The desire for greater flexibility in the workplace has played a vital role in turning remote and hybrid working into the norm for many businesses.
New data indicates that up to 75% of companies embrace hybrid working via various informal and formal arrangements.
While this trend enhances flexibility, it also undeniably impacts internal communications. Communicating with your staff can be more complicated if they work in dispersed teams.
With demands coming in from all directions, ensuring your internal communications are running smoothly has never been more critical.
There are various methods and tools you can use to improve team communication. For instance, many companies now use unified communications platforms that include features such as video conferencing, real-time transcription, and visual voicemail apps.
Another critical development is using short instructional videos, a highly effective way to communicate messages clearly and quickly
From boosting engagement to supporting training efforts, video offers many business benefits. Let’s take a closer look.
Sending out company-branded emails and newsletters to employees can make communication feel impersonal.
Using video for internal communications, on the other hand, helps engage your staff deeper and provides a more human touch.
Your company likely ensures it offers quality calls so that your customers feel more connected to your brand, but are the same efforts applied to your internal communications?
Instructional videos can help inject warmth and personality into your internal comms, making your staff feel they are more than just a number.
More than 52% of employees prefer watching videos to reading content, which shows that video is a great way to grab your employees’ attention and pass on key messages and information.
Written workplace memos can get boring, while interactive videos can be much more fun and easier to digest.
Many businesses operating on a small scale may believe that producing high-quality videos for internal communications is a lengthy and expensive business.
However, many easy-to-use solutions can now help you streamline the video production process at a lower cost.
Once you have a simple system and practices, it will be easy to generate video content for all kinds of purposes, including interviews, onboarding, company announcements, and training.
Using videos for internal communications allows you to cater to staff with a wide range of learning styles.
This is especially true for visual and auditory learners who find reading large volumes of text more tedious or challenging.
Memory retention rates also vary widely. Let’s say you ask two people, “what is continuous testing?” two weeks after teaching them the concept simultaneously and with the same resources.
Their ability to recall this information will likely differ because everyone processes information differently.
Using video allows you to combine different learning approaches, which increases the likelihood that everyone will be able to retain the critical information and messages they need to know.
Videos make news more concrete and ensure information circulates faster within a company. This helps ensure change is initiated and implemented more quickly and supports daily operational tasks such as lead time production.
We’ve covered the key benefits of using instructional videos to enhance internal communication and employee engagement, now, let’s take a look at some of the best ways to harness this technology for the best results.
Using videos to make internal announcements can generate excitement among your employees.
For example, you could create a video to send a message to employees about a public holiday or a work-free day. Or, you could use video to announce the arrival of new employees or product developments.
These kinds of videos create even more impact if they include music and text because this triggers an emotional response, which allows the messages to be absorbed more readily.
Explaining your company’s values and culture via video goes a long way to improving employee relations. When spelled out on a page, these messages can appear flat and meaningless, but when described and discussed by real people, they suddenly come alive and resonate more deeply.
Sharing behind-the-scenes videos of staff members is an excellent way to explain and enforce your company’s culture.
This can help your staff develop a sense of belonging and pride. Videos can also serve as an inspiration and help to promote diversity and inclusion.
Again, music will make them feel more powerful and excited.
Posters, newsletters, and emails are not the most effective way to promote events, as it’s almost impossible to guarantee every employee will read them. Video, on the other hand, can be a much more impactful communication tool.
Advertising a company-wide event through video helps get the word out to everyone. The process doesn’t have to be complicated, either.
For example, you can use various video platforms and ad makers to make the process less stressful and seamless.
Asking yourself the following questions can be helpful during the planning stage to ensure your instructional video is as clear and engaging as possible:
Using video to capture attention and generate excitement about an event—whether a webinar, workshop or social event—is likely to achieve better results than an email or poster.
Investing in your staff’s professional development is essential for your business’s performance and employee satisfaction.
Instructional videos make training more fun and immersive. Let’s say you’re introducing a new software platform.
A video running through the latest procedures with engaging visuals will be easier to understand and remember than a 30-page document.
Making your own instructional videos and tutorials can also save you the expense of paying specialists to instruct your staff.
Conducting video interviews with your team is beneficial on many levels. You can cover topics such as insights into daily work routines and career development.
This process not only helps your staff feel valued, but the content can be used as part of your employer branding and recruitment efforts to help candidates prepare for their interviews and the onboarding process.
You can use many powerful tools and tricks to make the videos as dynamic and engaging as possible, such as using multiple cameras and creative thumbnails to make your videos more clickable.
Starting a new job is a daunting time. Using onboarding videos is a more personal and friendlier approach than simply attaching a dry company handbook to a welcome email.
It’s easier to convey the company’s culture and routines in a 10-minute video that includes plenty of intriguing imagery—as they say, a picture speaks a thousand words!
You can make the onboarding process more special for new hires by giving each video a customized introduction.
Instructional videos are a great way to provide easily digestible insights into recently completed projects.
This can highlight lessons learned, inform future approaches, and celebrate accomplishments to boost confidence, morale, and productivity.
These reviews also keep everyone on the same page and prevent workplace miscommunication.
Here is a list of the types of videos you can create quickly and effortlessly to support internal communication within your organization.
When you need to convey a lot of complex and perhaps a little dry information, animated videos are a great option. A storyboard is a good place to start conceptualizing toon videos.
Once considered more complicated to create; explainer videos are now much more straightforward. Due to the prevalence of online video creation tools, this is now a quick and easy process.
These films are similar to explainer videos and are great for updating your staff on any element of your work processes.
Like presentations and animation videos, whiteboard animation is a great teaching tool for training. They save you the time and stress of meeting in person and preparing individual presentations.
Using videos is a great way to boost employee engagement and satisfaction as they provide a more personal, fun, and varied mode of communication.
They can help employees feel more valued and involved than standard written communication methods.
When many companies are using hybrid workplace solutions, video is becoming an indispensable part of any internal communications toolkit.
They are an ideal way to engage employees and forge strong team relationships for a minimum amount of time and cost.