Turning Data Into Clear Workplace Signals

Key Takeaways

• Visual indicators such as colours, traffic lights and icons can make complex data easier to interpret.
• The most useful communication often focuses on the meaning behind the data, not the raw numbers themselves.
• Iterating with feedback from employees helps organisations present information in ways people actually understand.

Topics

• Digital Signage
• Communications
• Data & Analytics
• Health and Safety

Transcript

Recently across numbers of the states in the U.S., it's become law to present air quality figures, and I think heat index figures as well. And so we're seeing more and more of this kind of traffic light type communication. Yeah, I love this. I think, you know, again, as someone who's basically not very strong on this, like this is a good visual indicator. It could be a heat map, it could be traffic lights. You're basically giving me a visual sense of, you know, what should I be caring about? What should I be thinking about? I even think with some of this stuff, it could be that the data itself isn't even visualized at all. It could be that the data actually then, you know, triggers the image. I think we were talking about that with that weather forecast, right? You don't need to see the number. The image will tell you the story you need to see. And actually, we're just using data more as, like, business logic behind the scenes, but actually telling the story is a data-driven prompt rather than just data on a screen. So we can be super imaginative with that. And again, I think it's just taking—it's realizing that everyone is different in how they interpret this information. And then probably the penny drop moment for most customers is because the screen is so versatile in what you can do, you have the choice to keep showing everything in these different ways and experimenting. And then actually, like, you know, one of the comments we had earlier, taking the feedback from people on the floor and seeing how they prefer to consume this, and even including them as well in that content creation is, you know, you're going to find that these just become more essential if you keep iterating and just thinking about these simple concepts. Yeah, I just had my own example of this, which I think about sometimes with data, employees don't really know what you're trying to tell them. And so I don't know if anybody has AirPod Pros and has used them to do the hearing test yet using the new iOS, but I got the results, and the results, the data they gave me absolutely meant nothing to me. I didn't know how to interpret the data until they basically just said, Little to no hearing loss. Great, that's all I needed to know, right? The decibel amount, all that kind of stuff that they were sharing with me was like, I don't understand. I actually put it in the ChatGPT to try to understand it a little bit more, but really all I needed was like thumbs up or not. And I think sometimes the data actually gets in that instant reaction of what employees need to know, and that's where I think colors, emojis, whatever that is, comes into play because the number 28 may not mean anything to someone, but if it's good, then that's fine. That's all they need to know. The air quality is good, temperature is normal. That's what they need to know. It's not the data that is the important part.