During this unprecedented time, technology is the crucial bridge between many employees and their workplaces. It is even more essential to communicate effectively as well as create opportunities to connect despite the distance. It can be challenging to get the message out to employees across varying locations without the right communication tools to keep them engaged.
Video is an effective medium you can use to help cut through the noise and capture employees’ attention. Video communications allow you to connect in a clear, authentic way and motivate vividly and visually, capturing the kind of realism that an email or phone call simply cannot.
Internal communications videos are popular, cost-friendly, easy-to-create tools you can use to increase employee engagement, spark team collaboration and ensure reusable, secure content to keep in your organizational archives.
Why Use Video? A Look at the Numbers
- 94% of employees who have experienced live-streamed video at work prefer at least one event to be live streamed thereafter.1
- 49% of employees who watched videos in the workplace found internal company meetings to be the most valuable.1
- 75% of employees are more likely to watch a video than to read documents, emails or web articles.2
- Mobile video consumption rises 100% every year.3
- 59% of senior executives agree that if both text and video are available on the same subject on the same page, they prefer it in video.4
- Video in an email leads to 200-300% increase in click-through rates.3
5 Benefits of Using Video to Engage Your Employees
Aside from the statistics above, there are many other compelling reasons and ways to incorporate video communications to engage your employees:
#1 - Increase Your Reach
It’s nearly impossible to lock in a meeting time that agrees with everyone’s schedule these days. This can result in low employee attendance and missed messages. By live streaming your next all-staff meeting or major announcement, you give every employee the opportunity to attend regardless of location. Additionally, the recording can be played for those who couldn’t make it work with their schedules. Your message will reach more people without causing scheduling conflicts.
- Open Enrollment - A lot of questions arise during Open Enrollment. By using video, you can explain important benefits changes, the reasoning behind the changes and how the new plan(s) will help. In essence, you can bring your benefits portal to life. Employees’ spouses and family members can also view the changes, which is one added perk of video as the medium.
- Benefits Spotlighting - Video can also be used throughout the year to highlight relevant benefits. For example, you can plug your employees’ nutrition counseling benefit with a video of a chef preparing a healthy, nourishing meal. Or, a charismatic and informative spokesperson can walk your employees through the benefits portal to showcase what’s available while explaining where to find key information.
#2 - Reduce Costs but Stay Connected
By hosting virtual meetings, your organization eliminates the need for an expensive venue or the compounding employee travel costs (in either money, jet lag or time lost) that come from these events.
- Learning and Development - According to Wordstream, when people watch a video, they recall about 95% of the message versus only 10% with simple text or sound. This has considerable implications for the use of video in employee learning and development. Videos can help employees stay focused on training and retain more of what they learn.
- Status Updates - Annual reports and organizational performance meetings can get a bit… stale. Using video to share financials, goals and other timely metrics can perk things up and help your employees keep engaging with the information at hand. Where they might have just skimmed the surface of a stale PDF report, your video can take dry data and turn it into visualizations and graphics that break through the boredom.
#3 - Showcase (& Strengthen) Your Brand
While your workforce is your organization's greatest resource, it’s also a remarkable recruiting asset. Videos of your employees in action showcase how they act, look, talk and exude energy in the work they do. The footage can be used as a valuable method for giving job seekers insight into what it’s like to work at your company. You can use it to build a brand that attracts the right candidates for the job.
- Company Culture - A video that vividly depicts the story behind your organization can elicit feelings of immense pride for the people working there. Your company has a one-of-a-kind set of milestones, successes and even failures that forged its path to today. Telling it with video can help current and new employees understand where you came from, where you’re going, and why you operate the way you do. This helps create clarity and buy-in.
- Employee Testimonials and Highlights - When your employees go above and beyond, show it. Not only will this encourage them to stay driven and dedicated to the work they love, it will show your appreciation for what they do. This is a synergistic and essential aspect of keeping an engaged workforce. What better medium than video to reinforce the message that hard work is both recognized and rewarded for everyone to see.
#4 - connect Unlikely Audiences
Video communication can break traditional organizational structures and give visibility to employees who might not otherwise receive it. It also provides employees with access to executives they might not typically be able to interact or idea share with. By using live stream video in particular, you can deliver critical updates in a more personalized way.
- Messages from the CEO or interviews with the CEO or C-suite can help forge a connection between senior staff and the rest of your employees. You can use these videos to share important updates, information about new developments or events, policy changes, crisis communications and even congratulations for outstanding performance.
#5 - Think Green
Video communication is a great way to lighten your company’s carbon footprint because it curbs the emissions that stem from unnecessary commuting. This might not be a top priority for all members of the workforce, but, according to Deloitte, newer generations like Gen Z think corporate activity intended to improve the climate or minimize the misuse of resources could significantly help improve their view of business. Plus, they seem to simply love video content.
- On-boarding and New Employee Induction - Up to 20% of employee turnover happens within the first 45 days of being on the job. Some of those employees might have been lost in the shuffle of a lackluster on-boarding experience. By using video, you can deploy a first rate on-boarding operation in a personal and cost-effective package.
- A welcome video, IT training, department overviews are other examples. These videos can be repurposed into a library for new and existing employees to provide on-demand access to product training, internal policies and procedures and everything in between.
Creating a Shared Sense of Purpose
Video helps build relationships and bridge the divide between your employees and your organizational vision. It steers the living, breathing, daily task of internal communication away from simple issues management and into a shared sense of purpose for the entire organization.
There’s no limit to the number of videos you can create. In doing so, you’ll inspire camaraderie among your employees, offer them a clear sense of where your organization is going, and show them how they can fit into that bigger picture.