Walk through your office, your warehouse, or your lobby. Look at the screens on the walls. What do you see?
If you see a generic weather widget, a Happy Monday! graphic that’s been up for three weeks, or—heaven forbid—a No Signal floating box, you aren’t looking at technology. You’re looking at a $10,000 screensaver.
For most non-technical business owners, digital signage is a check-the-box purchase. You bought the hardware because the office looked bare or the IT department said you needed modern communication. If that screen isn’t actively driving some type of behavior, it’s just a really expensive way to heat the room.
The Wall Decor Trap
The biggest mistake owners make is treating signage like a digital poster. A poster is static. A poster is ignorable.
When you treat your screens as decor, your employees develop environmental blindness. After three days, that Employee of the Month slide becomes part of the drywall. You’ve spent thousands on hardware and software licenses to achieve the same result as a $5 corkboard.
The shift: Your signage isn’t a gallery; it’s a scoreboard.
The Only Two Metrics That Matter
To stop wasting money, your IT-managed signage must do one of two things:
- Speed Up and Get More Done
Stop the information lag! Think about a factory worker trying to spot a machine breakdown or a salesperson checking how close they are to hitting a bonus. Having to log into a laptop slows things down way too much. Instead, if you put the key data right there—like in “big red and white letters on the wall”—people can see it, know what to do, and act fast.
- Kill the Internal Memo
Seriously, who reads all those emails? A super-important company update is just going to get lost in the shuffle. If something is urgent, the best way to get it seen is to blast it out on a big screen, like a 65-inch TV in the breakroom. That way, everyone sees the message and gets the heads-up.
Stop Managing Content
If your IT person or HR manager has to manually log in to upload a file every time you want to change the screen, your system is already dead. The value of IT in 2025 isn’t maintenance—it’s integration and automation. A high-value signage system should be set and forget. It should pull live data from your CRM, your safety logs, or your company calendar.
The Litmus Test
If your office power went out for a week, and then came back on, would your screens show something relevant immediately without a human touching a keyboard? If the answer is no, you have a decorative hobby, not a business tool.
The ROI of the Glance
You don’t need your employees to stare at the screens. You need the five-second glance.
- The Warehouse: A screen showing trucks arriving in ten minutes changes how people move.
- The Sales Floor: A live leaderboard changes the energy of the room.
- The Lobby: A screen showing a custom Welcome message changes the closing percentage of the meeting.
Is Your IT Giving You Value?
If you would like to talk about digital signage and how it can be used most effectively, give our IT experts a call at 978-798-6805.
