The Irresistible Power of Video for Internal Communications

In both our personal and professional lives, effective communication is essential for happiness, high-functioning relationships, and maximizing time and resources.

Yet poor communication plagues companies across the board. And internal communications strategies that are irregular — or worse, completely left to chance — can lead businesses down any number of undesirable roads, including bad decisions, bad execution, and negative impacts on an organization's bottom line.

But when companies do practice effective internal communication, the benefits stretch beyond better decisions and execution. For instance, one study by Towers Watson revealed that companies considered highly successful with internal communications saw 47% higher total returns to shareholders over a period of five years compared to companies that were considered ineffective communicators.

Now that’s a goal worth striving for. Not to mention benefits like increased employee engagement, higher employee morale, better profitability and a better company culture, just to name a few.

But how can organizations reach such goals with a newly remote workforce and decreased budgets? One proven strategy enabling organizations to overcome these hurdles is the integration of synchronous and asynchronous video into internal communications.

“Internal communications should be strategic, planned, and regular,” writes Forbes contributor Robert Sher. Instead of leaving it all up to chance and interpretation (especially at a time when employees are aching for transparency), video is an engaging and cost-effective way to level up your comms strategies.

Below, we explore four ways you can use video to take your internal communications strategy from an afterthought to a primary tool for creating an informed and engaged workforce.

Modernize Every Phase of the Employee Lifecycle

Today’s workforce expects employers to offer efficient, organized, and modern experiences from applying for a role to communicating with management. Falling short of these expectation could mean losing out on top talent, productivity, and, ultimately, profitability.

As we’ve talked about previously, synchronous video — like Zoom calls — or asynchronous video that delivers communication to individuals and teams regardless of time zone or work schedule, can be applied to every stage of the employee lifecycle, including:

• Landing top talent: Use video to showcase company culture and key aspects of the job to candidates.
• Onboarding: Welcome new employees and introduce them to teammates,
• Enhance employee engagement: Connect employees to the organization’s mission, projects, initiatives, and each other with company-wide video announcements. Embed videos into surveys to encourage participation, give instructions, and enhance transparency by clarifying the overall purpose of surveys, or use video to communicate projects or decisions that impact specific groups.
• Guide employee performance: Leverage video to enable transparency and two-way communication between employees and managers. Employees can use video to share performance highlights with managers outside of routine check-ins, and managers can use it to provide feedback or instructions.
• Provide continuing education opportunities: Tap into the enormous potential of a learning management system (LMS) to access a library chock full of subject matter, expert-led, and custom-made videos tailored to specific duties and areas for improvement.

Enhance Employee Self-Service

Right now, just about every company is aching to save labor hours and increase efficiency. This is where video can do a lot of heavy lifting usually left to the HR department. Instead of running to HR to get additional information about job duties and company policies, employees can access a hub of video resources, including welcome messages, safety training, company information, and much more.

This strategy provides the best of both worlds: streamlined processes for your company’s HR department, and helpful content with a personalized, human touch for your employees. 

Shorten the Distance for Absorbing Information

In a season where most of your workers are dealing with more stressors than usual, it’s hard to stay focused on garden-variety, text-heavy internal communications.

Relying on meetings, emails, or memos to keep everyone updated is a recipe for having your communications ignored completely. This is especially true considering the five generations now in the workforce who bring their own preferences for receiving and sharing information.

In this brave new world — where the average attention span is 8.25 seconds and only 16% of web readers read word-by-word — video provides more firepower than traditional written messages. One Forrester researcher suggests that a single minute of video is worth approximately 1.8 million words!

Not only that, but research has shown that people pay closer attention to video than text, and video beats text and audio when it comes to capturing attention and promoting information recall, making it the single most effective way to engage employees and ensure they remember the messages you disseminate.

Get Data You Can’t Get from Memos or e-mails

It’s hard (if not impossible) to track the effectiveness of corporate communications, like how much employees get out of a meeting or how many employees actually read a full email or memo after opening it. But video gives organizations much more granular information about how employees interact with a video message, including:

• How many employees viewed the video
• How long they watched it
• Which videos were watched next

In terms of measurability, no other medium provides the same level of detail as video. Having the ability to drill down into this information means you’ve got more employee engagement data to present to decision-makers, which can translate into decreased labor and turnover, and help reduce the number of platforms you’re using.

Don’t Leave Internal Communications to Chance

You take great measures to launch new initiatives, develop products, and provide flawless customer service — and your internal communications strategy shouldn’t be any different. Lighten HR’s load and meet your employees where they are by using video to enhance engagement and capture the attention of your workforce. 

---

Ready to bring your internal communications to life? See for yourself how video can level up your strategy, or get a guided tour of Paylocity’s video capabilities in action with a solutions expert.