EPISODE 172 | Derek DeWitt, communications specialist for Visix
Choosing the right content for your digital signs can feel overwhelming, but an effective strategy is rooted in one key factor: your organization’s structure. The way your company is built – whether it’s a traditional hierarchy, a dynamic matrix or a decentralized network – fundamentally shapes its culture, workflows and communication needs.
This episode unpacks how aligning your visual communications with your company’s framework can help you prioritize and produce better messaging. We explore seven distinct organizational structures and give you specific, actionable content ideas designed to reinforce your company’s goals, improve the employee experience and make your internal communications more effective than ever.
- Identify which of the seven most common organizational structures your company uses.
- Learn to tailor messaging to the communication flows and cultural values of each model.
- Discover dozens of content ideas for each of the different frameworks.
- Understand why a call to action is vital for every message and how to craft one.
- Explore using audience feedback to continuously improve your digital signage content.
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Transcript
Derek DeWitt: What kind of content should I put on my digital signs? This is a question that many people who are tasked with maintaining their digital signage system ask themselves, and the answer is almost always, well, it depends. It depends on who your audience is. It depends on what it is you’re trying to accomplish. And it even depends on what kind of organization you have. Not just what that organization does, whether it’s a business or a university or a hospital or a law office or whatever, but also what kind of structure the organization has might also affect the content that you display.
That’s what we’re gonna talk about today on this episode of Digital Signage Done Right. We’ll look at different kinds of organizational structures and how you might tailor the content that you display for that structure. Thank you for listening to this episode of the podcast. I remind you that you can subscribe, share, review and follow along with a transcript on the Visix website.
Different types of organizational structures have different kind of communication needs and different kinds of flows, so it’s important to align your content with the culture, workflows and decision-making styles that your organization has. So, for example, a flat structure might value quick updates and transparency, whereas a hierarchical structure might emphasize approvals and top-down messaging and things like this. So, a lot of things might be clarified by figuring out what kind of structure your organization is using. We’re gonna take a look at seven different types of structures: hierarchical, functional, divisional, matrix, team, network and flat.
First up, we’ll look at the hierarchical structure. This is the more traditional structure, top-down communications. There’s a clear chain of command, and these structures are often very stable, but they do require a certain amount of uniformity and control. Now, we’re not gonna talk about the negatives of each of these structures because hey, everything can work if it’s done correctly. So, let’s just talk about the good points. And the good points here are that there are defined responsibilities, there’s a defined chain of command, it’s clear how things should be reported and to whom, and, for employees, there’s a clear career path. This is the structure, this is how it works, these are the things I need to accomplish in order to rise up within that structure, getting more and more responsibility and, hopefully, a pay rise.
Because uniformity is such a key component of a hierarchical structure, it’s important to make sure that you’re really sticking to brand guidelines, and you’re not playing around with things too much. You want things to be instantly recognizable, not just for the specific organization, but also maybe, for example, color-coded messages for certain types of content; alerts are red, HR things are blue, things about sustainability are green, and so on and so forth. The whole point of a hierarchical structure is that everything is understood and very, very clear.
So, what might you put up on your screens? Well, maybe leadership messages, that’s an obvious one. Anything from the higher ups that they feel needs to be communicated to people below them in the hierarchy. Some of those may be for everybody, and some of them may be just for specific departments or teams, so you want to tailor your messaging accordingly. There’s no reason that the people in sales need to see messages that are targeting the accountants, for example. Strategy updates are another good use of digital signage. Here’s what we’re thinking, here’s where we’re going, here’s what the C-suite is planning in the next quarter or the next two quarters, here are our ultimate goals.
A common feature of hierarchical structures is something like an executive town hall, and it’s always a good idea to stick up recap messages after these meetings just to kind of reinforce the important points that were hit. Reminders to comply with various rules, whether they’re external or internal, are also good things to put up on your digital signs. Policy changes as well. Anything that’s going to change the way that things flow within the hierarchy, these need to be understood by everybody who’s expected to make those changes, so communicate them through succinct, targeted messages.
You can also reinforce alignment with the values of the organization by putting up what you might call vision and values content. Here is what we think, here is what we present ourselves as in the world, and here is how we’re going to achieve those goals.
Compare this to a functional structure, which is usually organized by departments, so you’ve got the head of the marketing department and then everybody under that person. You’ve got finance, you’ve got HR, and so on. Now, the good thing about this kind of a structure is that it is scalable. It creates efficiencies, and teams and departments have very clear goals and very clear roles and responsibilities. For employees, they can specialize their skillsets within their department or their part of the structure.
Now, KPIs might be useful in a hierarchical structure, but they’re really useful if what you have is a functional structure. Wins, milestones, progress towards goals, all on department-specific dashboards. This way, everybody knows how they’re performing, whether they’re meeting expected goals or exceeding them, and you might even throw in a little cross department collaboration in order to help break the silos. This is one of the negative things of these sorts of structures is it often creates silos. So cross department collaboration or even competition in a friendly sort of a way can really go a long way towards breaking those down.
We’ve talked many times in the past about gamification and the ways that you can kind of make it fun for different departments to sort of compete with one another. This might be trying to see who can get certain goals faster, or if it’s a company-wide initiative, who could meet a certain target goal within that initiative faster than anybody else. The trick with gamification though is that you absolutely have to have some sort of real-world prize or reward at the end of it. Just “Yay” is probably not gonna be enough for people to actually start to engage with whatever gamified solution you’ve come up with.
Having said that though, on an individual level, employee recognition really goes a long way. Again, this will probably be by department. If somebody in HR has done an outstanding job, then go ahead and call that person out and let everybody in HR know that this person is doing exceedingly well or accomplished something or got a certain certification in their training or what have you.
A divisional structure is a little bit similar, but it’s usually organized by product lines or industries or markets or even regions, all underneath a CEO. Very large corporations tend to use this structure. For example, Disney and McDonald’s both use divisional structures. Now, these can be very flexible and can respond to local changes faster than functional or hierarchical structures. There’s a lot of divisional autonomy, which encourages team experimentation and innovation. So again, everybody’s kind of sticking to their lane, but they have a lot of autonomy in that lane.
Regional sales leaderboards are a good idea or maybe divisional performance snapshots. Different customer success stories by division if you are an organization that has customers. If you are a hospital or a medical clinic then you might throw up, hey, we’ve had this many successful surgeries or we’ve managed to reduce the wait time in the waiting room to a certain number. If it’s a university, you might tout some things that are going on on campus to help foster a sense of community among the students as well as various achievements in various departments. The sports team did this, we just got this award in the physics department and so on and so forth.
You can also put up tailored messages that reflect market achievements for each division and that help foster a sense of local culture, you might call it. I’m specifically thinking of, for example, a university. Different departments are often very different in their internal cultures, and so you want your messaging to make sure to reinforce that specific department’s culture.
Now, if the functional structure is basically organized by departments and the divisional structure is organized by something else, regions or markets or product lines or what have you, the matrix structure combines both of those things, and employees very often end up reporting to multiple managers. This means you’re gonna have a lot more cross-departmental pollinization. One of the good things about this is it tends to discourage the creation of silos. It’s also much more dynamic than the previous three that we’ve talked about. It allows employees to move from project to project on an as-needed basis and very often results in faster deliverables.
A lot of matrix structure stuff is all about projects, so project-based updates are a great idea. We’re talking about progress along the timeline, allocation of resources and so on. Cross-functional team achievements are always going to be an important thing to highlight with a matrix structure organization. One thing that is incredibly useful for many people who operate within this kind of a structure are visual roadmaps that clarify overlapping responsibilities as certain projects or products are developed and brought to market.
Then you have your team structure. This is usually organized around small autonomous teams. Now, this is a very agile organizational structure. It allows for lateral career moves, and encourages growth and innovation. In a structure like this, experience matters more than seniority. Of the more common organizational structures out there, this one is probably closest to a true meritocracy. So, the kind of content you’re gonna show on your digital signage needs to encourage all of these things.
Obviously, team goal progress is very important. This is how you’re doing as a small team. But because each team is pretty autonomous, you also want to do as much as you can to help bind them together into a community, even if we all know that the team is only going to exist as it’s currently constituted for a particular short period of time, a particular project or what have you. To this end, celebrations, anniversaries, things that go beyond just the scope of work are important for binding everyone together into a real feeling of fellowship and that we are all here working side-by-side towards the same goals.
These sorts of teams, because they’re so agile, often have a lot of very short meetings, and so showing shared calendars and even reminders of various meetings is also a good idea. This is easy enough to do with most digital signage systems. You can just tie into your calendar system and make sure that everybody who needs to know about particular meeting is informed of that meeting in a timely fashion.
You can also do spotlight stories on individual team projects. This helps encourage knowledge sharing. While the whole idea is that each team has its own thing that they’re doing, you don’t want these to silo, especially because very often these teams are temporary configurations. This is very much a rising tide lifts all boats kind of an idea, so make sure that everybody is getting messages that helps them understand not just what their little group is doing, but what everybody is doing.
Now, you may work for an organization that uses a network structure. This is a highly decentralized structure, very often relying a lot on freelancers or external partners or vendors. This is incredibly agile and flexible, probably the best at breaking down silos and the best at encouraging collaboration. Like with the team structure, you want to foster better overall views of the entire organization, your markets, your customers, your products, everything. Everybody needs to know as much as possible in order to be able to do their best.
Because so much of a network structure is focused on things outside of the company or organization itself, news from partner organizations is always a good idea, whether these are specific individual messages or maybe even industry feeds that are fed directly into your digital signs. Shared success stories also go a long way towards creating a sense of accomplishment, even when a particular group of people didn’t personally achieve that success.
Resource availability updates are also important. A lot of tools will be shared between different groups of people, so everyone should know not only what’s available but where they can access it and how to use it. Contract milestones might also be something worthwhile to put up on your digital signs. Again, so everybody knows where they are in the whole overall process. For something like this, you really do need to align your teams, who are distributed very often, as much as possible, and so mission and values reminders are also a very good idea when you’re dealing with a network structure.
And then there’s the flat organization, which has few or sometimes no middle managers, and each individual has broad autonomy. This is sometimes called a flatarchy instead of a hierarchy. Basically, every employee answers to one boss. This is often used by startups or other small businesses when they’re first starting out, though as the organization grows, usually they transition to one of the previous organizational types that we’ve already talked about.
Now in this kind of a flat organization, or flatarchy, employees have a lot more responsibilities. They’re much more adaptable and flexible, and so therefore communications need to be clear and open, and innovation needs to be rewarded. Therefore, you need to have messages that have very transparent metrics. Financial health of the company, company-wide dashboards, how we’re all approaching a certain goal.
You also want to encourage ideas and innovation by putting messages out there that are basically open calls for ideas, suggestions, improvements and so on. Because space on a digital signage message is limited, a clean way to go about this is to put up what it is and then a QR code, which will then take people to a dedicated webpage where they can get more information, input their suggestions, and so on and so forth.
For a flat organization, because everybody’s kind of on their own only answering to the boss, peer recognition is key in order to build that sense of community. And in fact, community-driven content or community-created content is also a good idea in an organizational structure like this. Employee A knows what Employee A is doing, whether they’re temporarily collaborating with a couple of other people or they’re operating completely on their own. But sharing those updates with the entire organization is a great way to make sure that everybody understands not only their own specific responsibilities, but where what they’re doing fits into the larger picture.
Basically, what we’re getting at here is that there is no one-size -fits-all when it comes to choosing the right content mix. Content needs to reinforce structure and organizational culture. You should certainly be experimenting with different kinds of content and interacting with your audience in order to see how they are responding to it. If something works, keep doing that. If something doesn’t work, then change it. And this needs to be a constant process. You will never be finished improving your communication strategy. You need to get that employee feedback and review it and incorporate it whenever it makes sense. Engagement metrics will also help you make sense of how things are being received and allow you to refine your content even more.
One of the key things here in all of this, of course, is that everything needs to have some kind of call to action. Now, you may think, well, if it’s just like a leadership message or a strategy update, what’s the call to action? Well, yeah, what is the call to action? Again, it’s gonna matter entirely on the specific projects that you’re dealing with, the specific type of organization you have, the specific mix of people and so on, but you need to figure out what you can ask them to do in each case.
It might be just something as simple as a QR code that takes people to a bigger webpage that has a bit more detail. That in itself is engagement, and because you’re using a dedicated webpage, you can very easily monitor the traffic flow to that webpage, and so you automatically have your engagement statistics right there. You can also ask people what content they think would be important for them. What would they like to see? This could be through one-on-one conversations, this could be through email or IMs or whatever.
Now, just because a particular organization has a particular hierarchical or functional or matrix or whatever structure doesn’t mean that you’re prohibited from doing different kinds of messages. The whole point of this short episode has been to give you an idea of how to prioritize your messaging to make sure that you’re doing the best job possible to engage the most people in the most meaningful way in an effort to get them to do something that assists not only the entire organization but themselves. As Sean Matthews, the CEO of Visix, has often said, the whole point of digital signage is to change human behavior. And that’s why a call to action is vital for every single message that you come up with.
Now, it’s entirely possible that you don’t know what kind of a structure your organization adheres to. Well, it shouldn’t be that hard to figure it out. The fastest way is to look at the organizational chart. If there’s a big boss and then a few sub-bosses under that person and then sub-bosses under those people and it trickles down like that, then you’re hierarchical.
If everything’s organized by departments, there’s a head of finance, here are all the people in that sort of semi-hierarchical structure, here are the people in PR, here are the people in marketing, here are the people in sales, then you’re probably dealing with a functional structure. Or if you’re looking at regions or product lines or industry markets, then you’re a divisional.
If you’ve got a combination of those last two and employees tend to report to multiple managers, you’re dealing probably with a matrix structure. If instead everybody is in small, pretty autonomous teams, you’ve got a team structure. If it’s highly decentralized and mainly relies on external people who aren’t really full-time employees, then you probably got a network structure. Or you might be using a flat organization structure. Though as I said, those don’t tend to survive scalability. When an organization gets bigger, they tend to go for one of the other forms of an organization.
The key takeaway here is that this is one way to help you start to organize and prioritize what kinds of communications you can send to the people within your organization in a way that matches the way that they interact with everybody and the organization on a daily basis. It becomes a kind of virtuous feedback loop. The structure of the organization helps inform the way that internal communications are presented, and the way that those internal communications are presented help reinforce the organizational structure.
As American businessman Harold Geneen, former president of ITT once said, “Every company has two organizational structures. The formal one is written on the charts; the other one is the everyday relationship of the men and women in the organization.” The whole point here is to try and align those two as much as possible.
Ricardo Semler, the CEO of Semco Partners, which is a Brazilian company that engages in corporate re-engineering and what’s sometimes called a radical form of industrial democracy, makes the point that you have to accept change as a basic premise for any organization, and that power is derived from respect, not rules. Basically, a company that is successful is one that puts quality of life first. If this is prioritized, then everything else – profits, worker productivity, the quality of what you’re producing – everything else follows naturally.
So, think about what kind of organizational structure you are operating within and leverage those structures in a way that improves the quality of life for everybody who is involved.
Thank you for listening to this episode of Digital Signage Done Right. I remind you once again that you can follow along with a transcript on the Visix website where you will also find several helpful links.