You’ve got messages to share. Important updates that everyone should know about. Deadlines. Disaster prevention tips. Details that you can’t afford for anyone to miss.

Which is the primary reason you invested in digital signage in the first place. You needed a better internal communications strategy, and TVs in your office seemed like a good fit. It’s nice that you can include the weather and news on your signage, but that’s not worth the time and expense of putting screens in your office and store. But increased productivity, better understanding of company goals, internal communications everyone pays attention to, and a boost in that all-essential company culture? That feels worth the investment.

There’s only one problem. When’s the last time you paid attention to the screens in your grocery store? How often do you learn new things from screens in waiting rooms, or even notice the ad screens in a train? Odds are low that you can remember a single thing that you saw on a screen.

Except for one place: The airport. You’re rushing to your gate, and wait, what gate was that again? You instinctively look for a bank of vertical TVs, the first time you’ve purposefully looked for a public TV in weeks. And there it is: You need to go to gate B33, boarding time’s in a half hour, and it’s a 10 minute walk from here. Oh, and incidentally, there’s a notice about the mobile passport app—you make a mental note to download that sometime later.

That’s when screens are effective. Productive. A game changing part of your internal communications strategy, even, for teams that are struggling to get their message across. You need a TV in your office that people will pay attention to, that they’ll want to look at—and that gives you a chance to share your more important messages, too.

First, deliver value.

What can you do to encourage employees to read announcements? It starts with what the viewer wants.

So put yourself in their shoes.

Imagine a menu sign in your favorite coffee shop. It’s 8:33AM, you’re rushing to work, and you need caffeine—and could be persuaded to buy a muffin to go, but would be equally content with just a cup of coffee. You want to see coffee options, sizes, and prices front-and-center. If the entire screen changes out and shows muffin and donut promotions, and the coffee prices are nowhere to be seen, you’re going to be annoyed. And the next time you grab a coffee, you’ll be less likely to even look at the menu board; who knows if it’ll have the info you need, anyhow? If, instead, the menu is there as expected, with a notice about 20% off baked goods on the side, you might be tempted to go ahead and grab that muffin, too.

Same in your workplace. Your team doesn’t exactly want to see HR notices, company calendar updates, and reminders about the fire drill this Thursday. If they did, they’d have stood around the bulletin board, reading every flyer and print-out.

They didn’t then, and they’re unlikely to do so now, even if your ads are on shiny new 65” screens. “Most people don’t want to hear from most companies most of the time,” says Harvard Business Review, and that goes for their employer as much as any other company.

They do, however, want to see things that interest them.

What do they want to see?

General interest things, especially those you’re pretty sure have your entire team’s interest. Sports scores for your local teams, especially around important games. The weather and transit schedules, especially before your team heads out on their lunch break or is ready to go home. News. Trending topics on social media. Finance, including exchange rates and stock market data, depending on your industry. If there's anything public that most people on your team check on their phones, that thing should be on your signage—even if it's not related to work.

Company stuff, even, can keep people’s interest if it’s actually interesting. Your team, by and large, doesn’t care about forms and paperwork; we’ll get to those more critical updates later. Even safety announcements can start to feel nagging. But your staff does care about their colleagues, so company event photos and videos are worth sharing right after an event (just don’t keep them up forever). They care about their work, so praise on social media and good reviews on Google Maps are absolutely worth sharing. Employees want to do a good job, and be recognized for it, so shout-outs and congratulations are a great fit. Even direct work-related things, data and graphs that your team would otherwise have to check on a piece of equipment or surface pages deep in software, can be time saving enough that your team would learn to rely on company screens for that bit of info rather than digging for it on their own. More boring than the news, but also more relevant to their lives than HR updates.

Each team has different interests, and yours might find some things more interesting than others. A tech team likely wants to know what Apple announced in yesterday’s keynote; a European team would care far more about FIFA games, while an American team is likely more interested in the Super Bowl or how last night’s game affected their fantasy roster.

So dig in. Stand in your team’s shoes. What do they want to see this morning? What would get them to build a habit of looking at your company’s screens, every day, multiple times a day even?

Put that on your screens. Use that as the core content on your office TV, even if it’s not why you bought signage in the first place. Because getting people to look at your screens every day is the whole battle. Your best internal communications strategy is to build digital signage content with things people care about. Once you’ve got their attention, once you’ve increased dwell time—the time they stand looking at your screens—you can share anything else you need.

Fighting Screen Blindness

For your company TV’s biggest enemy is screen blindness, the real-world equivalent of banner blindness online. Your brain automatically ignores banner ads on the top of a website and in the middle of articles; they’re just distractions in the middle of what you want to read. Same for screens on transit: They show ads and, perhaps, safety videos, and you’ve learned to recognize the patterns they follow and tune them out so effectively that you might stop noticing they’re there.

Your employees will, in the same way, become blind to the TVs in your office if they don’t have a reason to look at it.

They’ll look at the screen the first time you turn it on, then will start tuning it out if it only has uninteresting, repetitive info. Or, instead, if your screen always has relevant, interesting information that’s live-updated, they’ll build a habit of glancing at your screens whenever they want to know what’s going on. Their dwell time will increase, until it stabilizes at a meaningful daily number of seconds and glances.

If the screen in your train station always showed the stock prices or recent sports scores, and you cared about those things, you’d glance at the screen for an at-a-glance update, just like you glance at a clock. You’d build a habit of checking the screen for an update. The data updates—that’s why you look at it every day—but the format stays the same, similar to the familiar feeds in social media and forums. Along the way, you’d end up reading the metro’s notices of upcoming closures, or an advertisement from a sponsor, things you’d accidentally pay attention to since you’re already checking the score. The info you cared about that got you to build a habit; the info the metro cared about snuck its way in.

You invested in digital signage in hopes you’ll improve internal communications and keep deskless workers connected to the company. Showing sports scores and team photos feels hardly worth the investment. Yet the irony is that if you don’t show things your team is interested in, they’ll get screen blindness and cease to notice your signage, the same way you likely haven’t read notices on a bulletin board in years.

Better to let the interesting digital signage content take center stage, for the chance to increase dwell time enough that you can sneak your important messages in alongside.

Building Inside-the-Office Advertisements

Then, it’s time to pretend you’re running a news channel. Audiences don’t tune in to see the ads. They switch to the news channel to see the talking heads, the personalities taking up 2/3rds of the screen. You’re building an office TV, and your core content is the sports, weather, team photos, crucial data, and other interesting bits your signage should show to keep your team’s interest.

Everything else goes on the right-hand sidebar, or in the footer underneath. On news, perhaps, there’s weather or bullets outlining the reporters’ points on the side, with stock prices scrolling underneath. On your company’s signage, that’s where you can sneak in your HR updates, founder messages, health and safety notices, and all the other company communications you need to broadcast on signage.

It’s so little space for your message. And yet, better the sidebar than no visibility at all.

You’ve got their attention with the core content that interests them. They’re looking at your company screens, just like you look at the menu screens when you walk up to the counter. You’ve raised dwell time. Now, like the mythical muffin ad at the cafe, you can show them a bit of extra info, things they’re less interested in, and they’ll see them. They’re ads for your business—the corporate equivalent of a PSA playing at primetime. Your company announcements and updates might get more attention, on the sidebar, than if you put them front and center and accidentally trained people to tune them out.

Your team didn’t look at the TV to get reminded to wear a hard hat or that insurance open enrollment is ending soon. They looked for the sports scores and to see if they’re in the photo from last weekend’s outing. And they accidentally saw your HR notice, and now you’ve accomplished your job without making your team any less likely to see your next message (something that might happen if your announcement took up the whole screen). That’s when a company TV is successful.

The most important thing is what’s important to other people, not what’s important to the company.

Remember that, and you’ll have a fighting chance at beating screen blindness, keeping your team’s interest and getting across those company-important messages at the same time with a company TV.

Image Credit: Menu image by Croissant via Unsplash, base header photo by Thanongsak Kongtong via Unsplash, screen blindness photo by Norbert Braun via Unsplash