Employee engagement is a key driver of success for many of today’s businesses. The benefits of an engaged workforce are well documented, ranging from higher productivity and better morale to improved retention rates and stronger overall performance. However, engaging employees is challenging in the age of virtual and hybrid work models, remote teams, and fast-evolving communication methods.
To help foster connection, belonging, and engagement in the increasingly remote workplace, personalized video has emerged as a highly effective solution. This blog will explore innovative employee engagement ideas and initiatives that leverage the power of personalized video. It will offer unique strategies and programs that will resonate with your team and illustrate personalized video’s impact through real-world examples.
Employee Engagement Ideas
Employee engagement initiatives are structured programs designed to create a positive work environment. When done well, they succeed in building connections and strengthening the relationship between employees and their organization.
Traditional employee engagement programs include:
- Team-building activities: Offsite events, retreats, games, or social events to build camaraderie and relationships.
- Recognition and reward programs: Incentives for excellent performance, milestone achievements, or important contributions.
- Employee wellness programs: Initiatives focused on employees’ physical, mental, and emotional well-being.
- Professional development opportunities: Workshops, courses, and mentoring programs that support employees’ growth and leadership skills.
Many of these employee engagement ideas can fall short in organizations working within a hybrid or remote working environment. Rather than deliver employee engagement initiatives via traditional emails or newsletters, personalized video offers a fresh approach to engaging with employees, resulting in more intimate, engaging, and meaningful interactions.
How to Improve Employee Engagement With Video
Video is an incredibly versatile medium that has proven results in increasing productivity and boosting morale among employees. But not just that, video is also a highly effective way of transmitting information. Research from MIT found that 90% of information transmitted to the brain is visual. It takes viewers as little as 13 milliseconds to identify an image—60,000 times faster than text. For delivering messages, it’s proven that viewers prefer video content over written words.
To ensure that your employee engagement ideas resonate, deliver them where employees want to be reached–-by video.
Onboarding and welcoming new hires
A smooth onboarding experience is critical to setting the tone for an employee’s future with the company. By creating a personalized experience with video content based on a unique profile or where they are in their journey, you can eliminate potential points of confusion or friction and ensure necessary actions are taken.
Effortlessly scale the onboarding process for any number of new employees through video. With SundaySky, reach your audience wherever they are, through seamless distribution via email, intranet, or embedded within your product or app.
With personalized video, onboarding doesn’t need to be so tedious anymore. Make it fun and interactive with personalized video for every stage in the onboarding process.
Some employee engagement ideas throughout the onboarding process could include:
- Welcome videos from team members or leadership can introduce the company culture, core values, and expectations in an engaging format.
- Training videos can walk new employees through important systems or processes. Make these videos more interactive and engaging by adding quizzes, polls, and clickable links.
- Virtual office tours can give remote employees a better sense of the company environment.
Leadership communication and organizational updates
One of the biggest challenges in today’s workforce, especially for remote or hybrid teams, is maintaining open and clear lines of communication. Employees often feel disconnected from leadership and company goals.
By incorporating video messages from leadership, you can close this gap. Video allows leaders to communicate in a more direct, human way. Seeing and hearing from leaders regularly makes employees feel more involved in the company’s mission and direction, leading to more engaged employees.
Employee recognition and celebrations
Employee recognition is one of the most effective ways to improve engagement. Employees who feel appreciated are more likely to stay motivated and committed to their work. Video offers a unique opportunity to make recognition more impactful.
Instead of a simple email or announcement, imagine a personalized video message congratulating an employee on a job well done, or a team celebration video for achieving a major milestone. This level of personalization can elevate the significance of recognition, making it more memorable.
Ongoing training and development
Employees are more likely to be engaged when they feel like they are growing in their roles. Video can play an important role in ongoing training and professional development. Develop skill-building video tutorials to teach employees about new tools or processes. Offer a leadership development series to make employees feel more connected to leadership and learn from their management and communication abilities.
By offering training and development through personalized video, you allow employees to advance their skills and knowledge at their own pace and in their own time. Video is also a proven method of communicating complex ideas in a digestible format, making video the perfect method of transmitting training and development information.
Employee Engagement Strategies
Creating video content to enhance employee engagement requires a thoughtful approach. Here are some practical employee engagement strategies to maximize the impact of your video initiatives:
Create a Video Communication Schedule
Just like any other communication method, consistency is key. Develop a video communication plan that aligns with your overall employee engagement strategy. This plan should outline when and how often leadership will provide updates, when recognition videos will be released, and how video will be used in onboarding and training processes.
Keep Videos Short and Focused
Attention spans are short, especially in the workplace. To maintain engagement, create a captivating video that is concise—between 2 to 5 minutes. If you have a lot of information to share, break it down into smaller, digestible segments. Short, focused videos ensure that employees absorb the key messages without feeling overwhelmed.
Personalize Content for Maximum Impact
One of the biggest benefits of video is its ability to feel personal and direct. Personalization can make a significant difference in how employees respond to and engage with the content. Mention individual names, and specific teams, or highlight personal achievements to create a sense of relevance and connection.
Make Videos Interactive
Whenever possible, make your videos interactive. Incorporate surveys, polls, or quizzes at the end of training videos to gather feedback and ensure comprehension. Encourage employees to respond with their own video messages or questions, creating a more dynamic and engaging communication loop.
Use an Enterprise Video Platform (EVP)
Traditional methods of video production are typically too complex and costly for most businesses to adapt, especially when you want to introduce personalization at scale. Instead, opt for an Enterprise Video Platform (EVP) to support you in creating and personalizing videos, no prior video-creating experience is necessary.
Employee Engagement Examples
To better understand the potential of video in improving employee engagement, let’s explore some real-world examples of how companies are leveraging video effectively.
IntouchCX: Video Onboarding New Hires Across the Globe
IntouchCX helps other businesses provide excellent customer service by outsourcing the function for leading brands in a range of industries. To do this, IntouchCX hires consistently and in large numbers, which means effective, large-scale onboarding is important.
IntouchCX’s global employee experience strategy uses video onboarding to guide new hires through every step of their new job. The company has locations around the world – each with its own local language and regional culture. IntouchCX empowers each location to create its own onboarding videos that reflect the specifics of its region while adhering to a core set of brand settings and creative themes within the SundaySky platform.
Beyond video onboarding, IntouchCX uses video to tell employee stories, setting a new standard for keeping employees aboard and happy.
Okta: Video Onboarding to Self-Serve New Customers
The digital security company Okta uses video onboarding to guide customers post-sale who don’t have customer success managers to onboard them. Okta needed a way to enable a self-serve motion with limited resources, for customers to adopt and realize value from products purchased.
Okta onboards new customers using video personalization that guides them through the multiple steps of product setup. One of Okta’s core requirements was the ability to use data to follow their customers’ onboarding journey and see what actions they’ve taken (or not). Because SundaySky’s platform allows Okta to easily connect to its Salesforce data, they can provide customers with personalized guidance that gets them to the next step.
Aetna: Healthcare Member Education and Engagement
Aetna orchestrates personalized video experiences at key moments to support and guide members through their journeys, including commercial health plan comparison, the onboarding process, benefits education on high-deductibles, and onboarding group and individual Medicare members. In an industry laden with obtuse and confusing jargon, personalization must be specific and relevant to healthcare members to educate them about their health plans.
The business saw a significant lift in Net Promoter Score as well as incremental value in cost savings per video view, measured by fewer calls into the call center by viewers and lower medical costs from fewer out-of-network visits, fewer emergency room visits and more enrollments for chronic care management programs.
Creating an engaged workforce, one video at a time
Incorporating personalized video into your employee engagement initiatives is a powerful way to connect, motivate, and engage your workforce, especially in increasingly remote and hybrid work environments. From new hire onboarding to leadership updates, training, and employee recognition, video allows for richer communication that is more dynamic and personable than traditional text-based methods.
Increase your employee’s productivity, boost morale, improve retention rates, and drive overall stronger performance, all through personalized video.
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