Eleven million meetings happened yesterday. Eleven million more will happen tomorrow, and the day after that. All in all, companies will host more than one billion meetings in 2022. If we’re talking about effective internal communication, this bloated meeting calendar is bad news.
Why? Because many of those one billion meetings will be unproductive.
Our collective over-reliance on meetings is a costly problem. And we’re not just talking about wasted time and money. When your employees have to sit through too many unnecessary meetings, you also take a serious hit to morale, engagement, and team communication.
Don’t get us wrong. We’re not saying ditch every meeting. Meetings have their place, and they probably always will. But it’s time to think long and hard about what should be included in those meetings and what should be left out.
It’s time to think about asynchronous video as a way to replace some types of live meetings.
For certain situations, which we’ll get into in a minute, asynchronous video is a far better option. Not only does it save time (for you and your meeting attendees), but it’s often a more effective way to communicate. You’ll see more engagement, fewer misunderstandings, and happier employees.
The problem with meetings
In 2021, the average employee spent roughly one-third of each work week in video meetings.
“Well, 2021 was a hard year,” you say. “We were still dealing with the pandemic and learning how to work remotely. Things will get better in 2022, when employees return to the office.”
There are a few problems with this argument:
1. 45% of full-time employees in the US still work remotely at least part of the time.
2. The number of meetings businesses host has been rising every year since 2008.
3. 71% of meetings that companies host are inefficient and don’t accomplish anything.
The pandemic caused a lot of problems, but meetings weren’t one of them. The truth is, we’ve been obsessed with meetings for over a decade. And it doesn’t matter how we host them — in-person or via Zoom — most meetings don’t help us achieve our goals.
Don’t get us wrong, we’re not anti-meeting.
Meetings are appropriate in certain situations. The problem is, we host them far too often. This over-reliance on meetings kills productivity, lowers team morale, and doesn’t do a whole lot to help us get the information we need to do our jobs well.
In many situations, meetings aren’t the best option for effective internal communication. A great deal of meetings can — and should — be replaced by asynchronous communication.
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How asynchronous communication wins the day
In-person meetings and video calls have their place.
If you want to brainstorm ideas with your team, host a meeting. If you want to build rapport with your colleagues, host a meeting. If you need to deliver a significant critique or reprimand an employee, call a one-on-one meeting to make the news more palatable.
But for just about everything else — information sharing, announcements, updates — you’re far better served with asynchronous communication.
If you aren’t familiar with the term, asynchronous communication is any form of communication that doesn’t happen in real-time. If you send a colleague an email and they respond two hours later, you’re engaging in a form of asynchronous communication.
The opposite of asynchronous communication is synchronous communication, AKA communication that happens in real-time. If you call the same colleague you emailed earlier and talk with them on the phone, you’ve engaged in synchronous communication.
It’s true that not all forms of asynchronous communication were created equal. (Dreaded email graveyard anyone?) we’ll get to that in a minute when we talk about replacing meetings with videos.
But first, here are some of the overarching benefits of asynchronous communication.
Increased productivity
Every company wants to be more productive. But a constant stream of must-attend meetings prevents your team from getting their work done in a timely manner.
Think about it: one hour-long meeting means your team members only have seven hours to complete their tasks for the day. But it’s actually worse than that. According to the University of California Irvine, it takes 23 minutes and 15 seconds to refocus on a task after a distraction.
Basically, an hour a day spent on meetings results in roughly 17% less work time. Why would you expect your team to get more done when they’re working at 83% capacity?
Team morale
It would be one thing if that 17% of the day we spend attending and recovering from meetings resulted in something useful. But the fact of the matter is that most meetings aren’t all that productive.
A full 65% of managers say meetings keep them from finishing their work.
Spending all that time in useless meetings, and yet still being expected to get all their work done, takes a serious toll on employee morale. This in turn harms employee engagement and decreases motivation.
If your team doesn’t enjoy coming to work every day, they won’t. Or at least, they won’t bring their “A” games when they show up.
Flexibility for remote and in-person teams
As we said earlier, a significant portion of the workforce is still remote or hybrid. So there’s a chance your team won’t be in the office the next time you want to host a meeting.
You could schedule a Zoom call, but if your remote team members live in different time zones, choosing a time that works for everybody gets tough. Plus, Zoom fatigue is real. The last thing your people want is to attend another conference call.
Asynchronous communication accommodates remote work because team members can consume and reply at times that work for their schedules.
And even if your team is back in the office five days a week, they’re still busy people. They have coding to code, and customer complaints to answer, and people management to manage.
Asynchronous communication shows them that you respect their time. Let them take in your message at the point in their day that works best for them. They’ll be more receptive to hearing it if they have a choice in the matter.
Why async video is so effective for internal communication
There are plenty of asynchronous communication channels available to you: email, Slack, Loom, company intranets, and wikis. The list goes on.
These channels themselves aren’t the problem. Unfortunately, the way we use these channels doesn’t always work for internal communication.
Text-heavy emails are hard to digest. Your team skims them and then forgets them. Slack is good for fast-paced conversations, but it’s not so hot for relaying detailed information.
Looms offer an option for on-the-fly video messaging. But when the message is complex, Looms can quickly take a turn toward long-winded. The company intranet is important, but when all employees see is a heavy block of text, their attention tends to wander.
Replacing heavy blocks of text and unscripted Looms with short-form videos takes your asynchronous comms to a whole new level.
When you need to send an important message that engages and aligns your people, short videos have a clear leg up.
Easy to consume
Once you create a video, your team will be able to watch (and re-watch) it whenever they want, which means you won’t have to worry about anyone’s individual schedule.
When you share your video using a unique link (it’s easy to do with Biteable Teams), you can add the link to an email, drop it in a Slack message, or post it on your company intranet. Or do all three of these things and let your team consume your video in the way that works best for them.
Videos are also easier to understand and remember than written content.
There are two main reasons for this. First, video is a time-restricted format. When you make a video, you have to boil the information down to only the essential elements. This naturally clarifies your message.
Video also includes plenty of visual cues, which goes a long way toward helping people retain the information. This is part of why the average person remembers 95% of a message when they see it in a video, compared to just 10% of a message when they read it in text.
Highly engaging
Sixty percent of people would rather watch a video than read text. Why? Because well-crafted videos are incredibly engaging and elicit emotional responses from viewers.
This is especially true when said videos contain on-brand animations.
By including animated characters in your videos, you’ll be able to easily represent the diversity of your team and depict recognizable situations. This allows viewers to connect with what they’re watching on a deeper level and keep their eyes glued to their screens.
Trackable
Depending on the video creation tool you use, short-form videos are much easier to track than other forms of internal communication. (More on video creation tools in a bit.)
As an internal communications specialist, your job is to communicate with your team. You can only do this if your team actually consumes the content you create for them. It’s important for you to be able to see how many people watch your videos and whether or not they watch all the way to the end.
If your video contains a clickable call-to-action, (again, totally possible with the right tools), you can also track how many clicks each link gets.
Let’s pretend, for example, you want to create an announcement video introducing your company’s new CEO to the team. After explaining who this person is, you could end your video with a CTA that allows team members to easily welcome the new CEO via email.
From views to clicks, a short-form video gives you the analytics details you need.
More personal
Finally, short-form videos can include actual footage of you, leadership, or other members of your team. This makes your videos feel more personal and increases the likelihood that they get watched.
This doesn’t have to be anything fancy or overly produced. In fact, for internal communication we recommend a quick one-take video shot on a cell phone or computer camera. Film a quick introduction, then dive into animated scenes for the rest of the video.
Or, if footage isn’t feasible, voiceover is another great option for adding that personal touch. When you want your message to come across as relatable and personalized, a recognizable voice makes a big difference.
(Biteable Teams users can now record voice-overs and video footage, or request footage from others, directly within the platform. No uploading required.)
Add video to your internal comms stack with Biteable Teams
Replacing even a handful of your meetings with asynchronous video has the potential to improve team productivity, morale, and employee engagement.
The question is, how do you create videos at scale? Simple, you use Biteable Teams.
Biteable Teams is the internal communication tool you’ve been waiting for. With it, you can create highly engaging videos in as little as 10 minutes.
Biteable Teams is packed with professionally designed video templates, brandable scenes, and on-point animations suited for just about any workplace situation. All you have to do is find a template you like, use the intuitive platform to add words, animations, and music, and then send the finished product to your team with a trackable link.
When it comes to asynchronous communication, video wins. And the easiest way to create polished videos that your colleagues actually want to watch is with Biteable Teams.