85% of employees are either unengaged or actively disengaged at their jobs.
Thankfully, video communication can save the day 🎯
In fact, video-savvy organizations are 75% more likely to report excellent employee engagement. Folks working in these companies are also twice as likely to rate their working environment as collaborative.
So how can you use video for better asynchronous employee collaboration without going haywire trying to learn complex video creation tools?
Let’s take you through nine ways to use video to engage teams better and show you how to make these videos with a simple screen recorder.
But first, what’s a screen recorder?
A screen video recorder is software that records whatever’s happening on your desktop or mobile screen. You can choose to record a specific window or the entire screen with or without recording yourself and your voice.
It’s a handy tool for quickly sharing your thoughts with your team or customers without having to write (and edit) long paragraphs explaining something.
You also don’t have to worry about taking accurate screenshots and marking them to show specific things. Instead, you simply walk viewers through the steps with a screen recording and your audio explaining things.
9 ways to communicate better with recorded video
Screen-recorded videos add a layer of sincerity to your comms by capturing your tone, facial expressions, and other non-verbal cues — In turn, engaging employees, and minimizing any misunderstanding that might come from text alone.
Use these videos for all types of internal communications — sharing performance reports, presentations, training content, and a lot more:
1. Executive messages
77% of disengaged employees say they would feel more engaged if they received a steady cadence of messages from their leadership such as operational updates and the C-suite explaining why decisions are made.
Even so, leadership often limits their updates to quarterly town halls, long emails, and official announcements. These scripted comms do little to get employees’ trust — let alone engage them.
Thankfully, screen-recorded videos can serve as the bridge between the C-suite and the rest of the organization. Quick and easy to record, these videos are more human and less scripted, helping leadership earn their employees’ trust faster and build an engaged workforce.
As Vimeo’s CEO, Anjali Sud notes:
“Being video-first and visual in your workplace communication is a powerful antidote. It forces you to remove the mask and protection of written and edited comms.”
2. New employee welcome messages
Half of new hires plan to quit soon — simply because of a poor onboarding experience that leaves them feeling disconnected.
Boring decks sharing the company mission and culture do little to engage new employees.
Again, screen-recorded welcome videos offer a great solution. These capture your excitement to have the new hire on board without you needing to block time for another Zoom meeting. And because these videos show you, they can also:
- Do a great job making employees feel welcome
- Help you and your colleagues build rapport with the newcomer right off the bat
Simply pull up a screen recorder like Vimeo Record to record yourself off the cuff — sharing where you’re from, your interests, your working and comms style, and so on.
Here’s an example with Maddie Diaz, Senior Demand Generation Specialist at Vimeo, created a short welcome video to introduce herself to the marketing team.
3. Employee onboarding
Like new employee welcome videos, screen-recorded videos humanize the remote onboarding experience. They’re also easily scalable — make them once and share them with all new hires — so they save you and team managers plenty of time.
To effectively bring new hires up to speed with your company’s culture, values, and processes, you can also amp up screen-recorded videos into an interactive video.
By layering in interactive elements like hotspots, overlays, and branching elements, employees can have a more engaging experience as they navigate their onboarding journey. For example, you can add clickable hotspots to hyperlink more content — say a team retreat blog post — within the parent video.
Bonus: Make interactive video quizzes to train new employees.
Here’s an EMS interactive training video that gives quiz-takers points based on their answers:
4. Product walkthroughs
Teams need a strong understanding of your product’s value proposition before they can market and sell it.
Making snackable feature video series is an effective solution to going deeper into explaining a product than a demo alone can.
All you need to do is record the steps to use a feature on your screen. Since Vimeo Record gives you two hours of free screen recording, you can capture each feature’s benefits in one sitting. Then use Vimeo’s Create editor or text-based editing to slice and edit the video into shorter videos.
Once you’re done, organize them into folders and subfolders in a Netflix-like video library to:
- Scale product education
- Make all content easy to find
5. Process walkthroughs and instructions
Know those “Hey, so what’s the next step here?” messages? They signal your employees don’t have full clarity of your workflow.
In fact, only 4 in 10 remote or hybrid employees say they clearly know what’s expected of them at work.
Screen-recorded process walkthroughs are handy assets for setting clear work expectations. Encourage marketing, sales, support, product, and other departments to make these for their teams, breaking down the following categories:
- Processes — For example, how to use specific tools, submit a paycheck, and navigate internal databases.
- Workflows — What tasks come first, second, and third; who is responsible for what, and who they’ll pass the ball to next.
- Team comms — When is it okay to call a meeting versus when to share screen-recorded videos including how to make these videos.
You can also assist employees in solving simple tech problems with troubleshooting videos as well as answer frequently asked questions.
The best part? Screen-recorded videos are efficient for laying out processes for external contractors as well. For example, Shopify uses payment process walkthroughs to reduce back-and-forth between managers and freelancers on getting paid.
6. Just-in-time trainings
Half of the employees in this TalentLMS study report being unsatisfied with their training program because the content isn’t very relevant to them. Because it’s irrelevant, employees forget 50-80% of training in two days.
The solution?
Short just-in-time-training videos. These videos are personalized, scalable, and available on demand for when employees need them.
Because of the instant application, the message is also far better retained than when employees are forced to sit through a helpful but irrelevant-in-the-moment training workshop.
With Vimeo Record, you can quickly create personalized training videos, edit out any unwanted content with text-based editing, and manage all your training content in a single video library. Eric Pokorny, Media Content Manager from an international coffee brand that uses Vimeo for employee training notes:
“Having a platform like Vimeo that can house the single source of truth [let’s] us push it as a link or embed code, bring it into any learning, and still swap it out without the links or embed code changing — that has saved us so many times over the last several years.”
Plus, thanks to detailed video analytics, you can also easily track engagement on your content to measure your training program’s success.
7. Sales enablement training
Between prospecting, doing cold outreach, and closing deals, it’s easy for sales training emails to fall through busy reps’ inboxes. One-size-fits-all workshops squeezed between packed schedules don’t see much retention either.
In contrast, sharing one-on-one sales training in video format is an effective way to increase adoption and improve team performance. You can record different sales enablement videos sharing:
- Marketing intelligence: Share market analysis, brand messaging updates, and briefs on incoming leads in bite-sized video lessons.
- Ideal customer profiles: Go deeper than a surface-level buyer persona PDF does. Educate reps by talking through exactly what resonates with ideal buyers, their challenges throughout the sales cycle, and so on.
- New sales playbooks and frameworks: Use screen recording to share and source feedback on playbooks you develop. Once ready, package the steps to take in short videos that encourage adoption.
8. Project management
“New project, more meetings — how exciting,” said no one ever.
Still, project meetings are the most common type of meetings employees attend.
However, replacing them with screen-recorded videos explaining the how, what, and why for projects is a surefire time saver for all parties involved. Think of it this way:
- Project managers can share project goals and details + feedback in their own time.
- Team members can go through project videos at their pace — instead of yawning through meetings.
- Project members can also record short videos from their browsers to share progress updates.
The best part? Time-coded video comments make asynchronous team collaboration a breeze, and you don’t even need to go through the full video to spot these comments since the review mode gathers all feedback on one page.
Pro tip: Organize videos sharing project goals and results by campaign name in your video library. This way, you’ll have an easy-to-follow record of every project’s ‘why’ and the results they drove.
9. Team updates and reporting
Team updates can easily fall through chat threads and email archives — with some members missing them entirely.
Video-recorded updates, on the other hand, are hard to miss. When organized by teams, project name, or topic in your video library, they become easily searchable too. Yet another idea: share your screen to record performance reports.
Based on who’s watching the video — team members or stakeholders, give the viewer permission to view, comment, or manage specific video folders. You can also disable public comments if needed.
Start recording employee comms videos today
Remember, screen-recorded video messages capture your sincerity way better than written comms can.
They’re also effective in bridging the communication gap between leadership and employees. As for an easy-to-use tool for making these videos, we recommend our free Vimeo Recorder. Simply enable the recorder in your browser to get started right away.
Record your next employee comms video
