If a picture is worth a thousand words, a video is worth millions of them. Video can convey a message of any level of complexity and emotion in a bite-sized, easily retained format. In business, the first place we think to apply our video capabilities is in marketing to attract and convert leads.
Why stop there?
Here’s how to use video for internal communications and scaling, and strengthen your business from the inside out:
Video is the perfect medium to amp up your employment brand. During recruitment, it’s critical that you’re able to accurately and effectively demonstrate what it’s like to work for your company and what your organization stands for.
In short, video is the perfect way to SHOW—rather than tell—why a candidate should work for you instead of your competitor.
The emotional element of video helps your business compete for candidates in areas other than compensation. Video allows you to visually demonstrate the value of your organization’s purpose, unique culture, work/life balance, or whatever else represents a competitive recruitment advantage for your business.
On the other side of the table, recruitment videos can ensure that you’re only attracting candidates that are a good fit for your organization. For example, if your organization prides itself on teamwork and collaboration, effective recruitment videos may help weed out a job-seeker who prefers to work solo.
Check out this endearing example from Dropbox:
Businesses with a strong, positive company culture dig deep to develop consistent principles and values, then work tirelessly to communicate and reinforce that culture among their employees.
Company culture videos are similar to recruitment videos in that they serve to strengthen your employee value proposition. The difference between a recruitment video and a company culture video is that company culture videos remain important throughout the tenure of your workforce.
A well-crafted company culture video reminds employees that the work they do contributes to a greater goal that is fulfilling and gratifying. When people feel like they “belong” within an organization, they’re more likely to stick around for the long haul.
It’s not difficult to understand why video is the best medium to showcase company culture. Visual elements, personal touches and music combine to create emotions and experiences that just can’t be portrayed by text or pictures alone.
Here’s an excellent company culture video from Atlassian:
Smooth onboarding isn’t just helpful to the incoming employee, it has a major effect on your personnel expenses. In fact, 20% of turnover happens within the first 45 days of employment.
Onboarding videos help reduce costly turnover by providing a structured, effective method of providing information to new hires. Instead of wading through stacks of printed information, onboarding videos deliver details in a format that contributes to the employee’s desire to feel secure, informed and connected.
We love this onboarding video example from GrubHub, offering helpful tips to new drivers (for example, pack a snack so those tasty aromas don’t leave you hungry all the time!)
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Scalability is achieved through straightforward and crystal-clear processes. Video is the most versatile medium for any and all training and development initiatives: You can use it to introduce new products or services, explain process changes, deliver skill-building guidance and helpful career information, and more.
Video also gives you the best chance of actually reaching your employees. People are 75% more likely to watch a video than they are to read print! Distributing a video outlining a new process has much better engagement odds than emailing a PDF.
Another benefit to using video for training and development is that you don’t need to pay anyone to deliver the information. When you invest in the creation of training and development videos, you’ll be able to use them over and over without increasing your costs—an important quality for scalability.
Blasting out an email is a quick way to make a company-wide announcement...and also a quick way to have that announcement ignored or forgotten. Video allows you to drop the big news in a buzz-worthy way, helping your employees understand the importance of a message and ensuring it’s not lost among inbox clutter.
One option is a video newsletter, which gives you an opportunity to engage your employees on a recurring basis in a way that feels more personal than a basic text newsletter. This can be especially important for businesses with a large portion of employees working remotely.
Video can also be used to highlight events like trade shows, retreats, or community services in which your organization has participated. All of these things contribute to employee alignment, ensuring that your team is up-to-speed and feels connected through video.
Here’s a unique example of an alignment video from an organization called HelpScout with a large percentage of employees working remotely. This video helps distant coworkers get to know each other in an “MTV Cribs”-style format: home tour montage 2.0.
Has this list inspired some ideas on how you could use video to enhance your internal communications strategy? If you could use some guidance, the experts at Tobe are at the ready! Reach out today.