Internal Communication9 Jan 2024
Corporate Videography - How to engage your employees / internal stakeholders
How do you inspire, motivate and educate your employees? Engaging your employees is a necessary and powerful action required in every organisation. Indeed without employee engagement, organisations may experience a loss of productivity and profits.
One of the most effective ways to communicate and engage with employees at scale is through video. Corporate videos have become an increasingly used business tool to connect with employees and boost engagement across a wide range of different business initiatives. Videos can enhance employee engagement in many ways, such as; helping them learn how to perform essential tasks, educate and inspire on new initiatives and policies and feel a stronger sense of belonging as contributors to the company culture.
Videos can be all shapes and sizes! Animated, footage-based, or even in the form of memes or slides, or indeed a combination of all these things. More complex tasks and information is communicated more easily for employees through video as a powerful visual medium that can be digested almost anywhere at any time at the user’s discretion.
Combined with email campaigns and ‘town hall’ meetings, video can help enhance more traditional internal communication channels.
Corporate videography and employee engagement
Definition of Corporate Videography
Corporate videography is a video produced for a company for the purpose of either internal and/or external communication. Corporate videography can boost engagement in internal communication by conveying messages in a simple and engaging way. Employers use corporate videos for employee training and development, recruitment, onboarding, customer service, internal news, team bonding and policy education.
Importance of Employee Engagement
Employee engagement has gained prominence in recent years owing to its link to employee performance. Employee engagement can create a positive work environment where employees are emotionally invested, motivated, and satisfied. This, in turn, leads to higher productivity as engaged employees are more committed, collaborative, and innovative in their work, ultimately benefiting both the individual and the organisation as a whole.
Employee engagement offers many benefits to the organisation such as:
1. Reduced employee turnover
2. Improved employee morale
3. Reduced employee absenteeism
4. Enhanced productivity
5. Improved work culture
Recently, through the Covid-19 pandemic, remote work culture has forced organisations to think of new ways (like video - which is easy to distribute) to make workers feel involved with the team and nurture a sense of belonging to maintain engagement.
The role of video in internal communication
Companies have realised that investing in employee engagement can have many positive benefits. Employers are constantly looking for new ways of engaging employees and corporate video production is one such method.
Video plays an important role in internal communication, particularly concerning training and development, onboarding and team updates. It enhances corporate communications and keeps the team on the same page, helping all departments to work collaboratively while at the same time improving employee motivation.
Videos are easily circulated within an organisation through internal social media, emails, push-up messages and intranets to all internal stakeholders.
The benefit of video in internal communications
Video provides many benefits to all the departments across an organisation.
1. Helps reduce employee turnover
2. Enhances employee onboarding
3. Motivates employees
4. Reinforces employee value proposition
5. Enhances employee training and development
6. Lowers the recruitment costs through internal referral
7. Improves employee safety through training videos
Benefits to the Service, Sales and Marketing Departments
1. Helps in improved sales through product demonstration videos
2. Enhanced customer service through systems and process videos
Understanding your audience: know your employees and stakeholders
Start by getting to know who you are talking to. When creating videos for internal communication, it’s essential to know the needs, desires and media consumption habits of your target audience. Conducting research via interviews, focus groups or surveys can give you a much clearer understanding of what your audiences’ likes and dislikes and any obstacles to avoid. This gives your video a higher chance of being effective.
After identifying the target audience and their preferences, it’s essential to analyse the results to create a more compelling video. What’s their preferred channel/s to consume video? What’s their preferred duration of video? Do they prefer animated or live action depending on the content being communicated? Knowing these preferences ahead of video production can steer you down a more engaging path for your audience. This research upfront, helps save time (and costs) in the long run by creating a more effective video that meets the requirements of your ideal audience.
Different types of video content
Explainer videos with animation
Animated explainer videos help organisations convey complicated messages with ease. Animation translates text messages into characters and iconic concepts that convey the critical message in a more digestible and memorable way.
Animated explainer videos can help all departments of an organisation to communicate with each other in a way that makes sense to different audiences.
Leadership videos from C-suite
Leadership videos from senior management of an organisation can be used to inspire, guide and announce new strategies to all levels of an organisation. These videos are usually motivational, about the changing dynamics of the company and what needs to change, or shift in focus for the sustainable growth of the organisation. Having your C-suite on video makes them more accessible to a wider audience and provides authority and credibility, so employees feel that this new information is coming right from the top!
Onboarding and training videos
Onboarding and training videos help the human resource department provide an orientation of the work culture and can guide employees at different levels and from different departments to improve the quality of work such as productivity, wellbeing and safety.
Corporate Values and Behaviour videos
Many employees look to align their personal values with those of the organisation. Using videos to showcase an organisation’s Corporate Values can help bring the right employee behaviours to life in a more relatable way. You can even go a step further and produce videos that show what NOT to do. This is about nurturing a cohesive set of ‘cultural norms’ that employees can take onboard and reflect back to each other; i.e. ‘this is how we do things around here’. From a managerial point of view this can be a powerful way to condition your workforce to operate in a way that fuels your business purpose and drives performance towards the vision.
Employee Value Proposition videos
Employee Value Proposition videos create connection and belonging amongst the employee base. They may be a series segmented into strategic EVP pillars (i.e. what sets our employee experience apart) or could be by talent role types, or different divisional work groups. These videos can be a powerful reminder of ‘why work here’ and help improve retention of the right people who value what you have to offer as an employer.
Implementing and distributing your corporate video
After producing a corporate video, the next step is to effectively distribute it. The following factors need consideration when distributing a video internally:
After producing a corporate video, you will need to distribute it using the right communication channel or channels.
The channel mix for distribution depends on the intended audience consumption habits and preferences. Equally you may need to distribute over multiple channels to reach your entire employee base. For example white collar workers who have laptops can easily be reached via email or digital means, whereas blue collar workers may need more traditional methods such as printed flyers or posters with a QR code linking to a video that they can watch on their smart phones. Also consider the content you wish to share. Will it have more impact being delivered by leaders in face-to-face forums? Or will a general email-blast or series of emails over time work better?
So, choose your internal communication distribution channels carefully after considering the target audience’s needs.
Company intranets and CRM software are ideal for helping organisations distribute internal communication videos effectively. They are a known ‘go-to’ and centralised place for organic traffic or to drive people to this familiar environment for specific campaigns. Intranets and internal social platforms that leverage corporate video encourage employees to engage with content and communicate with each other and other departments, thus enhancing connection and belonging throughout the business.
Employee engagement and sharing of processes, product demonstrations and cultural videos helps in uniting internal stakeholders and bringing everyone together on the same page. Encouraging and supporting employees to share and comment on corporate videos improves employee engagement and motivates them to become a more influential part of the organisational culture.
To review a video’s performance, establishing KPIs like views, duration, engagement, and sharing is an important step ideally established against project objectives. Employee feedback surveys also help to know how they rate the video production and it’s content.
Why you need an internal communications video strategy
Internal communication videos can help make your organisation more cohesive and productive. However, how effective your video is, comes back to the strategy. The need for internal communications video strategy arises due the following reasons:
1. It helps to bridge the gap between the business objective and how video can be implemented to achieve these goals
2. It helps identify and implement the desires, needs and consumption habits of the intended audience into the right sort of video
3. The video content gets circulated effectively through right channels
4. The video performance gets properly evaluated using suitable KPIs and learnings are optimised for following video content
At Belong Creative, we feel privileged to have helped organisations such as Allianz Australia, Roche, TPG Telecom, Toll and EY enhance employee engagement through corporate video production since 2009.
