11 Simple Ways to Improve Your Internal Communication with Video

For most of human existence, we’ve been trying to come up with ways to say things to people who aren’t in the room. There have been carrier pigeons, smoke signals, semaphores, trumpets, and now SMS, emails, voicemails, movies, emojis, and snaps. But does it ever compare to face-to-face interaction?

Most would agree not. That’s because, with each of these forms, some of the messaging is lost. You miss out on the interplay of all the senses that comes with seeing, hearing, and reading all the non-verbal communication that we’ve evolved to receive. Yet in the device-addicted, always-connected modern landscape of business, one technology is bringing back the human spark: video.

Why is it new? Because with quick-capture technology like Vidyard’s ViewedIt, it’s finally easy. And because video has a higher informational throughput—you can say far more with less effort—it’s opening up a world of possibility for internal communications.

Here are 11 ways that video is perfect for internal communications:

1. Executive fireside chats: Fireside chats are far from a new concept, but what about selfie ones? With the power of webcams, there’s no need for heavy industrial camera equipment and a marketing-led, makeup-padded production. In fact, Vidyard customers are finding that engagement (which ViewedIt users can track) rises and internal audiences watch for longer when videos are informal. Just a little lighting, maybe a hi-definition webcam, and your executives have a direct channel to the entire company.
   
   
2. Capturing meetings: It’s always the webinar or the whiteboard brainstorming session that you didn’t think to capture that you end up needing. Erase those regrets and set up either screencapture or your laptop webcam to document the entire thing. Save them for easy recall by tagging them by date, time, and topic.
3. Broadcasting standups: Saving team weekly or bi-weekly meetings via video helps teams remember what happened previously and allows team members who weren’t there to stay up to date.
4. Keeping remote teams connected: Video communicates more than phone calls do alone and they help alleviate the alienation that remote workers can often feel. This is increasingly important as already, 43% of the U.S. workforce works remotely to some degree, reports The New York Times, and this figure is expected to grow to 50% by 2020. It’s important for your organization to nail down these video communication skills now to maintain that connection no matter what.
5. Walk-throughs: Ever have someone circulate an internal email on how to change your HR benefits or update an Outlook setting that looked like an impenetrable wall of jargon-filled text? Suffer those email essays no longer. Technologies like ViewedIt allow you to screen-capture while you talk so that everyone can follow along. It’s like a webinar, but without the mind-numbing complexity.
   
   
6. Onboarding: While many organizations have onboarding processes, it’s remarkably difficult to build a bullet-proof system. Instead, new hires typically pester more senior employees with corner-case questions until they’re ramped up. This is great for team building, but bad for productivity. Senior folk who record their answers in video, need only do it once, for all future new hires. These videos can then be stored in a simple video onboarding hub for easy access.
7. Peer-to-peer messages: Some questions or problems transcend text or voicemail, and it’s easiest to ask them via video. This way, employees can walk through their thought process, lead their peers up to where they got stuck, and invite their responses.
8. Tribal knowledge data dumps: Whenever a teammate reaches an “aha moment” and discovers something critical, it’s not unusual for people to gather around their desk to see. Usually, the knowledge transfer ends there. With video, however, teams can share their newly won tribal knowledge with a wider group and save it for future new hires.
9. Product feedback: Constant feedback is crucial to agile development teams but more often than not, they either have to hunt through analytics or interview users to get it. With simple video capture, product teams can solicit feedback from across the organization to hear, see, and watch reactions from everyone in a client-facing role.
10. Product announcements: If a product team wants to demonstrate a new feature, it’s not uncommon for leadership to gather everyone into conference halls or onto webinars for a demonstration. If your product team works in sprints that are measured in weeks, this is impractical, and announcements must either wait or developers must pack it all into the release notes and hope that people read it. With video, these teams can simply show how the feature works in real-time and track to see who has actually watched.
11. Marketing announcements: As a marketer, there are few things worse than hearing what your new marketing message has evolved into after it’s gone through the telephone-game process of making its rounds through the company. Video, on the other hand, allows you to distribute your exact phrasing, intonation, and wording directly to everyone in the company to a place where they can return whenever they wish.

Video is ideal for internal communications and can be had for a fraction of the cost of raising a roost of hardy carrier pigeons. And the best part? We haven’t even discovered half of the uses yet. Be part of the video shift—download the ViewedIt plugin and see what your organization comes up with!

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