How do you build a thriving workplace culture when your team might span time zones or no longer be in the office five days a week? How do you communicate in a way that feels personal when your employee base numbers in the thousands? And how do you keep people engaged when everyone is overloaded, distracted and — let’s face it — bombarded with messages all day long?
These aren’t easy questions. But they’re the ones today’s HR teams and L&D professionals are grappling with every day.
The good news? You don’t need to solve them with yesterday’s tools.
Companies at the forefront of employee experience are turning to something new — or rather, something next gen. It’s video, but not like the one-size-fits-all corporate reels of the past, and it’s changing how organizations train, support, and connect with their people.
Next Gen Video for Employee Development
What do we mean by Next Generation Video? Think of it as video that does more than traditional video content from 10 years ago. It can be personalized to the individual. It can be interactive. And it can be generated with AI. And more. It’s dynamic, scalable (both in the ease of creating and the number of videos) and engaging.
We see Next Gen Video used most often for customer campaigns, but companies are increasingly adopting this tech to talk to their most important stakeholders: their own employees.
Personalized Video, in particular, is great for this.
Personalized Video combines the impact of video with the relevance of personalization, creating a unique method of digital communication. These videos are uniquely tailored to each viewer. Viewers don’t watch a video — they watch their video.
Their data, their scenes, their information. It’s a video made just for that one unique individual.
With our Next Generation Video Platform, you can personalize any video content, whether it’s created by a professional studio or with AI. (More on this later.)
HR Use Cases
Next Gen Videos create unique, impactful experiences that help strengthen company culture, improve employee training outcomes and reinforce core values across the employee lifecycle. Here are a few examples.
Potential Applicants
For most modern job seekers, the application process has become painfully impersonal. Resumes are scanned by bots, form emails are automated, and all too often applicants are left feeling like faceless cattle.
Now, imagine a different world: where a video showcases your company’s unique and engaging culture.
Next, let’s take that dream even a step further – it’s not a generic video. It’s a hyper-personalized video thanking that unique person for their time and their interest in joining your team!
How we treat applicants has long-lasting repercussions on an employer’s brand, which in turn impacts the EVP (employee value proposition).
Personalized Videos can be used to establish positive perceptions of a company’s culture, instilling those feelings in an applicant even prior to becoming an official member of that culture.
This is where the journey begins, but in terms of revolutionizing the employee life cycle, we’re only just getting started.
Candidates
It’s a two-way street. Job seekers are considering employers while employers are considering them.
So how do you keep potential talent engaged and excited about your company during what can often be a lengthy and tiring hiring process? How do you, in fact, turn a process into an experience? This is where Personalized Video comes in.
Personalized Videos keep the experience fun while ensuring candidates remain informed and engaged.
Your candidates want to know what to expect at every stage of the interview cycle, while also learning about the company and their potential new colleagues.
Personalized Videos tell candidates who to know and what to expect while cultivating positive feelings about your company, creating an experience that’s as personal as it is memorable.
New Employees
We’ve all been there — the daunting first day at a new job. Starting at a new job can be a lot of things: exciting, surprising and, sometimes, a little scary.
Empower your new hires to feel informed, engaged, welcomed and motivated to become effective, contributing members of the team!
A Personalized Video answers all those burning new hire questions:
- Where do I go?
- Who should I know?
- What are the core values?
- What’s the company’s culture?
- How can I succeed here?
A video is a lot easier to pay attention to than a PDF or text-heavy email. And it helps build a sense of culture and fun.
Videos can include everything new hires need to ensure a smooth onboarding and be set up for success.
And with Lucas, our AI video creator, HR can create these videos on their own from a simple prompt, no specialized tech skills needed.
Current Employees
Employee training is an ongoing process. Whether it’s diversity training or re-upping your annual cybersecurity awareness certification, learning and development (L&D) is a priority for companies of all sizes.
If your goal is to have employees actually learn the material — not just check a box — video is the way to go.
Here’s an example of a sales training video for SUMR. It’s created by Lucas, so AI handled the script, storyboard, animation and more.
Video is increasingly being used for employee training. Here’s some data from Research.com.
- 88% of large companies use video for training (as do 70% of small companies).
- 83% of people prefer videos for consuming instructional or informational content
- Learners recall 95% of video content vs. just 10% of written content.
- 75% of people are open to watching instructional videos made with AI.
- Companies in the U.S. spend around $774 per learner on training, and the average video cost is anywhere from $400 to $1,000 a minute.
- The global video learning platform market is projected to hit $9.7 billion by 2032.
That’s a lot of money, but the potential upside in terms of information retention is huge. That’s where AI video helps.
Why Video?
So why does video matter so much when it comes to company culture?
Because video, done right, drives emotions.
A comedy can make us laugh. A drama can make us cry. A well-made video has the power to cut to our emotional cores. (If you want to nerd out more about this subject, as we do, you can read how audiovisual content aka video influences behavior.)
Simply put, people don’t want to read. There’s a reason YouTube has 2.7 billion monthly active users.
When making a new video, many creative professionals start with the question, “How do I want my audience to feel?”
Well, how do you want your audience to feel about your company?
Few tools will help you better accomplish that goal than an effective video.
Among employees who’ve left their jobs within 90 days of being hired, 32% cited company culture as the reason. Poor culture can kill a workplace. As they say, culture eats strategy for breakfast
That’s why UBS Investment Bank used Next Gen Video to improve their employee communications, resulting in a 70% video completion rate, and a staggering 100% positive feedback.
Think about how you can use video creatively for employee communications. For example, by creating a library of quick AI Personalized Video “notes,” you can let employees know you’re thinking of them. Here are common scenarios where a personal touch means the most:
- Birthdays
- Family milestones like marriage and having a baby
- Get well soon messages
- Promotions
Here’s an example of that, an older video, but one we still like.
Best Practices for Employee Videos
Ready to get started using video for employee communications and L&D? Here are some best practices.
Customize for Your Audience
How do you tell an entire company about a new product or policy change and still make the messaging relevant to each team and every individual?
Dynamic scene selection is your answer. It lets you tell each department the message that’s relevant to their group.
Data can be personalized on the group or individual level. In one blast, all departments and individuals learn what they need to know and filter out the information not relevant to that individual or group.
Communicate Often
It’s hard to overstate the importance of positive recognition.
Video says thank you in a way that’s heartfelt and, even better, easy to share online, expanding your brand. You can even send a personalized GIF as a quick way to brighten someone’s day.
An employee recap (a variation on the popular year-in-review video) is a great example of a shareable, encouraging, dynamic video.
It’s easy to forget all that one has accomplished in a year — or over a career. But, when you add it up and present the data in a compelling way, personalized recap videos empower employees to feel proud of just how much they have accomplished.
Fun fact: Idomoo typically sees an over 80% social-sharing rate for Personalized Videos recapping employee achievements.
Or consider a video that shows how much employees support your company mission. It’s a piece of content you can share not just internally but on social channels like LinkedIn as well. Your customers and other stakeholders care about who you are as an employer. It’s part of your brand.
These employee-focused videos build a strong brand identity while helping employees cultivate a sense of pride in the company as well as in themselves.
Make It Interactive
This is more for training videos — although we’ve seen huge success leveraging interactivity across use cases — but, when possible, add interactive elements to your L&D materials.
This can include a range of interactions:
- Chapter markers so learners can jump to relevant content or rewatch parts they need to refresh themselves on
- CTAs so they can click to get more information
- Quizzes or polls so you can see how much they’ve learned or gather feedback
- Highlighting to help viewers keep track of what they’ve seen or learned
- Branching, which lets users take a choose-your-own adventure path through the video
Here’s a great interactive training video from Lancôme that shows branching in action with a role-playing twist.
Interactive Video turns passive viewers into active participants, helping them remember the material even longer. Research shows that intermittent testing leads to better retention. In one study, employees who watched a video and answered quiz questions retained the information 20-35 hours later.
Next Steps
If expense or the complication of creating videos has you stymied, don’t let that be the barrier. Innovations in AI make the rapid creation of video content not just possible but easy. You don’t need in-depth knowledge of video production. You don’t need to even know what Adobe After Effects is. Our AI can do the heavy lifting and make sure it’s on brand too.
Contact us to see why top brands use Next Gen Video to engage their employees and learn how we can help you level up your employee experience.
