People prefer video!  You are desperate to keep your employees "in the know" but the reality is that with increasing dispersed channels it's not easy.  Nothing is worse than one of your employees discovering an important company announcement from an outside channel.  Video is a game changer and we're here to help with some great ideas on how you can leverage this great tool for your organization's internal communications.

• Tweet This ▶ 75% of employees prefer videos over reading.  (Source: E-learning | Industry Analysts, Inc.)
• Tweet This ▶ Our brains process visual information 60,000 times faster than text. (Source: 3M Corporation)
• Tweet This ▶ Social video generates 1200% more shares than text and images combined. (Source: Responsive Inbound Marketing)

Want more proof that video gets more engagement than text-based content and email? Read on...

5 simple ways to use video to reach employees and boost engagement

Here's what happens when your employees are more engaged:

• Tweet This ▶ Businesses with highly engaged teams experience a 20% lift in productivity.  (Source:  Gallup)
• Tweet This ▶ Businesses saw a drop in absenteeism by 41% when teams were engaged in their work. (Source: the Workforce Institute on Absenteeism)
• Tweet This ▶ On average, highly engaged teams experience a 40% improvement in turnover. This improvement can vary from 24% in high-turnover organizations to 59% in low-turnover organizations.  (Source:  the Gallup Q12 Meta-Analysis Report)
  
  
  

Here are 5 simple ways you can use video to reach your employees and boost their engagement ...

1. Message from "The Boss"

Create quick weekly video updates from your management to their team(s). These are more friendly and personal than email and reduce the chance of things being misunderstood in text messages that lack the critical context created by facial and voice cues.

Face-time conveys your state of mind. One of the big things employees attribute discontent to?  Fear. Diffuse it! High tech? Forget about it! Grab your smartphone and start talking. This doesn't need to be a polished production. It needs to be real. Your employees will appreciate that and so will you when it saves time by reducing miscommunications.

• Tweet This ▶ 54% of senior executives share work-related videos with colleagues weekly, with the videos inspiring many to take action.  (Source: Tubular Insights)
• Tweet This ▶ Almost two thirds (64 per cent) of workers now trust a message more if they see a person actually delivering it.  (Source:  Generation Now report | Kollective)

Why are bosses sold?  They already know the value themselves:

• Tweet This ▶ 75% of business executives watch work-related videos at least once a week. (Source: MWP)
• Tweet This ▶ 59% of executives agree that if both text and video are available on the same topic, they are more likely to choose video. (Source: MWP)

2. The "Employee Show!"

Create a channel and invite staff to tuck their own video blogs in, sharing ideas for new products and services, ways to improve customer satisfaction, and simply to share things they are passionate about.

Instead of sharing ideas through email or stuffing them into a suggestion box (which often simply get ignored or lost), make innovation personal.  This improves team building and promotes a healthy and inspiring corporate culture, and can be especially helpful in a remote office.  (Did you know that 50% of the U.S. workforce will be remote by 2020?)

Giving employees a voice improves both morale and engagement. That leads to increased productivity and satisfaction and reduced attrition, protecting the valuable intellectual and human capital that are your most precious resources.

• Tweet This ▶ 60% of 2,000 workers surveyed across the US and UK found visual content easier to consume.  (Source:  Generation Now report | Kollective)
• Tweet This ▶ Almost half (46 per cent) can’t be bothered to read long emails or documents.  (Source:  Generation Now report | Kollective)

 3. Online Employee Handbook

Move this online if it isn't already and bring it to life with videos. Creating "conversations" instead of static, one-way and intimidating rule books is a great way to inoculate against toxic work environments!

You don't have to do the heavy lifting by yourself. Our InspireHUB Co-founder, Karolyn Hart, made our handbook an entertaining knowledge portal by embedding some of the many wonderful videos that are shared on YouTube covering the basic human resource practices that most companies embrace, including a handful that were just downright funny. Suffusing this with humour made our handbook human instead of feeling like the typical militaristic reading of the "riot act".

We use the comments section to invite questions and feedback and come up with ideas to help us constantly innovate. Inviting interaction not only makes critical corporate communications and resources more accessible and engaging, it actually reduces your email overload. Comment threads create a useful context for others that might have the same question, and make it easier to find things and so important things don't get lost in email ever again.

When critical corporate communications and resources are more personal, they are more engaging.

• Tweet This ▶ Video equals higher viewer retention. The information retained in one minute of online video is equal to about 1.8 million written words. (Source: Brainshark)
• Tweet This ▶ Viewers retain 95% of a message when they watch it in a video compared to 10% when reading it in text.  (Source:  insivia)

"Presenting information both audibly and visually (Video, Voice, Captions, and Animations) reinforces information in multiple brain areas. This dual-encoding process increases the chance that material will be stored in long-term memory. You will get high levels of understanding and recall."  (Source: Five Reasons Why Video is More Effective for Workplace Training | Catalyst Connection )

4. Customer Tips and Training

Create a channel where you can share news updates and helpful tips with your clients. Instead of one more boring email (which we both know probably won't get read) inject a little personality into the value you create for your clients.

Treating them like the valued friends they are goes a long way to protecting and respecting those relationships.

It's cheaper to keep a client than it is to get a new one:

• Tweet This ▶ Acquiring a new customer is anywhere from 5 to 25 times more expensive than retaining an existing one. (Source: Harvard Business Review)
  
• Tweet This ▶ Research done by Frederick Reichheld of Bain & Company (the inventor of the net promoter score) shows increasing customer retention rates by 5% increases profits by 25% to 95%. (Source: Prescription for Cutting Costs)
  
  

At InspireHUB we create short videos to "show" instead of "tell."  It reduces a lot of the email back-and-forth and makes it easier to introduce customers to new features and services in a way that's much more personal and that allows them to tap into tips and resources "on demand."  

• Tweet This ▶ 4X as many customers would rather watch a video about a product than read about it. (Source: Animoto, 2015)
  
• Tweet This ▶ 95% of people have watched an explainer video to learn more about a product or service.  (Source: The State of Video Marketing in 2018 | HubSpot)
  
• Tweet This ▶ 53% of smartphone users feel more favorable towards companies whose mobile sites or apps provide instructional video content. (Source: Google, 2015)

“Videos have a better level of engagement because there’s a greater opportunity for people to understand what it is that they’re trying to learn and the messages that are going out.” -- Mark Gibson, digital consultant at Nationwide.  (Source: ITProPortal )

5.  Your Own Edison's Lab ... Online

Set up a video channel on your office intranet to invite big thoughts, a sense of playfulness and experimentation.

One of the things I love best about our own internal communications channels at InspireHUB is the way our leader treats them like Thomas Edison's lab.  She tucks in everything from TED Talks and business vlogs to training videos from Navy Seals, inviting us to explore and experiment with new ideas to grow a corporate culture that is uniquely us and very inspiring.  (She's even organized team fieldtrips to visit the Menlo Park genius' lab, which was relocated to the Henry Form Museum of American Innovation at Greenfield Village in Detroit.  Talk about inspiring engagement!)

In the past she might have just sent us an email, which more often than not got lost in the flood.  There was just too much stuff to wade through to really capture true engagement.  Having a channel that invites us to playfully explore new ideas not only coaxes out a bumper crop of "Aha! moments," it's actually a "destination" and something to look forward to.  It's a little like having a living, breathing, interactive version of "The Discovery Channel" right in your own workplace.

This doesn't just solve one of the problems of email overload, it actually invites a level of engagement that cultivates innovation and grows your ROI.

Here's a little something to get you started!

Homework is awesome!  No, really.  We're tucking in some of our favourite inspiring video talks to share with your own team to spark a little (or a lot) of engagement straight away.  From our "Greatest Hits" list:

▶ a Google Talk with Chris Voss of The Black Swan Group sharing powerful tactics from his book "Never Split the Difference" ... rocket fuel for engagement!

▶ a TED Talk with author and Career Analyst, Dan Pink, on "The Puzzle of Motivation"  (Be sure to raid his "Pinkcast" treasure chest for 90-second videos to share snackable bits of wisdom and motivation with your team.)

▶ a bumper crop of ideas and experiments straight from Thomas Edison himself, compliments of our friends at Think Jar Collective, to help launch an Edison style lab of your own.

Let us help you take control of your internal communications!

Let us show you just how much we can help you save in time and money while increasing your employee engagement. Our proprietary ROI calculator will help you understand the impact to your organization.  so you can see exactly what these statistics actually mean in hard dollars in your OWN company. 

Looking for a few more great ideas?  Check out ...

▶ The 3 most important reasons you need to stop the email madness ... right now.

You're exhausted. We get it! And if your boss isn't convinced that your "email fatigue" is a real problem, we've done your homework for you so you can send up the SOS. What your boss cares about is the bottom line. Here's a primer to help you make the case that it's time to handle internal communications in a different way.