Over the years, Kollective’s customers have been driving innovation in content strategy. Building upon the basics of executive messaging and training, companies have launched regular programs that deliver company information, co-workers doing great things in their communities, shout-outs for awards and accomplishments, product selling techniques, spotlights on business units and their teams, new innovations and product announcements, benefits and employment information, business priorities, leadership messages, diversity and inclusion, and company change management.
The results include increased employee engagement, inspiration to excel, and helping employees feel part of something bigger than themselves. An inclusive content strategy using both live and on demand video gives everyone the chance to participate and shows them that the company cares about them as individuals, no matter where they are located.
The key to success? Video must be accessible to be successful. Let’s look at some best practices in content management and publication that will help you put your content where your people are.
Encourage Employees to Watch Videos
It may come as a surprise, but your employees aren’t waiting for the next training video or live event stream, and they don’t independently search for them unless it’s a requirement. As you begin to make video more accessible, make sure that all employees understand that taking the time to view these videos is important, and that that they need to watch them. The expectation from management to attend an event or watch a video must be clear. We’ve found through surveys and casual conversation that all too often employees think they aren’t supposed to watch video at work. If your company is committed to sharing information via video, the behavior must be modeled by managers before employees can understand this same behavior is expected of them. Encourage managers to play videos in their team meetings to reinforce receiving important information via video.
Sharing on Demand Videos and “Snackable Bites”
Once the mandate from management is clear, the video or live event must be easily accessible and kept top of mind. Many companies use “old fashioned” email and calendar reminders to promote viewership, but we know that people don’t respond well to full inboxes and don’t fully read the emails they do open.
Companies are embedding video links in the employee intranet portal home page to drive employees to time-sensitive information like benefits or compliance training. One of our customers uses a concept they call “snackable bites of content” to reuse live event content or break up existing content into smaller, more easily-consumed segments.
Many of our customers pull out short clips from their longer Town Hall events and embed these “snackable bites” into webpages that are dedicated to specific topics like Diversity and Inclusion, Company Priorities or the like. Share the content links on internal social channels and encourage employees to continue the conversation around topics that are high profile in the company.
Self-directed learning is a proven way to enable better learning. The use cases for Digital Learning have become more focused to include embedded video and audio clips in self-guided computer desktop training modules. Many of our customers deliver these modules using Kollective’s trickle feed feature to save bandwidth and perceived download time.
Searchable Content
One last important method of making your content accessible is ensuring that your content is easily searchable. This is simple to do by giving it a descriptive title. “CEO Town Hall February 12, 2019 from New York City” gives you plenty of search optimization tags to start with. In your video library, you should always add in relevant descriptions, including speaker names, topics, keywords, and special segments to further drive ease of access.
Using snackable bites of content in easily accessible places, along with a mandate from above that employees must consume internal videos, ensures easy access to repeatable, consistent messaging, and can serve as a cornerstone of your Video on Demand Strategy.