Good internal communication leads to better team relationships, boosts morale, combats gossip, and gives your workforce the tools to cooperate effectively, improving productivity. But the ways we communicate change, just as we humans do.
Convoluted emails and tedious newsletters rarely get the job done in keeping your employees attention long enough to educate them. If you want to reach and connect with your workers, it’s time to start thinking outside the box.
That’s where captivating videos come in.
Using video can give you a great way to ensure your messages reach home by engaging employees and building trust between your team. So, we developed this short guide to help you take advantage of one of the most effective internal communications tools available today and create professional videos to train and connect with employees.
Let’s get right down to it!
Benefits of Using Video in Your Internal Communications
We’ve been getting used to using video in our daily work more frequently, with things like Zoom calls and online courses. It’s a format that viewers prefer because it is easier to digest than other types of content, as it doesn’t demand too much effort from viewers.
But there are other major reasons you should incorporate video in your company’s internal communications. There are more benefits to this format, and here are some of them 😉
1. More Engaging
The power of video content lies in its ability to attract and keep a viewer’s focus. With eye-catching visuals and a compelling narrative, you can get employees interested and attentive to corporate matters that could otherwise come across as tedious.
Engagement is crucial to retaining information. We tend to remember better the things that stood out to us, made us feel a certain way, or compelled us to interact. By the nature of the medium, videos are interactive and dynamic, making it easier for our brains to retain information delivered in this way.
2. Easy to Distribute and Avoids Miscommunication
After creating a video, as long as the information conveyed remains relevant, you can send it out unlimited times. Depending on their available time, staff can choose when to watch or re-watch it, and they can see exactly how long the piece will take to perfectly organize their tasks accordingly.
The best part is that your video’s content will remain accurate, no matter who or when someone watches it. Employees are human beings that can make mistakes in their communications. A typo in an email can lead to a funny anecdote or a full-out corporate crisis if it isn’t corrected quickly.
Just make sure to send the right video and not a recording of your cat playing 😉 Now, that would make for a funny anecdote.
3. Appeals to Various Learning Styles
Not everyone retains information the same way.
Some people can read a text once, and the content gets automatically embedded in their brains. For others, visual cues are easier to remember. Videos combine audio, text, and visual components to create a piece that appeals to a broader spectrum of learning styles.
You can create videos to deliver diverse messages, both simple and complex, in a way that is easy to remember for most of your workers. Adapting your communications to your staff’s needs will help everyone on your team better process and understand the information you’re sending.
4. Cost-Effective and Time-Saver
High-quality video creation may seem like a luxury for small to medium companies, but using videos for internal communications is one of the best ways to help you reduce costs when communication and educating your workforce are concerned.
Instead of hiring an expensive teacher to give a talk several times a year or wasting your PR staff’s time trying to align everyone’s schedules to organize a meeting, you can simply use video — easy to share and even easier to watch.
That way, your employees will be up-to-date on every new development much quicker, increasing efficiency and saving the company valuable time and funds.
5 Ways to Use Video for Effective Internal Communications
By now, you have a solid grasp of the potential value of using video for your internal communications. However, if you’re used to the good old memo or email, it can feel like a challenge to switch to a different medium.
First, keep in mind that video is not there to substitute other forms of internal communication but to enhance it where it matters most or will have the biggest effect.
That’s why we came up with some solid ideas for internal communication that are easy to replicate and can have a huge positive impact. And we added examples, so you can get the whole picture 🙂.
Set Up Onboarding Videos for New Employees
Getting new staff on the same page as the rest of the workforce is crucial to avoid breaking the balance of your current teams. But educating and training new employees is always a challenge — especially if you cannot use a hands-on approach because part of your workforce is working remotely.
Videos can help with onboarding every step of the way. You can instruct new hires on the specific steps of a certain process by visually showing them the way things need to be done. You can even create compelling pieces that teach the core values that make up your brand’s identity.
Don’t be afraid to show a deep, personal side of what your company stands for during onboarding. Oftentimes, the hardest part of training new hires is integrating them into the team and making them feel like the work they do is part of something bigger.
With an onboarding video that showcases your core values, you can get them up to speed much sooner, and your retention will rise.
Use Internal Training Videos to Empower Your Staff
Nowadays, industries are fast-changing. Even after your workforce is fully capacitated, with the constant development of ground-breaking technologies, this expertise can become outdated in just a few months. That’s why constant, effective education it’s key to success.
You can use explainer videos to effectively train your employees, which helps illustrate difficult concepts in clear and interesting ways. For example, if you operate an eCommerce business, you can produce an explainer about using eprocurement systems or CRM tutorials to streamline and improve business operations.
By combining captivating visuals with well-scripted narratives, even new, complicated techniques, and boring company processes can come to life in a way that makes the information easy to follow and grasp.
That way, it’s easier for your workforce to comprehend the addressed topic in a short amount of time. And here’s a hot tip: Don’t hesitate to add a little humor. Everybody likes a joke, and it can make the addressed topic more relatable, engaging, and easy to understand for your audience.
Share Announcements and Updates
It’s important to keep personnel up-to-date to celebrate advancement together as a cohesive group, inform of changes so that everyone can be on the same page, and even notify them about incidents yourself before they hear it from another source.
Primarilty-text mediums, like emails and newsletters, tend to take away the human element from the messages you send out. With videos, you can showcase real people speaking to your employees, connecting with viewers, and making it easier to resonate with them.
Nobody likes sudden changes, especially when they’re related to the workplace. Showing transparency about what’s happening in every department of your company will create an atmosphere of openness and care. This will allow you to humanize your corporation, building a strong bond with your staff that will stand even when times are tough.
Record Your Business Presentations
If you have a brilliant idea you want to share with your team, meetings aren’t the only way to go. You can create a video depicting it instead and get much more mileage out of your message.
This tactic works both ways: if your subordinates have a project they want to show you, but you don’t have the time to meet with them in person, ask them to send it via video.
The most important aspect here is to be mindful of what you want to say. The heart of every video lies in its script, and in order to create a solid script, you have to have a clear idea of what your listener has to know. Once you have that, it’s as easy as making a presentation and recording yourself talking through it.
Sharing ideas on video will allow you to portray them in a more engaging and accurate manner without the nerves of facing the public. If you make a mistake in your speech, just start over. That way, your team can properly get the memo to discuss at a further due date, the recordings will always be available for review, and you can share them easily with remote members.
Nurture Your Workforce with Company Culture Videos
Company culture is one of the biggest assets any business can have. Your personality and values as a brand are all intangible assets that make you unique and set you apart from the competition.
But in the rush of everyday tasks, it can be easy for employees to forget them and stray away from your core values. Culture videos keep that from happening!
You can create videos to remind employees what your company is all about, from showcasing the physical spaces where the magic happens to showing how people interact with each other at the office. Portray staff from every department and level, and make sure to display how each one of them plays a role in building the culture inside.
Seeing themselves actively taking part in the construction of the company’s traditions will help integrate it into their brains and make them proud of their efforts. Plus, company culture videos are also a great way to show prospective employees what it’s like to work at your company and attract top talent that resonates with your way of doing things.
Wrapping Up
Good internal communications promote learning and leadership, share feedback, help achieve more, and provide opportunities for employees to get more involved with the company if they want to.
If those opportunities already exist, but no one is taking advantage of them, your internal communications strategy isn’t working. By empowering members from multiple teams and sharing important information with video pieces, you can give your people the encouragement they need to add another fulfilling dimension to their work.
