Employees are the heartbeat of every organization.
Unfortunately, a majority of them feel dissatisfied. According to a recent study, 71% of American workers are thinking about leaving their jobs right now.
Employee experience matters.
Employees are happier when they’re engaged with their work, feel valued by the company, and understand how they fit into the bigger picture. And happy employees have a habit of sticking around longer.
Here’s the good news: one of the best tools for improving employee experience is totally within reach. Internal communications have a huge impact on employee engagement. Small changes to the way you communicate with your team can make a big difference.
Keep reading to learn how your internal comms impact employee engagement and how to use short-form internal communications videos to connect with your team.
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How internal communications impact employee engagement
When you think about employee engagement, what comes to mind? If you’re like most people, visions of company retreats and fancy recognition apps dance through your head.
These things definitely help connect and motivate a team. But they aren’t always necessary. The easiest, and oftentimes best way to engage employees is to communicate with them on a regular basis — in ways that don’t bore them to death.
Here’s what you don’t want to do:
DON’T drown your employees in information
When the human brain gets overwhelmed, it disengages. Sadly, most text-heavy comms like email newsletters, PowerPoint presentations and intranet blog posts are too dense. This causes people to tune out.
DON’T forget to humanize your internal communications
You’re the voice of your company, but that doesn’t mean you have to sound like a company when you talk to your team. Internal communications are more effective when they’ve been humanized. Why? Because it helps employees relate to the company they work for.
After all, at the end of the day, the company itself is just a bunch of humans.
DON’T send conflicting messages
When people feel like their company tells them two different things, they get frustrated. Continued frustration leads to disengagement. The opposite of this is consistency. When people know what to expect from the company they work for, they’re more likely to stay engaged.
There are many strategies for avoiding these pitfalls. But one of the easiest and most effective ways is to add short-form videos to your internal comms stack.
DO use short-form videos to engage employees
Video is an impressive tool for internal communication. Add one to your next email newsletter, or PowerPoint presentation, or intranet post, and you’re almost guaranteed to see a rise in engagement.
This is because:
Video prevents information overload
Video is a time-restricted format. When you make an internal comms video, you naturally have to choose the most important details to include. Anything extraneous gets stripped away.
Videos are also much easier to digest and remember than text-heavy comms. People retain 95% of a message they watch in a video, versus 10% if they read it in text.
Video humanizes your internal communications
Would you rather receive a huge block of text from your boss or a quick video that includes an introduction from them, speaking to you casually through their webcam, paired with a few engaging graphics and onscreen text to drive the point home?
The second is more personal. Video adds a human touch to your internal comms. As such, it’s easier to consume and engage with.
Video-making tools help communications pros maintain consistency
Video creation tools like Biteable Teams give internal communicators access to brandable templates and video scenes. These templates give videos a consistent look.
Don’t underestimate the importance of consistency when it comes to employee engagement. When people know what to expect, they don’t have to expend a lot of brain power anticipating what they’ll see next on the screen. They can focus all their attention on your message.
As you can see, internal communication videos can have a huge impact on employee engagement. But what kind of videos should you send? Let’s talk about that…
4 essential videos for engaging internal comms
If this is your first foray into video for internal comms, it’s hard to know where to start. Here are the four types of videos we recommend for improving employee engagement.
1. Announcement videos
What’s new? Tell your employees about it with a quick announcement video.
Announcement videos can be used to share important company news and information regarding team performance. They can also be used to build excitement for upcoming training seminars, holiday parties, and a host of other events.
The great thing about announcement videos is that they’re easy for employees to watch, which means they actually will. The same isn’t true for your text-heavy email broadcasts. A SlickText study found that 60.8% of people ignore workplace emails altogether.
When you make an announcement video, keep these best practices in mind:
Minimize details
The best announcement videos are clear and concise. To make these kinds of videos, minimize the amount of information you share. Tell your employees what they need to know, then sign off.
Keep it short
All of your announcement videos should be less than two minutes long. Many can be even shorter. If you go past the two-minute mark, people tend to get annoyed or lose focus.
End with a call-to-action
What do you want your people to do after they watch your announcement video? Maybe you want them to RSVP for an event or fill out a survey. Drive them directly toward this action with a CTA.
Pro tip: With Biteable, you can add a clickable, trackable call-to-action button to your videos.
2. Training videos
Looking to roll out a company-wide learning initiative? Hoping to bolster attendance for your next company-sponsored training event? Maybe you need to give your team a quick how-to on a new workflow. Whatever the case may be, you can do it better with video.
Remember how we said people retain 95% of information they see in a video, but just 10% when they read it in text? When it comes to employee training, that’s a big difference.
Here are a few tips to make sure your training videos hit the mark:
Explain why
Tell your team what to do, then tell them why they need to do it. This gives people a better understanding of how their work fits into the bigger picture. It also makes them feel like a valued member of the team, an important part of employee engagement.
Keep it short
How short should your training videos be? As short as possible. Why? Because it’s easier to remember information in short videos. That doesn’t mean you have to skimp on important details. Just cut the ones that aren’t essential.
Make it interactive
Hands-on training is always more effective because it allows for immediate application. If at all possible, make your training videos interactive.
3. Culture videos
Your company has a unique vibe. Foster that culture with video.
What’s a culture video, you ask? Any video that celebrates, builds, or seeks to improve the culture of your company. A few examples include videos that celebrate or reinforce certain aspects of your company culture, or videos that encourage people to take part in events like company retreats or employee surveys.
Culture videos are a great way to boost employee engagement because they remind employees of everything they love about the company they work for.
The best culture videos are:
Concise
Like every other kind of video we’ve talked about, culture videos are better when they’re short. Keep your culture videos under two minutes.
Purposeful
Why are you creating a culture video? Keep this reason in mind during the video-creation process. That way you don’t lose sight of your goal.
On brand
Is your company fun and irreverent? Maybe it’s cool and professional. Make sure your culture videos reflect your unique internal brand.
4. Reporting videos
A reporting video does exactly what you think it would: deliver information from a report.
In most cases, a video can’t replace a written version of your report; it’s meant as a supplement. Written reports have notoriously low engagement. By putting the highlights and key takeaways into a video, people are much more likely to pay attention and remember the information you share.
Follow these best practices when you make a reporting video:
Use numbers
Your team doesn’t want to know that they’ve helped “boost sales”. They want to know that they’ve helped boost sales by 20%”. Reporting videos are more powerful, and therefore more engaging, with numbers.
Consider the length
You knew this was coming. The best reporting videos clock in at less than two minutes. This is long enough to share important metrics, but not so long that employees get bored and tune out.
Liven things up
Most reports are overly-professional and stuffy. Your reporting videos shouldn’t be. Make them fun, with eye-catching colors and animations.
Internal comms is more engaging with Biteable Teams
As an internal communication professional, it’s your job to engage employees. This is difficult to do with text-heavy comms but surprisingly easy with video.
Once you start creating announcement, training, culture, and reporting videos, you’ll notice a difference. The question is, how do you create those videos?
The easiest way is to use Biteable.
This intuitive video-making platform has everything you need to create engaging internal comms videos — even if you’ve never made them before. Brandable video templates and scenes, unique animations, and a huge library of stock footage gives you all the creative assets you need.
An easy-to-use platform makes editing, collaborating, and sharing a breeze. Use a unique link to share your video on your existing comms channels, then track engagement on your dashboard.
With Biteable in your corner, you’ll be making top-notch internal communications videos in no time flat.