The past few years threw a wrench into employee engagement as the workplace made a drastic shift and sent their employees to work from home. From conventional 9-5 (and sometimes more) office hours which included team meetings, happy-hours, and brainstorming on breaks, the corporate world has taken a turn to remote and hybrid work settings.
As many businesses are aware, keeping employees motivated, productive, engaged and connected has proven to be inherent for a company to keep on moving forward. At the same time, this has also proven to be increasingly difficult as the workplace has shed its old-school ways. As work went remote, so did employee engagement.
A strong and effective communication strategy that includes high-quality video has proven to be one of the most productive methods for maintaining effective levels of internal company communication. With interactions shifting to video and LMS platforms, HR teams and management have had to adopt new ways to hire and onboard employees remotely, update their teams virtually and keep their employees in-the-know about what is going on internally.
In this article we will provide a few examples of how video content can improve your internal company communication as well as a few tips on how to do it best.
Explainer Videos
Explainer videos are usually short and animated, illustrating more complex or dryer ideas in a way that is simple, engaging and fun to watch. They often use great storytelling techniques and striking animation in doing so. Email and text-based employee communication can be easily trashed, misinterpreted or archived, which makes explainer videos more engaging and harder to ignore.
Explainer videos are a great tool for training new employees and supporting onboarding processes. With a short and engaging video, you can effectively explain to your employees how your product or service works, internal processes, and other important information that they probably wouldn’t retain if they were said or written.
Employee Onboarding Videos
Educating and training new employees has become a challenge in the new work-from-home era but thanks to use of video content, new employees can be guided remotely every step of the way during their onboarding process. You can use your current LMS platform to host video content, making it easily accessible and available at any point in time.
Company Videos
The aim of company videos is to take the business side of the employee-employer interaction and relate to him for what he is, a human with feelings, interests, passion, and a desire to be a part of something. These videos tell the company’s story, its values and culture, usually told by the employees themselves. Company videos are important because they encourage employees to develop that “team spirit” making them proud of their workplace and want to give back to it. Company videos are also a great tool during recruitment and onboarding to inspire applicants to want to work within a specific organization.
Training Videos
These videos aim to explain to the viewer how to complete a task or activity from start to finish. When done right, they are straightforward and easy-to-follow. These videos are ideal for employee training and onboarding processes as they reduce training time, enhance the learning experience and walk team members through a new process at their own pace.
Compliance Videos:
There are several issues that need to be addressed during onboarding, including company standards, rules, occupational hazards, and other important topics. These regulations aren’t the most exciting part of starting a new position, but they are very important and are vital to the integrity of a business. With an engaging video, it is possible to get employees acquainted with policies and retain the important messages that the videos present.
Best Practices:
Integrate other mediums and creative resources
Text, images, animation, graphic design, sound effects make the viewer become more engaged and committed to what he is watching and gets your message across a lot quicker whilst being a lot more memorable.
Host your videos wisely
Choosing the right platform to host your videos and making sure they are easy to find are important in ensuring that they are put to good use. Using a digital or LMS platform that is familiar to employees and easy to manage is essential!
Live action or animation
Choosing the right format for your video has a very important role in the affect your video has on your audience. For explainer videos or topics that require presenting a lot of information, such as company reports, company regulations and so on, you might be better of finding a more creative and compelling way to present these topics and chose animation as the preferred alternative. Want to reflect on the first half of 2022 through a talking giraffe on the moon? Animation allows you helps you simplify complex or abstract ideas, making them more easily understood, accessible and retainable.
Live-action videos are a great solution when you are looking to send out a message that is personal, intimate and approachable. Want to let your employees know that you appreciate them? They will surely feel the love a lot more if they see it live.
Short and sweet
One of the great advantages of video content is that you condense a lot of information in a short amount of time. This is a big plus because we are all familiar of how people’s attention spans are getting shorter. Aim to create videos that don’t push two-minute mark. Keep it short and straight to the point– introduce your core message within the first 30 seconds, present what is relevant, adds value and gets your message across.
Tell a story
What makes a video successful is it’s ability to tell a story. Whilst trying to be as educational as possible, try to get your message across with a good story and clear example. Storytelling will make your brand more accessible, memorable and a lot more likeable.
Creating video content that masters its desired affect isn’t always an easy task. However, with the right planning, thought process, script writing, illustrations, editing and affects, videos can be an essential part of building a proper corporate culture. Businesses that use the power of video to improve employee engagement are future-proofing their workplace. If you’re not using it yet in your internal communications, it might be time to rethink things and include it.