With 70% of the U.S. workforce either disengaged or actively disengaged, finding new ways to connect with employees is essential to the success of HR departments.
One of the key roles of Human Resources is disseminating important corporate messages to employees. For most companies, information is shared mainly through written emails, but if employees aren’t reading emails, this makes communication extremely ineffective.
Adding video to your communication plan can provide an engaging way to distribute information that will grab your employees’ attention and keep it.
Here are five practical ways that HR professionals can incorporate video into everyday communication.
Corporate Announcements
Video is a great way to communicate corporate announcements in a more compelling way. By offering employees the opportunity to connect with a human presence, your message will be more impactful and emotional reactions to the news or information can be accurately portrayed.
Here are a few examples of messages that can be enhanced with video.
Is your company adding a new employee benefit? Add excitement to the roll out by using video to share the news.
Are you welcoming a new executive to the company? Use video to introduce them to the team and share their excitement for being a part of the company mission.
Is the business relocating? Share the news in video with clips of the new location and allow employees to feel the regret displayed from the messenger for the inconvenience that will be caused by the move.
These videos should be produced by the marketing team or an outside vendor to get the best overall engagement. Keep announcements under 2 minutes and focus on sharing a simple message with engaging imagery.
Company News
Many organizations use their corporate intranet or written employee emails to distribute news stories. These stories include new products, changes to company teams, major marketing campaigns, or mergers and acquisitions.
By communicating these news stories with video, the value of these stories can more readily be depicted and understood by employees.
Let’s say your company wants to communicate to employees the impact of a major marketing campaign starting in 2 months. The goal is to get employees to start the buzz on social media by sharing the company’s posts. What’s the best way to generate that excitement?
The visual storytelling that video provides can be extremely impactful in this situation. The company can share images of the new campaign, give a first look at the new commercials, and even introduce employees to the team responsible for its creation. Now that’s exciting!
Company news should be produced at a high level to create an impactful story. These should also be created by your marketing department’s video team or an outside vendor.
How-To Messages
Does your HR team regularly teach employees how to manage time-sheets, book corporate travel, or apply for benefits?
By creating video training modules, your team can point employees and managers to the training videos instead of spending hours individually training the same things over and over again.
This allows the HR team to focus on what’s most important — attracting and hiring top talent, employee retention, and managing important compliance requirements.
These training modules can be presented as a simple screencast with voiceover, a “brainshark” presentation, or an over the shoulder procedural video with commentary.
These videos can be produced with simple technology and most people with some technical experience can create them. Production quality is less important, but organization is key. Make sure that you start with a training script and a plan for how to explain the information.
Screencasts can be recorded with Quicktime or an online screencast software. Powerpoint presentations also allow voiceover and can be saved as a video file. And finally, video presentation services such as Powtoon offer easy to use video presentation templates with compelling imagery.
Daily Updates
Does your HR team send out daily or weekly emails about happenings around the office? Many HR teams are responsible for sharing updates such as local road work, teams relocating to new workspaces, office luncheons, investor visits, and holidays.
By sending out a quick video, your team can save time by simply relaying these messages in a video format. Just take the few announcements you have and use this simple script to share them.
Good Morning Colleagues, I’m ______ from your HR department and here are your office announcements for the week of _____, 2015.
List Item 1, Item 2, Item 3, Item 4.
Thank you for taking a moment out of your morning to allow me to share these items with you. Have a great week, and please don’t hesitate to contact your HR business partner with any questions about these announcements.
These videos can be filmed on a simple laptop webcam, a smart phone, or an inexpensive camcorder. The only editing necessary is removing any early hesitation, blips, or button pushing if you’re filming yourself.
Employee Engagement
Sharing videos of employees is a great way to build an engaged workforce. It’s an opportunity to make employees feel special, and recognize them publicly for achievements.
Ideas for employee videos include clips from award ceremonies, brief interviews with teams doing interesting projects, clips of great employee speeches (at company Toastmasters or speaking clubs), and public praise for recipients of excellent customer feedback.
These videos can be filmed on a smart phone or inexpensive camcorder with little editing required.
Sources:
Coine, Ted, and Mark Babbitt. “Building a World-Class Team for the Social Age.” A World Gone Social:How Companies Must Adapt to Survive. New York, NY: AMACOM, 2014. Print.
Krystal Covington, MBA
I help businesses humanize their communication, develop authentic connection and influence people to act.
Learn more about me at http://www.goleadmktg.com/about