Digital signage for employee communication means TVs where staff already stop (break rooms, time clocks, canteens) showing short, current messages. It is the most reliable way to reach employees who do not have a company email: warehouse, factory, retail and care staff. Treat each screen as a billboard, not a newsletter: one message per slide, readable in five seconds, and a QR code to the employee app or intranet for the details.
What should the screens show?
- Today's operational news: safety notices, shift changes, a broken lift, the canteen menu.
- Deadlines with a date: open enrolment, payroll changes, training due by a date.
- Recognition: birthdays, work anniversaries, a team that hit a target, a new starter's name and photo.
- Safety and quality numbers: days since the last accident, today's output against the goal.
- Pointers to more: "Full details in the app", with a QR code that links to the article itself, not a home page.
Leave out long policy text, org charts and anything a person must read in full to act on. Put those in the app or on paper, and point to them from the screen.
Where should the screens go?
Put screens where people wait or pause for 30 seconds or more:
| Place | Why it works | What to show there |
|---|---|---|
| Near time clocks | Every shift passes it twice a day | Shift news, safety, deadlines |
| Break rooms and canteens | People sit and look up | Recognition, menus, longer slides (10 to 15 seconds each) |
| Entrances and lift lobbies | Everyone passes, but walking | One short message per slide |
| Production or warehouse floor | Staff cannot leave the line | Live numbers, safety counts; large text only |
| Office kitchens and desk areas | Staff who also get email | Events, benefits, visitors |
Frontline staff and desk staff need different content, even in one building. Plan a separate playlist for each group from the start.
How often should the content change?
Change something every week, and never leave expired content up. One out-of-date notice ("Summer party on Friday", in October) teaches staff the whole screen is stale.
- Give every slide an end date when you add it. Most signage software can stop showing a file on a date.
- Automate the repeating slides. Birthdays, anniversaries, the canteen menu and safety counts can come from a spreadsheet or HR system.
- Keep the loop short. Eight to twelve slides of 8 to 10 seconds each: a person who waits a minute or two sees everything.
- Keep text large. At 3 m (10 ft) from a 43-inch TV, text below about 40 pixels high on a 1080p slide is hard to read. A slide copied from a PowerPoint deck is unreadable across a room: rewrite it as one line and a QR code.
How do you keep it running without a full-time editor?
Split the work. Head office (HR, internal comms) owns the company-wide slides; each site adds a few of its own. Name one owner per site, even for 30 minutes a week. Then:
- Give each site its own area. A site manager sees and changes only their site's screens, so a mistake at one site never reaches the others.
- Lock the brand. Share designs where a site can change the text and photo but not the logo or colours.
- Approve before it airs when a site's slides must be checked. Keep the approvers to one or two named people, or slides wait for days.
- Pull from files people already keep. A screen that reads comms' shared poster folder saves re-uploading every file.
What about several sites and shifts?
- Group the screens by role, not only by site. "Every time-clock screen" is a group, so one change reaches them all.
- Schedule by shift. Night shift sees night-shift news. A morning message should not run at 2 am.
- Local time. Each site's schedule follows its own time zone.
- Turn the TVs off when the site is closed, unless a shift works around the clock.
How do you know if it works?
- Check the screens are on. Most failures are a TV switched off or a player offline. Get an alert when a screen stops reporting. A consumer TV that shows "No signal" or turns off after four hours without the remote needs its power settings changed once, or a player that controls the TV.
- Measure the action, not the view. Count scans on each QR link (use a link with tracking), app downloads and sign-ups after a campaign.
- Ask staff. A two-question pulse survey every quarter: "Do you look at the screens?" and "What do you want on them?"
- Proof of play reports show that a slide played, where and how often, for when a department asks whether its message ran.
Where Brix fits
Brix is cloud signage software for multi-site networks, used for staff screens as well as customer-facing ones.
- Recognition without manual slides: the Celebrations app lists birthdays and work anniversaries from a Google Sheet, a CSV file, BambooHR or CharlieHR.
- End dates: each file has a Show from date and an Expires date, and can move to the recycle bin when it expires.
- Sites kept apart: roles limited to the locations you choose, locked templates and approval before content airs. See user permissions by location.
- Files from Microsoft 365: a OneDrive or SharePoint folder syncs into Brix every hour, so a poster saved there reaches the screens without a second upload.
- QR codes: a QR code in the corner of a web page shown on screen.
- Shifts: schedules by time and day, plus screen hours that turn the TV off overnight.
- Hardware: the Amazon Signage Stick, Fire TV, Android boxes and a Windows player. You can use the TVs you already have.
- Price: $6 per screen per month billed annually, or $8 billed monthly.
Brix is not the right choice if you need push notifications to phones, or one app that is both the intranet and the screens. Look at employee-experience platforms that include signage instead.
Try it on one break-room TV with the 7-day free trial, no card needed. Running a tender? Our digital signage RFP template has the requirement rows.