As you look over your HR communications strategy this year, video should be at the top of the list. It’s one of the best ways to engage your employees. Video works because it showcases information more easily and is far more effective than any other content medium.
By nature humans process visual information better than plain text (40% better!), which helps explain why video consumption is on the rise. Over one-third of online activity is spent watching video. Your employees are watching more and more video at work, at home and everywhere else.
Here’s the top reasons why you should implement video into your HR communications strategy this year:
Short Attention Span
Employees are bombarded with all sorts of messaging all day long and most likely won’t spend a lot of time looking at what you send them. Plus, let’s face it, when an employee sees an email coming from HR, they don’t exactly jump for joy and read it right away. But with video you can get your point across in less time.
More and more, people are wanting to watch a video rather than read information. Consumers (read: your employees) are growing accustomed to viewing, rather than reading content. In fact, when an email has a subject line with the word “video” in it, it is 19% more likely to get opened.
Video can showcase a wide variety of information in a short amount of time. This is great for your employees who might otherwise be too busy to read or even skim an email or a printed communication material like a benefit guide book.
Great for Employee Education
Employees can learn at a faster rate with video. One of the best examples of this is with the health care-related benefits your company offers. Often health care topics can be complicated, cumbersome and difficult to understand – especially for millennials and gen z employees who may not have experience with benefits and all that goes along with it.
I personally have had clients see great success with animated explainer videos about benefits. By using short videos, employees can access the information relevant to them and get the answers they need quickly. In fact, according to Forrester Research one minute of video is worth 1.8 million words, or the equivalent of 3,600 pages of text. That’s a lot of information you can expand on in a video that your employees would most likely miss out on in another format.
Video is available on any device, any channel, anywhere and anytime
Ultimately video is accessible worldwide, at any time. So no matter if you have employees all around the globe, employees working remotely and even employees who don’t have access to a work email can all still watch a video at some point during their day – as long as you make it available to view.
Video is a form of digital media which allows you to post the video through multiple channels (email, YouTube, Facebook …) and send it to employees through different channels like text messaging. If you make it available, employees can view the videos you create when it’s most convenient to them. Plus with video analytics, you can see how many views your videos have gotten and how your employees engaged with the content which can help you craft better videos and messaging in the future.