The State of Employee Engagement 2023
Employee Engagement
20 min
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Did you know that 65% of the population are visual learners? It’s no wonder that paperwork, emails and voice messages are getting phased out in favour of videos, since more people can focus and take on the meaning of videos. In fact, viewers retain 95% of a message if they watch it in a video, which is much higher than when people read a message. This is why it’s so important to make sure that you are using the right method to contact employees, helping you improve employee engagement, as well as overcoming impersonal remote working. Videos are also a very convenient medium for employees and leaders alike, even in the fast-paced digital era.
If you are unsure where to start with using videos for employee engagement, we’ll go over why videos are so useful. We will also cover how to use video messages to boost your employee engagement.
Video is a newer way to connect with your employees compared to emails or even webchats, but why is it one of the most effective employee engagement tools? There is a broad range of ways that videos can help, including:
Video is a great way to make sure that people fully engage with the message that you are trying to get across, but that’s not all. Not only are people more likely to take in the information, but they’re also much more likely to remember it for longer, compared to simply reading information on a page. This makes video a vital tool for important messages such as training, onboarding info, and more.
Most video upload websites will let you easily track and measure employee engagement. This means keeping an eye on the number of people who have watched the video, how much of the video they watch, and if they interacted with it beyond just watching it. This is useful information to have. For example, if your employees are getting bored of videos halfway through, you know to make your videos shorter or more exciting to keep them engaged. Tracking these statistics makes it easier for you to act upon, compared with simply emailing a ream of information.
Text, and even voice, messages can be strangely impersonal, especially when your company’s leadership is too busy to be seen around the office very often, or when you have multiple office locations. Videos can help leaders, managers, and executives talk directly to employees, helping everyone feel like they are part of a team, and helping get messages across with the right tone and emphasis.
Compared to meetings or video chats, videos have a huge benefit because they are perpetual media and can be referred back to at any point. This helps in a number of scenarios. For example, you only need to make some video content once, such as an onboarding video, rather than having to have a meeting with multiple different new hires multiple times a year, while still keeping that personal touch. If someone misses an important meeting they won’t need a refresher if the content is delivered via video instead. And, if someone needs to look back over training materials or webinars, this is easy. People will often be able to find the answer to a problem they are having without taking away from other people’s time.
A lot of people prefer remote working to enable them to enjoy their home comforts, take care of children, or avoid the commute. However, this can lead to people feeling a bit cut off from the company’s culture and social side. Videos are a great way to make sure that employees get a feel for the company culture and still feel like they are part of their workplace community.
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So, how can you use video to boost employee engagement? Here are our top ten uses for videos:
Onboarding can be a stressful time for new hires, making it one of the most crucial types of internal communication. Video content can really help at this important time. Creating onboarding videos with your current employees can help introduce a new hire to the team straight away, rather than having to wait for everyone to be available. It is also a great way to make new employees feel welcome from the get-go. Plus, being able to look back over onboarding videos can help new starts learn the ropes quickly.
Employer branding and culture are one of the most important elements used to gain and retain talent. Videos can be a great way to make sure that everyone knows why you are a great company to work for. Making user-generated videos about culture and values can even be a great bonding exercise for your employees.
Let’s be honest, trawling through web pages with dates and figures can be a bit boring for a lot of people, and they won’t take in the company history information. This is a perfect use case for a video, making the content more interesting and keeping employees engaged.
Every employee will need training, but it can be hard to fit in time for this if your employees are already busy. A lot of training, from simple first-day training to more specialised training, can be turned into videos. This carries a big advantage in that you can get multiple people to use the same video. They’re also much more engaging than simple text training manuals, especially for software, or for any other types of internal communications needed for training.
Want to tell everyone about the company reaching a milestone? Or need to deliver annual reports? Most report documents are only skim-read by employees. Videos can help create better engagement with these updates by making them more human and immediately relevant to the watcher.
Video conferencing has become massively popular since remote working increased. Making sure to capture these as videos and having them accessible afterwards will make sure that employees know exactly where they need to go for information from a certain conference, and it helps employees feel more involved even if they had to miss a specific conference.
If you want to tell potential employees why they want to work for you, there’s no better way than getting your current team to tell them directly. Employee-generated videos for employee engagement is particularly useful when you want to showcase the culture of your workplace alongside reviews and opinions. Plus, seeing the faces and names of people who actually work in the company will make potential new employees feel more at home.
If you’ve got great training and speakers, you can make webinars. Not only is your content more likely to be watched by engaged employees, but you can use webinars to garner engagement from people outside the company. This can build company renown in your field and help attract good talent.
Having a user-generated video for internal communications is a great way to give your employees the chance to show off what they’ve achieved. Whether it’s talking about a project they completed or a bid that they won for the company, or even what they raised during your last charity day, this kind of content can help everyone feel engaged and motivated with the company’s mission and values.
Of course, another great benefit of videos is whatever your employees want to use them for. You can encourage people to make video notes, float ideas, and talk about anything. This is a great way to get people to feel like a community and come up with new and novel ideas to improve the company.
Videos are a great way to get information across and make sure that your employees retain key knowledge. Of course, not all videos are created equal. Try to bring energy and passion to the videos that you make, as this will help keep your employees engaged. Address your employees directly, be genuine, and make eye contact. You can also practice public speaking to make sure that your videos are interesting and more likely to be watched.
Remember, letting your employees have fun with user-generated video content will help them feel part of a community and support your employer branding. Be open to new ideas and watch your engagement grow! Just remember to use that all-important video feedback to gauge how well your videos are doing to keep your employees engaged. Employ these top tips to get started on your user-generated video today.
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