Industry and internal communication

A notice demands that somebody stops, looks and reads. That is exactly what nobody does on the way to the machine. On top of that, a notice board makes everything equally important: the holiday plan hangs next to the staff meeting, next to the note about the broken coffee machine. Anyone who has read something out of date three times does not look the fourth time.

A screen changes nothing about this at first. It changes something as soon as it does three things paper cannot. It shows one after another instead of side by side, so always one thing only. It tidies up after itself, because every item carries an expiry date. And it stands where people are waiting anyway: at the coffee machine, in the changing room, at the time clock.

That waiting time is the real raw material. Two minutes at the machine is more attention than a circular ever gets. Which is why the two-second calculation from the first chapter does not apply here: in the break room, pages may stand longer and carry more figures. At the passage into the hall it applies again in full force.

A plant has no customers in the building, but shifts, trades and routes. Every place has its own audience and its own dwell time, and therefore its own content.

Start with one place, not six. The break room is almost always the right first one: attention is greatest there and the damage smallest if the content is not yet right in the first weeks.

The last point is not a formality. A date of birth is personal data under the revised Data Protection Act, and not everyone wants half the workforce to know their age. Ask once in writing, record the answer and respect a no without coming back to it.

Figures on a screen in the hall are the most effective and at the same time the most delicate element of an internal installation: a shift sees at once where it stands — and the same display quickly turns into performance monitoring.

Legally and humanly the same rule applies: figures are shown per line, per machine or per shift, never per person. A display that makes the behaviour of individuals visible is a monitoring system for behavioural control, and the Labour Act and its ordinance set narrow limits on that. The Participation Act also gives the employee representatives a right to be heard. Bring the staff committee to the table before the first figure goes live. It costs one meeting and saves a year of mistrust.

The question always comes up the same way: does the machine have to talk to the screen? It does not, at least not at the start. Almost every internal installation we have accompanied began with a spreadsheet somebody updates on a Friday afternoon.

The last point is a network topic, not a signage topic. The production network and the office world stay apart; the player fetches its data from a defined point and never writes back. How network, power and access are built is covered in the chapter on network and security.

Start with the spreadsheet. Once it is clear after three months which figure really gets looked at every day, you will also know which interface is worth having.

A device from the electronics shop does not survive a production hall for long. Dust settles in the fan, cutting fluid creeps into every opening, in winter the hall sits at ten degrees and in August far above that.

Mounting at height is easily forgotten. A surface below the hall ceiling is quickly fitted and afterwards can only be serviced with a lift platform. Hang lower where you can, and plan access for maintenance at the same time.

In many plants, people from eight countries work the same shift. German is the company language, but not the language everyone reads in under time pressure. A text that a third of the workforce only half understands is not a notice but a risk.

The same rule applies to safety communication as to wayfinding in the previous chapter: the screen reminds, it does not alarm. Protective equipment, conduct rules, what to do after a near miss, the assembly points — all of that may and should run, ideally in rotation so it does not become wallpaper. The alarm itself stays with the system built for it.

An internal installation lives or dies by participation. If the content comes only from management, within two months the surface is a bulletin organ nobody looks at any more. If it comes from everywhere without rules, something will eventually end up on it that has no business being there.

A surface stays alive through people, not through technology. A picture of the apprentices' project, the long-service colleague with her team, the photo of the new machining centre on delivery day: these items get retold, and the figure beside them gets read along the way. After six months, ask during the break what stuck. The answer says more than any analytics report.