Organizations large and small are engaging employees by creating video to effectively deliver clear, concise, and most importantly, valuable corporate information. According to a recent study of over 700 business communicators, more than 71% currently utilize videos to converse with employees, and 72% of companies plan to increase their use of employer brand video internally this year. (1)
The use of video streamlines the corporate communication process by eliminating or reducing many in-person meetings, emails and flyers across any size of organization. Videos are perhaps the most effective storytelling medium available to business today.
To employees, video messaging feels more personal and accessible than email. Key messages are retained much more through video. Overall, employees are 75 percent more likely to watch a video than to read documents, emails or web articles. (2).
In seconds, effective video can communicate what might take several written paragraphs. Video messages can now be spread throughout an organization in seconds to any number of devices, saving both time and money by becoming instantly accessible to employees and integrating perfectly with their daily online experience.
From an employee perspective, and looking at the Blu Ivy Group key touch points of delivering the EVP through the employee lifecycle, we see several opportunities to employ an internal video messaging strategy.
Here are five examples of internally focused employer brand videos for your organization.
Leadership Messaging
Regular, short messaging from the CEO or executive creates a personal connection between the C-suite and the rest of the organization, reinforcing the employer brand. With video, there is a direct, open and emotional connection that the employee doesn’t receive with email or quarterly town halls. Top performing organizations frequently communicate with employees the mission and shared purpose of an organization, and align those goals to the EVP. Video provides branded, consistent messaging and storytelling with much greater frequency to a broader talent pool. Interview-style videos can reduce confusion and increase employee confidence by visually mapping out business changes with supporting graphics.
Welcoming and Onboarding
Many HR leaders and hiring managers, express a desire to deliver a more consistent, branded and connected experience for new employees entering the organization. An exciting, engaging onboarding video series can reinforce your employer brand while imparting valuable information to your new hires at critical stages, even before starting. A great video not only provides a new hire crucial information on what to expect, and key insights on getting started, but can also enable them to hear from their new colleagues and become far more connected and productive. Ensuring that your onboarding video truly reflects your employer brand will help establish a base of employee experience that your new hire can build on. It will also free up managers to spend more time with new hires on personalized mentoring and coaching
Talent Development
Providing training and development opportunities through video not only saves time and money, and it also enables ongoing personal and skills development for many of your busiest and highest potential employees. By providing video centric learning centres, remote workers, retail employees, manufacturing and plant workers are enabled to build new skills and management competencies through online and mobile enabled videos. If your organization is introducing new initiatives, new software, and new products, employer branded development videos are highly efficient and impactful for information retention, employee experience, and productivity.
Career Opportunities & Lateral and Global Succession
A great challenge many organizations face concerns building employee awareness for internal career opportunities. In particular, the highest engaged and highest potential talent are so busy during their work days, they rarely (or never) visit internal career posting sites. If an organization values its talent as corporate vs divisional talent, video messaging is a tremendous way to build awareness of career opportunities and improve the succession planning process. Creating employer branded videos that can be shared internally to high potentials in your key talent segments is a fantastic way to ensure that you are attracting and retaining top internal talent. And the use of video increases that sense of transparency on opportunities available in all areas of the business.
Employer Brand Reinforcement Video
Video is an excellent tool to reinforce an organization’s employer brand. Remember the onboarding video that introduced your company’s employer brand and value proposition? Reinforcing the employer value proposition yearly or biannually with video helps boost team morale, builds engagement and reminds employees of their ultimate goals within the organization.
Cisco predicts that 80% of internet traffic will be comprised of video by 2019. (3) Our society is attuned to video as its primary information source. A video is an opportunity to engage your audience (employees) in a way that they are now used to getting their information. Reinforce your brand identity, your employer brand and your corporate culture with your employees, while saving your organization time and money.
Hire an employer brand firm like Blu Ivy Group for key employer brand strategy and communications, video production and editing. Other smaller format, high-frequency video initiatives can be created internally. Next blog post, we will explore various production options that companies are employing as they create more, and better employer brand video, in the digital world.
- (Source: Engaging Employees with Video, Ragan Communications, com)
- (Source: Forrester Research, comprehensivemedia.com).
- (Source: Visual Networking Index, Cisco, cisco.com)
About Blu Ivy Group
Blu Ivy Group is a leading employer branding and employee engagement consultancy that aligns your organization with contemporary workplace paradigms. Blu Ivy Group’s mission is to help clients build award-winning people practices, inspire extraordinary employee engagement, and cultivate unique and desirable workplaces.
Blu Ivy Group provides integrated solutions in employer brand and engagement research, strategic consulting, employer brand integration, creative and talent communications.
Blu Ivy Group is a trusted partner to many of North America’s most respected employer brands. For more information, go to www.bluivygroup.com