4 ways video improves employee communications

We all love watching videos. Whether it's cute cats or crazy conspiracies, they're easy to consume and entertaining. We use them to learn guitar lessons, make-up tutorials, and recipe walkthroughs. But when it comes to our professional lives, there's often a notable absence of audiovisual content.

Poor employee communication is rife throughout the business world. Internal communications are often slap-dash, ineffective, and rely on out-of-date technology. Poor communication leads to less engaged employees, bad decisions, and disorganisation. On the flip side, companies with effective communications enjoy 47% higher returns.

One of the best ways to improve your communications is to use asynchronous videos. While "asynchronous" might sound a bit daunting, it just means "on-demand". Find out how to use on-demand videos to improve employee communications below.

What are employee communications?

Employee communication is simply the sharing of information and ideas between employees and management. It takes three primary forms: verbal, digital, and physical. Most businesses have some form of employee communication, such as:

• Emails
• Memos
• Intranet
• Notice boards
• Reports
• Meetings
• Videos.

Good employee communication is crucial for the success of a company and employee engagement. The benefits of effective employee communication include:

• It increases employee engagement.
• It improves workplace harmony.
• It boosts employee experience.
• It encourages creativity and innovation.
• It develops collaboration between departments.

What are asynchronous videos?

As we've already covered, asynchronous videos are on-demand videos. Businesses use these videos for a variety of purposes, such as:

• Sharing company news
• Staff training
• New hire onboarding
• Guest lectures and discussion.

Synchronous videos will undoubtedly play a part in an effective communication strategy. But by using asynchronous videos, businesses can avoid many of the pitfalls of live videos, such as:

• Poor network connectivity
• Fatigue from constant calls
• Scheduling conflicts
• Staff in different time zones
• The wasted time during meetings.

This means that you can use on-demand videos for anything that doesn't need participation. Brainstorming sessions and client calls will need to be live, but you can record training and announcements.

The benefits of using videos for internal communications

With more people than ever working from home and embracing flexible working, videos are a great way to ensure productivity and engagement. Here are just a few of the benefits of asynchronous videos:

• Team members can consume content when it's convenient for them.
• It reduces the need for lengthy emails.
• Staff can pause and rewind training sessions to clarify information.
• It saves time for both team members and management.

4 ways videos can improve employee communication

While there are obvious benefits to using on-demand videos for your employee communications, it can be challenging to know where to start with them. We've put together four ways to put videos to use in your employee communications engagingly and cost-effectively.

1. Revolutionise every stage of the employee journey

The modern workforce expects businesses to be organised and efficient with their communications. Not having an effective communication strategy can easily mean you lose out on hiring top talent, productivity, and profit.

Using videos for every stage of your employee journey is an excellent way to ensure efficiency, engagement, and enjoyment. Here are some examples of how you can update your employee journey:

• Hiring — You can create job description videos that showcase your company culture and entice top talent.
• Onboarding — Introduce your company, team members and engagingly welcome your new employees.

• Training — You can implement training videos into every stage of your employee training. Doing this can make even the dullest subjects more engaging.
• Performance reviews — Managers can use videos to create highlight reels for performance reviews to show their team they are aware of the work they are doing and happy with it. It can also be used when performance is below average to help boost productivity.

At every stage of the journey, you can also find new ways to increase employee engagement. The videos themselves can serve as a way to connect your employees to your business's mission, initiatives, and projects. You can also embed surveys into your videos or vice versa to find ways to improve your employee communications further. The surveys will allow you to see what's what working and — more importantly — what's not.

2. Create an office Netflix service

For clarification, we're not saying to let your staff stream Squid Game while they're working. But you should adopt the essence of Netflix and other streaming services by creating a library of on-demand videos for your team. Your library can include a vast number of videos on different topics, such as:

• Company mission
• Brand guidelines
• Welcome messages
• Safety training
• Tech setup guides.

There are almost no limits to what you can use videos for in your business. But creating these videos doesn't just make the information easier to absorb for your team and more entertaining — it makes it more efficient.

Rather than sifting through documents, you can create concise videos that give your team all the information they need. Or, instead of having a member of your HR team get a new employee up to speed in person, they can use videos and streamline the process.

3. Share information that employees will remember

We've all been there, scrolling through a 20-page document that just isn't holding your attention. Most of us get distracted a few pages in and procrastinate. But even if you manage to get through the document, you're unlikely to remember much of it.

Even if not text-heavy, internal communications can be challenging to stay focused on, especially if other stress factors are involved. Meetings, emails and memos are often the go-to for businesses, but they're easy to ignore. According to studies, our attention span is about eight seconds, and most of us only read about 25% of a webpage before clicking on something else.

Video is the obvious solution to share information with your team that they will consume but also remember. Video captures our attention far better than any other form of communication, and it's an excellent way to help your team recall the information when they need to.

4. Learn what works (and what doesn't)

One of the pitfalls of all employee communications is measuring how many members of your team read or consume the information. While videos are proven to have higher engagement levels, you still need to find ways to improve your employee communications.

One of the best ways to do this is to request feedback from your employees. You can ask them questions about the videos that they watch, such as:

• Did you watch the video?
• How long did you spend watching the video?
• Did you watch the complete video?
• Did you think the video was too short or too long?
• Did the video miss out on any vital information?

With this information, you can see what works and what doesn't. If you regularly send out 15-minute long videos but your team only watches 10 minutes, you can start making more concise videos. Or, if your videos are too detailed you can learn to split complex topics into multiple videos that are easier to consume.

You'll be able to use the feedback to drill down into processes, streamline them and make them more engaging. In turn, this can help reduce employee hours, improve productivity and reduce turnover.

Are you ready to introduce video into your employee communications? Try VIBBIO, and see how video can help to make your employee communications engaging, entertaining and memorable. Join with a free trial to start making your videos now.