you.”
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Be conscious of cultural differences to avoid creating subgroups or alienating certain groups of employees. Take time to understand cultural differences within the target population (surveys, focus groups) and use images to convey information, when possible, to avoid language challenges.
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Leverage cross-training — where employees spend time working with a different team/business unit — or increase manager contact in the spirit of building trust and community amongst different teams.
Using digital signage to increase engagement
Example in Practice: Find the Right Messenger
The impact of messages can vary widely based on our feelings toward the sender. Do we trust them? Love them? Identify with them?
Behavioral science consultancy Spoon Agency worked with global construction company Skanska. They developed an effective safety compliance campaign using short films of employees’ children, parents, or partners expressing to them how important it was for them to return home each day. Employees were then given stickers for their helmets with similar messages from their own loved ones.
Digital screens offer a solution to present similarly personalized messages from high-impact messengers in various contexts.
What to consider when displaying content on screens
Additional Resources
