While large regional jets are at the heart of Envoy Air’s fleet, its focus and energy flows from each and every employee to the customers it serves. That means it’s critical to keep everyone on the team updated with relevant information about pressing items including weather events and shift schedules.
Envoy Air is like other organizations in that it had established a corporate intranet to communicate important news. But much of its workforce — pilots, flight attendants, and ground crews — aren’t sitting at desks in front of a computer all day long.
This makes the strategic use of digital displays an important element in employee communications. Managing those displays and keeping content updated, however, was far from streamlined.
“When it came to screens and signage, it was higgledy-piggledy,” said Adam Simmons, Director of Communications at Envoy Air, as he explained the confusion and disorder. While some locations had higher-quality displays than others, for example, it was not uncommon for Envoy Air to rely on PowerPoint presentations loaded onto USB sticks that staff had to carry around. This fell short of its goal of offering dynamic, real-time data. “What we were displaying was a slide show, effectively.”
Luiz da Silva, Managing Director of Strategy and Operations Analysis at Envoy Air, explained that his team initially developed an in-house application to refresh general statistics on performance dashboards by pinging a website. These dashboards were primarily located at Envoy’s headquarters, but even there, the setup required minicomputers to be manually adapted to the existing displays.
“It wasn’t the most effective arrangement,” Simmons added. “At our headquarters, it was a wall with acrylic panels and a small monitor screen in the center. When we first moved in, we replaced the panels with stock photography, but the monitor ended up looking out of place and didn’t stand out — it just didn’t work well.”