Using Video for Corporate Communication

Whether you’re a large multi-national firm, or a small team working remotely, there are going to be numerous obstacles in making sure everyone involved is on the same page.

It’s easy to think that text-based correspondence is enough to cover all of your bases, but as many can surely attest to, emails and messages often go unread for a multitude of reasons.

The solution? Video.

As we’ve shown with customer communications, video is a fantastic tool for helping them stay up to date with your products or services; educate themselves on how to get the most from their purchase, and also get in touch with you when things don’t quite work out as they’d hoped. The same goes for your internal communications, and in this blog post, we’re going to throw a few ideas out there.

We’ve talked previously about the role video can play in employee training, so we won’t focus on that aspect as such. However, in terms of helping your teams to learn from one another, video has a very significant role to play in social learning.

Everybody in your organisation has something they can contribute in order to help improve the day-to-day running on things, and as a result, when one person isn’t around, their contribution often has to go by the wayside for however long they may be absent. But what if you could ensure that the knowledge that each individual has was instantly transferable?

Whenever there is a question for one of your team members about how they carry out a specific task, consider getting them to record their methods. Everyone can contribute, whether they record through their computer, tablet or smartphone. Store the videos in an online library and they will be available whenever somebody needs them. The beauty of this is it means that the knowledge that one particular individual has is now widely available to everyone within your organisation who may need it, resulting in any bottlenecks that may exist whenever they are not around being completely removed.

For the most part, employees like (and need, in some respects) to know have an idea of what’s going on within an organisation outside of the little departmental bubble they’re in. However, as we pointed out earlier in this article, a quick email doesn’t always do the trick in keeping everyone as up to date as you may like.

Get your teams to record updates that will help everyone to build their own bigger picture. This will help to keep all departments in the loop on a timeframe that suits them, as well as limiting the risk of any crossed wires.

Whether all of your employees are housed under the same roof or not, it’s inevitable that there will be a need for meetings from time to time, whether that’s for sharing updates, making decisions or just throwing ideas around for an upcoming project. Of course, setting a meeting time that suits everybody in an organisation can be difficult, especially when you consider factors such as the size of your team and even time zones if you’re spread out a bit.

Recording these discussions will be an invaluable habit to pick up as it means the meetings can be revisited later on, either by anyone who couldn’t attend, or even just to recap what was talked about.

A little tip? Do this even when you don’t think there is a need to – you’ll be amazed at the kinds of things you will have missed even if you were sat right there in the meeting. Being able to revisit these things will quickly prove itself to be of huge benefit.

Once again, we seem to be circling back on the issue of people not reading emails, but it’s an important thing to be mindful of. There’s a whole host of reasons for why people don’t pay close enough attention to what passes through their inbox, although most of the time it boils down to one of two things – got lost in the pile, or was too long, so didn’t read.

By replacing emails with short personal videos, you will save yourself any amount of time. Let’s imagine for a second that you need to provide someone with a summary of a client meeting. If you were to pop this in an email, it was likely consist of a multi-page document that took you upwards of 30 minutes to write. However, if you were to just give a summary via a quick two-minute video you recorded on your phone, you will have saved yourself and your recipient buckets of time AND also provided something with a little more life and therefore pulling power than an email. What’s not to like?