Boost Employee Engagement, Learning, and More with Video

Your business is only as strong as the employees who run it. So how can you make sure that your workers are engaged throughout the employee lifecycle?

In a climate where leaders are tasked with delivering an enriching employee experience to a workforce composed of five distinct generations in multiple locations — with a limited budget — video is a powerful tool to do just that.

In fact, many of today’s best-in-class organizations are turning to video to boost employee retention, morale, engagement, and productivity.

“Video is a highly measurable form of content, allowing a business to identify and optimize points of engagement and see what is most viewed and what is watched next. This insight helps businesses not only get a pulse on their employees but also learn how they can deepen engagement further,” writes Forbes Council member and Brightcove CMO Sara Larson.

While it sounds like a tall order, incorporating video, particularly asynchronous video that delivers communication to individuals and teams regardless of time zone or work schedule, into the employee lifecycle benefits your organization in a number of ways.

In addition to keeping your workforce connected and being scalable and cost-effective, the audio-visual qualities of video make it more effective at capturing attention and promoting information recall than text or audio alone.

Below, we explore a few ways you can deliver an exceptional employee experience by incorporating video throughout your employee lifecycle.

Video in Recruiting and Onboarding

A Forrester Researcher once quipped that a single minute of video is worth approximately 1.8 million words. This has a lot of implications for how video can improve your candidate experience. 

Video presents a clear picture of what it’s like to work at your company more effectively than any other medium. Wondering how to level up your recruiting process with video? Here are a few ways you can do just that:

• Use video to deliver personalized multimedia messages to top prospects
• Showcase your company culture, workspaces, and day-to-day responsibilities with employer brand videos
• Create welcome videos that allow candidates and new employees to “meet” colleagues in different locations

It’s been proven that people pay closer attention to video than any other medium (whereas they’re more likely to skim long-form business content), making it an ideal vehicle to quickly communicate your company’s value proposition, mission, policies, culture, and more.

Boost Collaboration with Video

Collaboration is the lifeblood of your organizational culture and the driving force that allows your teams to do their best work. But trying to achieve meaningful collaboration through emails or messaging platforms alone isn’t as easy. There’s a higher risk that the meaning of a message can get lost or misinterpreted without audio and visual cues.

On the other hand, video can be used to deploy team-building communications that are clear and digestible. Plus, communicating and collaborating via video ensures everyone gets the same message despite their location and time zone, empowering teams to receive, analyze, and act on information in an organized and centralized way.

For example, employees at all levels of the organization can use video to personalize corporate announcements, or create customized instructional content, project status updates, shift notes, welcome messages for new hires, and birthday and anniversary greetings.

Use Video to Supercharge Employee Development

It’s critical that your employee engagement efforts feel natural Gen Z and Millennial workers. This is especially true when it comes to learning and development. And in today’s environment, where more workers are working remotely from a variety of settings than ever before, delivering an easy, intuitive experience that is fulfilling is what separates “good” from “great.”

One huge advantage of using video in learning is that it’s engaging, digestible, and requires less effort for our brains to process than long-form text — all critical characteristics for a growing audience of “digital natives” who not only want, but expect, their employee experience to mirror their experiences as consumers.

Plus, video opens the door for customizable, repeatable content. For instance, you can record and play tailored lessons around a particular subject or policy, including lessons driven by subject matter experts within your organization.

Not only that, research shows that video can be as effective as a live instructor in terms of communicating facts or demonstrations. Put in the context of learning, video has already proven to be a game-changer for students by:

• Increasing motivation
• Improving the learning experience
• Promoting better grades
• Paving the way for more in-depth learning
• Enhancing teamwork and communication

What’s more, video empowers employees to manage and pace their own learning and development, promoting higher levels of participation in training and development programs. Plus, it’s easy to gauge the effectiveness of any given course by drilling down into video viewing data and examining how many employees have watched the video, how long they watched it, and more.

Take Performance Management to the Next Level with Video

Employee performance is the heart and soul of talent management — and it’s critical to provide feedback more effectively with a human touch.

“Video itself is a more expressive, authentic form of content that allows employees to uplevel their communications efforts in order to interact with fellow employees,” Sara Larson of Forbes points out. Larson encourages organizations to lean into using video in every aspect of employee engagement, “because of its ability to form a human connection and resonate with audiences.”

Within the context of a performance management system, video enables transparent, two-way communication that allows your teams to have ongoing conversations that promote employee development and help them level up their careers. Employees can ask for feedback or guidance via a video to help explain something that might be hard to understand over email alone. Meanwhile, managers or teammates can give feedback or kudos with a personalized video or even training on-the-go using video.

“When employees are properly engaged, they’re able to look at the whole of the company and better understand their purpose and where and how they fit in,” Larson writes.

Increase Employee Engagement with the Power of Video

At its best, employee engagement is when employees feel passionate about their roles, are committed to the business, and enthusiastically put in the effort needed to reach organizational goals. An employee engagement strategy that includes video helps promote consistent communication with multiple, easy-to-digest touchpoints.

And in a landscape where attention spans top out at 8.25 seconds, and the average person watches 149 minutes of digital video per day, making video a part of your employee engagement strategy isn’t just a smart move — it’s a must if you want to deliver a truly satisfying and enriching employee experience.

Learn more about how an integrated video solution can enhance your employee experience by enabling improved communication, collaboration, and productivity.