Importance of Using Video for Corporate Communication
Sometimes it’s easier to herd cats than to organize a meeting with department heads from across the whole corporation. And when you do get everyone together, are they paying attention, or are they worrying about deadlines and wishing they were back at their desks so they didn’t miss that important call from the client they’ve been chasing all week?
Preparing a short video that outlines the information you wish to share with your team provides a more effective way to communicate the same message to everyone, without taking them away from their workplace. It keeps everyone productive and they can review the information as many times as they need for clarification on any point.
Clear communication is the backbone of any business. Your workplace won’t survive if vital messages are not distributed through all levels of the corporation. Don’t rely on outdated methods to transfer information from one department to the next. Through the medium of video you have an engaging way to connect with all of your employees at once. And they will all receive exactly the same data.
What Subjects can be Communicated through Video?
One of the many advantages of the digital era is the production and storage of information in video libraries that can be sourced whenever needed. Here are some options for the start of your workplace’s video catalog.
Inductions
Why sit down with every new employee to explain your company’s policies on anti-discrimination, sexual harassment, and security measures when you can provide an induction video that covers all these areas instead.
Social Learning
Question and answer sessions are useful ways for personnel to transfer their knowledge to newcomers. Using a recording of these discussions provides an ideal way to share information and promote interaction amongst staff. Individuals with an area of expertise can be encouraged to add their views to this library of experience, which creates an ongoing database of ideas that other employees can draw upon in the future. This is also handy for staff who work from home, or those based interstate or overseas.
Policy Updates
Changes to internal policies or government regulations that require the attention of all staff are best announced by video. Employees who tend to skim through emails could miss important aspects of these announcements, whereas a video will hold their attention for longer, and they are more likely to have a higher retention of the important details through this format.
Five Reasons for Using Video in the Workplace
Video Reduces Your Costs
Training fees are virtually eliminated when a recording of one learning session can be used over and over. Calling together an entire workforce for training normally involves multiple meetings, which is ineffective and costly, especially if you have offices across the country. Holding one meeting and relaying that information to each employee’s computer makes sense on a financial level and it means people don’t have to coordinate time away from their desks.
Making it Personal Makes it Memorable
Employees are reading documents and emails all day, so a video presentation is more likely to hold their attention. Since videos can include images, stock footage, and role playing, they engage the audience and provide a more interactive experience than text. Video keeps it interesting as well as being informative. Also, compared to the written word, video is less ambiguous and is less open to misinterpretation due to missed nonverbal cues.
Video is a Permanent Record of Information
Short attention spans are common amongst employees at all levels of a business. Attending meetings isn’t productive when people are daydreaming about what they’d rather be doing. If these daydreamers do hear something relevant to them, they won’t feel comfortable asking for instructions to be repeated, but on a video they can hit ‘rewind’ and absorb the information as many times as they want. Because it’s difficult to have everyone available at any one time, a recording of a meeting gives absent staff an opportunity to review the session without having to hear about it from another person’s perspective.
No Need for Notes
Taking notes in a meeting is counterproductive. While concentrating on the words they are writing, people often miss the next words being spoken. Viewing videos allows greater retention of instructions because employees know there is a recording they can refer to if they need to check any information.
Video Saves You Time
When team leaders and general managers meet to discuss new protocols, it can take a long time to summarize the results, or to give status updates through the written format of emails and documents. If you want to share the results of a meeting with all employees, it’s much more time-effective to speak to a camera and upload that recording to the people who need to hear it.
The Best Way to Communicate Through Video
Corporate professionals are increasingly turning to video to communicate with their employees. It provides a personal touch where everyone from the president of the corporation to the newest recruit feels connected to each other through this medium. However, this format of communication only works to your advantage if it is done well. Poor audio, bad lighting, and insufficient editing can alienate the audience and they will be too distracted to pay attention to your message. To maximize your investment it’s important to hire a professional video production team such as RaffertyWeiss Media. As an award-winning, full-service production company located in the Washington DC area, we can help you produce video content for internal communication.
The Next Step
A quick poll around the office will soon tell you that in-person meetings are disruptive to workflow. Employees prefer watching recordings of policy updates, product launches, and new work processes. Dynamic organizations who value the effective circulation of information between staff and departments are creating video recordings instead of using traditional correspondence. Contact RaffertyWeiss Media to discover how communication by video improves company culture, increases productivity, and produces greater satisfaction amongst employees.