Having employees at their workstation is one thing – but ensuring they’re engaged with your overall mission can make a profound difference to your overall business performance.
Don’t just take our word for it.
Employee engagement is crucial for many reasons:
– It motivates employees to ‘travel the extra mile’ and deliver exceptional service
– It’s proven to increase productivity, reduce sick days, increase customer satisfaction and improve profitability.
Of course, fostering engagement among your team requires a multi-faceted approach. But, today, I want to talk specifically about how you can use video to cut through the clutter and boost employee engagement within your business.
1. Company updates
Nothing undermines engagement faster than secrecy and second-guessing. Plus, your employees can’t care about company goals if they don’t know what they are. And they won’t care about company performance if they aren’t regularly updated on how the business is performing.
They need to feel ownership and a sense of inclusion if they are to fully contribute to the business’ success – and they need to get a feel for how their daily activity contributes to that success.
There are many ways to provide company updates. But, as you grow, and you need to reach more people, you may find video to be a highly scalable and effective choice. One company that definitely does this, is HelpScout – who replaced their weekly ‘all-hands’ meeting with a video update, as explained in this awesome blog post.
“Our videos keep the team informed about birthdays, feature releases and other company-wide news,” writes Leah Knobler, of HelpScout’s People Ops team.
“Switching away from meetings to video saves precious time,” she continues. “Videos are asynchronous conversations, so people can watch them whenever it works best.
2. Training videos
Invariably, engaged employees are ones who know and understand their job roles well – while being nurtured and encouraged to improve.
Video is an incredible training tool for a number of reasons.
Firstly, it blends a variety of different learning styles into one package. Visual learners can feast their eyes. Auditory learners have the message reinforced by a voiceover. Those who learn best through reading and writing can read subtitles, or have key points highlighted using text on screen. And kinaesthetic learners can enjoy the movement and transitions included in a great training video.
There’s also the fact that video content can be stored in a central repository, meaning employees can revisit their training at their own pace, as needed, rather than having to ask another team member for help. The ability to grab a quick refresher on a certain part of the role is invaluable.
Professional animated video is a great direction to choose here. Take this video we created, for example. Nikwax is an aftercare product for waterproof garments, which helps extend their lifespan and keeps them waterproof for longer. We created this video to be shown to retailers and help them understand when to introduce Nikwax during the sales process – and how best to sell it.
Creating this video through animation helped us achieve so much more than live action would have: we could recreate the store environment, use ‘cross-section’ diagrams to demonstrate the value of the product, and have the right characters for the scenario without hiring actors.
If anything needed to be changed throughout the process, there was no need to re-shoot – we could edit the whole thing using animation software.
Check out our complete guide to using video to train your team here.
3. Video onboarding
I hinted at it above, but onboarding is about much more than basic training. The first week or so of a new hire’s employment are fundamentally important – and skills/competency training are only one part, albeit an important one.
There are plenty of different types of video you could create to onboard your new hires:
- “Welcome to the team.” Whether it’s from the company CEO, the new hire’s line manager or even one of their new co-workers. This is a great, personalised and very inclusive way to create a warm welcome and communicate some important messages about the company culture.
- “Knowledge handoff.” Most companies carry out exit interviews and handovers to ensure a smooth transition and good business continuity. What if you could create a video series in which the new hire’s predecessor is able to lay out everything they know about the role?
- “Key company policies.” We’re all familiar with the usual way in which policies are communicated – in black and white, on lettered paper, or hidden away on the company network somewhere. Doing this via video is a great way to communicate these important policies in simple terms, in an engaging format – which, again, can be repeated.
- “Skills training.” We touched on this in point 2, so no need to revisit here!
- “Little things matter.” That’s all the major bits taken care of, but what about the small stuff – how to use the photocopier? Where important documents are stored? How do you place a stationary order? This is a nice time-saving way to empower your new hires to answer their own questions, feeling relaxed and integrated quicker.
Video content can really help all these little bits fall into place. Your new hires will feel more welcome, more quickly; understand the company culture allowing faster integration and minimal culture clash; and get up to speed quickly with day-to-day life in your business.
4. Product/process videos
Video is an amazing resource for product training – and there are dozens of different styles you can choose from. Product knowledge can, of course, be a key driver of employee engagement. If your team understands how great your product is, they’re more likely to appreciate its value and feel a sense of pride around it.
It’s particularly useful for salespeople to understand the finer details of how a product works and what its key selling points are.
Here’s an example we made for Paymentshield:
Engaging videos like this not only keep the important benefits of the product top-of-mind for your employees, it can also inspire them to have more interesting and thought-provoking conversations with potential customers.
Closing thoughts
Employee engagement is critically important to the success of any business. A feeling of engagement, ownership and loyalty has been proven in countless studies to improve performance and deliver all kinds of healthy results for businesses who take time to foster it.
Ask yourself the following questions:
– Do they know what your wider mission as a business is, and how their role slots into this?
– Do they fully understand the product or service you offer, and its full potential?
– Are they respectful of, helpful and welcoming to their colleagues?
– Are they willing to go the extra mile?
– Are you keeping them up to date with developments in the field?
– Are resources available for them to enhance and refresh their knowledge and skills?
If the answer to any of these questions is ‘no’ – then video might be a quick and efficient way to change that to a ‘yes!’
