EPISODE 177 | Guest: Jill Perardi, senior director of professional services for Visix
A culture of recognition actively builds a more positive and productive environment. Publicly acknowledging achievements and positive behaviors isn’t just a morale booster; it’s a strategic tool that directly impacts the bottom line. It fuels engagement, strengthens loyalty and significantly improves retention by tapping into the fundamental human need to feel valued as part of a group. In any setting – from corporate offices to school hallways – a strong recognition strategy transforms a collection of individuals into a motivated and cohesive community.
Moving from the “why” to the “how,” this episode details the advantages of using digital signage for recognition over traditional methods like plaques or trophies. We cover practical applications, from interactive donor boards and digital yearbooks to celebrating employee milestones, showing how modern technology can help build a stronger, more connected community.
- Learn why public acknowledgement is a powerful driver of behavior and culture.
- Understand the advantages of digital recognition over traditional plaques and trophies.
- Discover recognition signage ideas for corporate, education and healthcare settings.
- Get tips for implementing a recognition strategy, from content mix to display placement.
- Explore how to create a living history with interactive storytelling and recognition.
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Learn more about our interactive recognition boards here.
Transcript
Derek DeWitt: You might read a lot of articles these days about how important employee recognition seems to be. What we’re talking about is acknowledgement and praise of employee behavior or employee achievements, things like this. It’s even maybe more important to people who are still in school, be that college or even K-12. And digital signage is kind of a great medium to help you in your recognition efforts.
Now, of course, there are some real bottom-line benefits to doing this as well. And Visix has recently developed new products to help you in these endeavors. Today we’re gonna talk about that with Jill Perardi. She is Senior director of professional services for Visix. Hi, Jill. Thanks for coming on.
Jill Perardi: Hey, Derek, thanks for having me.
Derek DeWitt: Of course. And thank you everybody out there for listening. Don’t forget, you can subscribe and like and share, and you can follow along with a transcript on the Visix website.
So Jill, there’s been a lot of talk, obviously, since a lot of our clients are corporate, about how there are benefits for employees being recognized and so on, on screens, whether that’s from their managers or that’s from their peers, their fellow employees or what have you.
And of course, when we go into the, let’s say, pre-work world, the world of education, this holds true as well. There’s some of the specific reasons and the sorts of things that you recognize might be different.
Let’s just kinda run through real quick why this is important and especially how, with mediums like digital signage and obviously with smartphones and social media and that kind of mindset that those create, I think we’ve really shifted into a much more dynamic model of recognition these days.
Jill Perardi: Yeah. So, digital recognition is great because you can easily update it. You can build upon it. You know, we’re not talking about old school plaques on walls and framing of photos and class composites anymore. You know, it’s done digitally now.
So, if you recognize people or groups of people digitally, now you can update it, you can build upon it, you can keep a digital history as opposed to having to fill your walls and your hallways and your open spaces with physical composite photos or product photos or whatever it might be, newspapers framed even.
Derek DeWitt: Right. And I’ll also say electronic stuff is easier to share if you’re using, say, a multi-channel approach. Easier to share across different kinds of platforms.
Jill Perardi: Yeah, being digital is great because you can share that information easily as well. And in the world these days, so many people are on social media and share a lot of information, if not too much at times. But it’s great to be able to share and recognize yourself or others.
Derek DeWitt: Yeah. Yeah, that’s true. I mean, you know, it’s one of those funny things, especially I think for, say Americans especially, because we’re all sort of raised with this idea of, boy, you’re such an individual, and yet we see time and time again we’re actually group creatures. We very much go with the group in everything from conversations that we’re having to the way that we vote for things to even on reality TV shows, you see people get into group think very, very quickly. And so there is this idea of where do I fit, the individual fit, within the larger context of the group? And I think that this public acknowledgement really does drive human behavior in all contexts.
Jill Perardi: Yeah, I agree. I mean, belonging is a basic human need for critical wellbeing and lack of belonging is, there are a lot of articles out there where it’s tied to poor academic outcomes, you know, maybe higher turnover in a corporate environment, lower engagement as a student or as an employee. And so, we all have this need to belong and to be recognized for the group to which we belong.
Derek DeWitt: There’s a lot of talk about how, oh, well these are the benefits of recognition, and the benefits are certainly there. But it’s interesting, there’s been a bit more work done recently about the negative effects of negativity.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics recently said just negativity at work, because it just kinda percolates in and stains everything, it affects the particular person who’s experiencing the negativity. They’re not as skippy at work, they’re not as on the ball, they’re certainly not in a mindset of growth or of moving forward or efficiency, and it also has a tendency to spread, like a stain, to other people.
So, the Bureau of Labor Statistics says negativity, just negativity, costs, overall, U.S. businesses $3 billion a year. Which is an astonishing amount of money, like…! And, of course, I think we have to assume that it’s also true in other contexts, in university and so on.
When there’s just this kind of positive foundation, everybody’s kind of moving along and they’re all kind of moving along together and little bits of recognition. We’re not talking about making a huge, huge stink. It could be something as simple as “good job” or “nicely done on that paper”. Just those things, little things, can really do an enormous amount of good for your organization, regardless of what kind it is.
Jill Perardi: Absolutely. And it needs to be timely as well. So that is one benefit of digital recognition, you know, that we’re talking about today, is making it timely. Because if you give somebody that pat on the back, that good job and it’s well after something has taken place, you know, everybody’s kind of forgotten about it at that point.
So, let’s build some momentum of positivity instead of toxicity. You know, make that timely, visible recognition for a little “good job” all the way up to, you know, “this group won a state championship”. Let’s do it so we make it visible, and let’s forget about those forgotten plaques and outdated displays and information that pops up well after the event has taken place, no matter how big or small it was.
Derek DeWitt: Right. I mean, that’s the thing. I’ve said this many, many times on here, but we’ve been saying this since the beginning of the podcast, if you have physical world things, they very quickly become just part of the background, and you literally just don’t notice them anymore. Whereas something that is changing and yeah, it’s also bright and colorful, but I think the important thing is, is that there’s movement, that there’s change, that there’s new stuff all the time. Digital signage just inherently grabs your attention more.
‘Cause if I walk into a room that has, I don’t know, let’s say it’s a lobby and it has six plaques of recognition or what have you, the fifth time I walk in that room, I’m not gonna see those plaques. I won’t even see, in a school, the trophy case unless that’s my particular obsession. I’ll just blank it out because I’m thinking about other things. Something that’s moving and colorful and all that and digital, I’ll probably notice more easily.
Jill Perardi: Right. And so, let’s say the trophy case, you’re not gonna notice that until a new trophy has been added. But I mean, what about all the old ones that are in there? You know, maybe if it’s digital, show videos of last year’s win or whatever that might be, whether it’s again, your football team, but it doesn’t have to be. I mean, show videos of your debate team and put those on your digital signage. It’s gonna grab attention if it is new and changing, as you mentioned.
Derek DeWitt: Yeah, seriously. I mean, there’s literally nothing that you can’t put up… 4-H! Well, you know, honestly, haha 4-H, but like, hey, look, animal, oh, animals are nice, and now I’m paying attention, oh, that’s right, I forgot we have a 4-H program, you know, blah, blah, blah. So yeah, it actually helps sort of create a knitting together of the whole community as well.
Jill Perardi: Absolutely. And, you know, public acknowledgement drives human behavior. I was on our website the other day and I was looking at a donor board recognition infographic looking it up to send to somebody, and there was a stat in there that said, donors want stories. You know, 42% of donors say they want personal stories from donation recipients to influence their decision to give. So, I thought that was interesting. So, it’s like the organizations and the individuals who are giving themselves want to hear the narratives, basically as to how their contributions made an impact.
So, I think that’s in all organizations, right? If you are a student and you hear this story of what somebody did, maybe it’s a story of an alumni, somebody that went to your school and what they’re doing now and how they’re making an impact in the world, but they were at the same school that you’re at now, maybe that will influence you and change your human behavior and improve your belief in yourself, that you can go do with this person is doing.
Or maybe it’s, you know, you’re wanting to be on the debate team, you’re the lowly freshman and you can’t get on it yet, but you’re gonna, you know, you see the recognition and the excitement that they’re getting, so it’s going to strengthen your sense of identity and have you work toward becoming that person or being a part of that team or that group.
Derek DeWitt: Yeah, I think that’s all very true. So, obviously we’ve got different sectors of the world out there, different types of clients, for example, that we have, like education, student engagement.
Jill Perardi: Yeah, student engagement and achievements, academics, the arts, you know, hall of fame athletes, alumni, donors. One that I think is a lot of fun is the idea of a digital yearbook. And the great thing, again, about digital is build upon that. Put all of your yearbooks digitally into a project.
Because again, if you’re going to the same school that someone else in your family, or an old friend or somebody went to, and it’s digital, scan that QR code, take it away with you on your phone, and next time you’re together, be like, hey, I found your, you know, your senior photo from 1995 and, you know, making fun of your hair. You know, take it with you. And then your information is in there as well. And so, it grabs attention. It benefits a wider audience, and your information can be out there in the world sharing with others.
Derek DeWitt: Yeah, yeah. That’s true. Or, you know, it could be like, hey, Uncle Teo, you know, I didn’t realize that you had the touchdown at the game when you were going to school here and you were the hero. What was that like, you know? So, all sorts of things can come out of that.
Obviously, in the corporate world, and again, I know it all sounds kind of vague and fluffy and, and no hard numbers on this, except we really do have hard numbers now, we’ve talked about this endlessly on this podcast, but yeah, company culture creates a sense of loyalty. People really do, they just work harder, they work smarter. And you get employee retention. Loyalty leads to retention. Employee retention, I don’t think people who don’t own businesses or run businesses really know how important that is, ’cause it is expensive to onboard somebody new. It just is. It’s super pricey. It’s actually super important to get good people and keep them.
Jill Perardi: Yeah, absolutely. And if it’s a client-facing employee, I mean, you could lose revenue as a result of that turnover. So, employee retention is uber important. And it’s great to be able to recognize your employees as well. It’s great for company and culture. It’s a great way to celebrate milestones. And when we have someone in our organization that’s been here 31 years this week, that’s insanity to me. So, you know, we’ve got the newer employees, and we’ve got the employees that have been here a long time and recognize them all. They’re all great milestones.
Derek DeWitt: I could just see that digital signage message, Happy 31st anniversary: you’re insane!
Jill Perardi: I’m not sure that’s exactly what it said, but….
Derek DeWitt: How about in a different context like say in healthcare, what kinda stuff would you, would you put up there?
Jill Perardi: Healthcare’s great for honoring staff, particularly first responders. I mean, they’re doing a lot of work, and they are, most of the time, under recognized. So, honor your staff, recognize patient families and memorial tributes. So, it could be a donor board in a traditional sense where that, you know, these groups of people or these organizations have made financial contributions to our healthcare system or facility, and we thank them for it.
It could be organ donations. I’ve had clients that have wanted to do that before and they wanna recognize people that have made contributions that way. Or maybe it’s a memorial tribute, like, thank you for taking such good care of my father while he was here.
Recognize patient families, particularly those that you might have to see often. You know, you think about a cancer center or a children’s hospital. There are families that are there for a very long time and recognize those families and make them as comfortable and welcomed as possible.
Derek DeWitt: I’m think even like community organizations, food banks, nonprofits, they can also, like, people are very often volunteering their time. Throw them a bone. Give them some recognition.
Jill Perardi: Absolutely. Recognize those volunteers. And again, it goes back to the storytelling. You know, people want personal stories and how it influenced their decision to give financially, given time. You know, maybe someone sees that volunteer all the time, but they have no idea why they volunteer there. They think maybe it’s just something they wanna do, but there’s a personal story behind it. And that could really touch some others and could be a positive benefit of sharing that with others.
Derek DeWitt: Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely. I read something recently that said that some companies and organizations have really taken this on board. ‘Cause we’ve been now talking about recognition really since the social media era began in the 20-teens and which is, you know, quite a long time. And now some people are starting to really take a seriously hard look at it and go, huh, you know, there are actually all these different kinds of recognition.
You could have, obviously, from the bosses, the people who are in charge. But you can also have peer-to-peer type stuff. It could be attributed, this recognition is from this individual or this team or what have you, or it could just be anonymous, especially on a digital signage system. It’s like, hey, the system is saying good job. It could be private, or it could be out for the whole public to see. And even what you recognize. It could be that you achieved something, or it could just be that you have certain behavior that we, as an organization, want to encourage.
Jill Perardi: This doesn’t have to be recognition because you’ve won something or you did something just fantastic, better than everybody else. It could be just a simple thank you for being kind and helping me out the other day.
Derek DeWitt: Right. Or, hey, guess what, it has been noticed, you are assiduous about the recycling, so thanks.
Jill Perardi: Exactly.
Derek DeWitt: So now Visix has these interactive recognition boards, which is quite exciting. Tell me about some of the features and benefits of those features for this product.
Jill Perardi: Yeah, so it’s basically digital storytelling. Tell the story of those Hall of Fame athletes, the academics, you know, the arts, your alumni, your donors. It is that digital storytelling capability. You can make real time updates to them. So, you can be timely, as we discussed, to help reinforce that behavior or contribute to ongoing motivation.
And you can be really specific, because there’s no limit on how many people, events, videos, photos, bios that you can include in these boards. Be specific about the recognition that you’re trying to share, details about the donor, the employee, the alumnus, you know, foster a sense of connection. And so that’s what these boards do.
They’re customizable for different industries and recognition types. So, it’s not like this has to be Hall of Fame athletes. You can use your colors, your branding, your photos, your videos. They are completely mobile, which I think is very cool, very, you know, they’re responsive. Scan that QR code and take it with you.
Again, there’s no limit on the amount of information that you can include and they’re fully hosted, so you don’t have to deal with the backend technology side of it. We give you a nice little URL, and it’s a pretty website that you can put on your interactive displays. Someone can view it on their phone, their tablet.
And a really cool part is the CMS is built in. So, let’s say you wanna add more donors, you don’t need our help to do it. We’ve created this template for you. You can go in and add people each year or more as timely recognition needs to be. You’ve got a new logo and you wanna swap that out. That’s very easy to do in the built-in CMS.
The built-in CMS gives you the opportunity to, let’s say it’s a donor situation or it’s a, you know, after the end of each athletic season, you wanna update all the people that were involved in either that campaign or that season, all of their photos, all of their names. In that built-in CMS, you can do that easily with batch updates, with just, you know, importing a CSV or Excel file, and then you can forget about it for the next year.
If you are recognizing people on the fly and in a timely fashion, log in, add somebody, you know, it’s kind of a copy situation. Copy-paste the last person, you know, swap out the photo or the bio and there you go. And so, it’s really economical over the life of the project, because you can continuously update this as opposed to, I am creating a poster to thank somebody, or I’m creating an old school plaque to put on a wall. So, we’ve gotta wait for the season to end. We have to print all their names, we have to, you know, get it all engraved on this plaque. Then we have to have someone come in and hang in in the right spot.
Derek DeWitt: Then we realize we misspelled the name. So now we have to have a new plaque engraved.
Jill Perardi: Right! Absolutely. Or you know, if it’s that alumni recognition, like somebody’s moved, somebody’s got a new job, you know, go ahead and update that in a timely fashion. So, it’s really, you’re getting more bang for your buck over the life of the project. And if you go with that kind of digital yearbook route, you continue to add to it constantly, and you’ve got just a history of information there. You know, you’re really getting a lot out of your project in that way.
Derek DeWitt: Right, it actually gets bigger and bigger each year and you’re just showing whatever sections of it you feel like showing.
Jill Perardi: Right.
Derek DeWitt: So, I understand you have basically a four-phase or four-point implementation strategy for getting these things up and running and making them as effective as they can be.
Jill Perardi: Yeah, for the most part. And we try to make it as easy as possible. So, you know, come to us with your idea. We’ll work together to choose the right content mix for your audience. Is it names, is it photos, is it bios, is it videos? What do you have? What do you, you know, need us to resize? That sort of thing. And so, you know, we’ll talk about that content mix and what your goal is to help you choose the best-looking design and template and how people or teams or organizations are going to be recognized.
Of course, placement of the displays are always important. Anytime you’re talking about digital signage, it’s important. I’ve talked about this on this podcast before. I was working on an interactive wayfinding project with a client and went to their facility after it was up and running. And I’m like, I know we have this great project that 1) is gorgeous, but 2) really helped you navigate this building. You know, the client spent a ton of time on making sure it was, you know, accurate and user-friendly. Where is it? And they had it tucked behind a staircase. Not even near the elevators that you had to go up.
So, placement and visibility of the display is incredibly important because you don’t wanna spend time and money on something that no one is going to even see. So, you’ve gotta make sure you’ve got it in the right spot. And we can talk through ideas on that with you.
And then just maintain that fresh relevant content. Come up with a plan on who is going to be responsible for updating this information. Again, the CMS is built in, the content management side of it is built into the website. So, it’s really easy for somebody to log in and add more people, more teams, whatever it might be throughout the year. Find out who that person is gonna be. We’ll work together to show you how to do it. Super easy.
You can go about your business and just see the community’s response to it, you know, see how you wanna add to it. And maybe you have a display in one area of your school or a campus that focuses just on one category. It is just on athletics. But then you’ve got this great concert hall or auditorium, and you want to focus on the arts in that one. Let’s see how we can expand this.
Derek DeWitt: Yeah, that’s true. Be a little odd to have football stuff up in front of the, you know, the music room, and hey, we’re doing Annie Got Her Gun in front of the football stadium. It is a nice idea to kind of parcel it out. ‘Cause the schools are, the infrastructure of the school’s already parceled out like that.
Jill Perardi: Yeah. But don’t forget, you can also incorporate regular digital signage. So, if you do wanna advertise your musical that’s coming up at your football game, your lacrosse game, you know, you can use that traditional digital signage to advertise that. You’re using a touchscreen, touch the screen and then dive into the athletics department from there.
Derek DeWitt: Right. I like, too, you said not just measure success in some way, but keep tabs on the community response. ‘Cause I think ultimately, and again, I know it sounds fluffy and vague and, and pie in the sky type stuff, but I don’t know a better way to say it, the way we often talk about it is, it’s about building stronger communities. But it kind of is, or it’s about weaving us together into an us instead of a bunch of me’s.
Jill Perardi: Absolutely it is. And you just said that perfectly. That’s absolutely what it is. And building employee retention, employee engagement, student engagement, student happiness. And again, make it a we instead of a bunch of me’s, build that stronger community.
Derek DeWitt: So, recognition has become a very large and broad category for all kinds of organizations and business sectors. Education, healthcare, you name it. You know, if it’s a bunch of machines making your cars, no, you don’t need to, you know, say “good job robot number 754”, but if it’s a person, you know, pat them on the back once in a while. And using digital signage is a great way to do that.
And an even better way for, especially for a larger and more widespread facilities and organizations, is to use these new Visix interactive recognition boards, which just allow you to do a whole bunch of things. Quite simply keep a record of it all and help just kinda knit everybody together into a more cohesive whole where it really is a rising tide lifts all boats. It’s true. We actually have the numbers now. Go out and read some studies. So, you might want to consider using a product like these recognition boards to reimagine your own recognition strategy.
Well, I’d, I’d like to thank my guest for talking with me about this today. She is Jill Perardi, she’s senior director of professional services for Visix. Thanks for telling me all about the new recognition boards, Jill. Super interesting. I wish I’d had these, you know, in my younger days. It would’ve been cool.
Jill Perardi: I know, I agree. Maybe I go back to my high school and ask them to do some digital yearbooks. But I don’t think I want my senior class picture hair showing up for all the world to see anymore.
Derek DeWitt: Right. That year with braces, that was not a good year for me.
Jill Perardi: It was rough.
Derek DeWitt: Right. And again, thank you everybody out there for listening to this episode of the podcast. And I remind you that you can follow along with a transcript on the Visix website.