When was the last time your employee excitedly opened a corporate email, or eagerly read your company’s training manual?
And for internal workplace communication, video trumps all other kind of content. It’s a far more successful and efficient alternative to boring and redundant internal communication channels - hint, yawn-worthy emails and wishy-washy manuals. Just like 64% of consumers purchase after watching brand videos, 59% of executives also prefer consuming information via video.
Just think about it.
Would you rather watch a step-by-step video explaining how to use a company software, or read through tedious manuals, emails, and way too many screenshots?
The former, of course.
Using video for internal communications has several benefits, such as:
In short, it’s the preferred solution to connect employees and increase workplace efficiency and productivity.
So, how do you adopt video best practice as the new document for all of your internal communications? Let’s look at 7 innovative ways you can use video for internal communication.
Mark is a new hire and today is his first day. He’s in a state of nerves, waiting for you in your office. He’s expecting a mundane onboarding presentation and a stack of must-read process documents.
But instead you point him towards a resource with several engaging onboarding videos that showcases company values, team culture, business processes, and all the other nuts and bolts. He loves it, understands everything perfectly, can search and view the required videos on his desk when need arises, and is eager and fully equipt to start work.
Employee onboarding done right.
It's an information overload when starting a new job, so give new employees all the information in the clearest and most engaging format possible, i.e video. Employees who go through a structured and efficient onboarding process are 58% more likely to stay with that organization than ones who don’t, and have an employee retention rate of 86%.
Providing a resource of onboarding videos can introduce new employees to the team, work culture, company’s values, expectations, complex work processes, and the list goes on. It not only adds the much-needed 'human' element to the onboarding process, but also saves time and empowers new staff with all the resources when and where they need it.
Here’s an excellent onboarding video by Adobe.
Cisco’s onboarding video gives serious vibes and is successful at explaining new hires what Cisco is.
I’ll let you in on a secret.
No one likes to read emails full of text or a physical newsletter.
There I’ve said it. We’ll all pretend we’ve read the latest newsletter and have gone through paragraphs after paragraphs full of technical (and even non-technical) updates, but the truth is, we’ve barely skimmed it.
If you show us visually, we’ll like that a lot better. Thanks so much.
Additionally, with teams in different locations and time zones- for example, Wipster is in Wellington, New Zealand and Portland - it can be hard to get everyone together for an announcement.
A video that gives the latest company news in a concise, simple, and layman-friendly manner is a great way to keep everyone engaged and up-to-date.
Here’s a fun example by Wipster.
Training can be costly, difficult, and hard to scale.
There are all kinds of trainings; from sales training for your front-line employees and field training, to compliance and other boring trainings. Every training regardless of how complex or simple it is, needs to be communicated in an engaging and easy-to-understand way. This is where videos come in.
A short, snappy and informative video works great to reinforce the learning process and get your employees attention. Even a simple screen share video that explains the process really well works better than a text-based manual or oral instructions.
Companies are understanding the need of providing effective training to their employees and more and more of them are investing in video. Training magazine's 2016-2017 study showed the average annual training budget for companies under 1,000 employees was $290,000. For companies between 1,000 and 9,999 employees, that budget grew to $3.7 million. And for companies with 10,000+ employees, the budget balloons to $13 million.
A great way to build rapport with your shareholders and build a positive brand name for your company in the industry is to use videos to send shareholder updates.
Instead of frequently sending long emails highlighting trading updates, KPIs and other important updates, create short videos and send them to the shareholders and everyone else involved.
Learn from Xero’s shareholder update video.
Videos will make the entire process efficient, understanding the update a lot easier, and inspire trust within shareholders and all concerned parties. You can also add a transcript of the video for better understanding, along with a section that states key highlights.
Gooroo creates interesting monthly shareholder update videos.
Employee of the month. New hires. Employees with unique job positions. Employees who’ve gone above and beyond in helping your company. Employees who’ve been with you for a certain amount of time.
Show employees that you care about them by sharing their experience, their stories with the world. Even within the company, you can share these videos to boost morale and encourage all employees to give their best. Outside of your company, sharing these videos can show your brand’s human side to consumers and audience.
An increasing amount of brands and companies have jumped on this bandwagon and are using video to bring their employees in the front. This not only evokes emotions in their audience, but also shows potential employees that your workplace is the absolute best to work for. You can also add these videos to your website under the ‘Meet our team’ page, or upload them on social platforms from time to time.
Get inspired from Deloitte.
Conferences and events can be a great opportunity for brands to create stunning video content and use it over and over again. By capturing conference and event highlights, you’re not only creating stellar marketing content, but also becoming a video-first brand and leveraging the latest content trend to get an edge over competitors.
Whether your company organized the event, or you took part in a conference organised by some other brand, creating a video or a vlog of it is proof that you’re an industry expert (or in the process of becoming one).
You no longer have to send event details and highlights over email and a few pictures. You can record highlights and send it to your employees along with your consumers so that everyone can experience it. More and more brands (in a variety of industries and niches) are now uploading their events highlights on social media to share it with their audience and brand themselves as an authority in their niche.
Wipster’s one of them.
By 2020, online videos will make up more than 80% of all consumer internet traffic (85% in the US). (Cisco)
Internal video teams are being inundated with requests for video, forcing them to think outside the box and leverage non-video specialists (people who run away from making videos) in their organization to help them scale video. They need all the hands they can get. In-house video teams are turning into video advisers for the rest of the organization and internal video opportunities represent a perfect opportunity to dip their workmates toes in creating video.
One way to train at scale is to provide video tutorials of how to shoot video, find suitable locations and record audio. Once you’ve created simple video-production training videos, ask employees to participate in creating internal videos. Show them the ropes and get them to participate.
We’re all a little camera shy, and that’s alright. We’re all a little video-technically challenged, and that’s okay, too. The only forward is to start creating these short videos for the organization that outsiders won’t see. Start small. Use in-house videographers expertise to improve yourself. And then once you’ve got the hang of these video, you can start creating bigger videos for your consumers.