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Building a Better Portal for Employee Training Videos

CMMA Blog

If there’s one thing that most business owners and managers realize, it’s that happy, engaged employees provide higher quality work. They’re also less likely to quit and, perhaps most importantly, they actively contribute to an overall positive company and workplace experience.
It’s also clear that employees want to work for companies that offer both personal and professional fulfillment. Office perks still play an important role, but more and more employees expect companies to offer a robust learning culture.
Training Enhances the Employee Experience
Learning and development (L&D) has proven to be a key driver of employee engagement. By providing tools and resources to strengthen employee skills and knowledge, companies can build a more capable workforce while showing investment in their employees. Furthermore, addressing skill gaps not only allows the business to grow, it lets employees grow, which improves the employer brand.
From an employee perspective, they want to feel like their current job is helping them build their career by preparing for their next role. Many are eager to continue building skills and staying competitive within their fields. In fact, they’re much more likely to stay with companies who they feel are supporting this.
From a company perspective, learning opportunities offer a competitive advantage and help them stay ahead in a constantly changing landscape. It helps the organization retain top talent, attract new talent, and maximize the potential of their existing talent.
And while there are various learning methods such as instructor-led training, on-the-job training, simulators, job shadowing, and case studies, training videos remain a top choice for employees.
Video Enhances Employee Training
According to our “Using Video to Improve the Employee Experience ” study, employees prefer video for policy training (76%), product demos (75%), and product training (68%). Also, 45% say training videos for systems and tools would increase their confidence in their employment decision.
There are numerous benefits for companies to deliver their learning and development programs through video.
For starters, it can be much more cost-efficient, especially for companies with multiple offices in different cities. In addition to reduced expenses like travel and materials, video also has a longer lifespan. Once produced, it can be reused and viewed by employees around the world in the comfort of their own homes or offices. Finally, video can also help you significantly reduce the amount of overall employee training time and even provide microlearning experiences .
There’s also the fact that video is more engaging than other forms of delivery. Multiple surveys have shown that employees prefer video to text , and the visual stimulation helps employees retain the information much longer. For HR teams who have strong learning initiatives, it’s not a matter of if they use video, but rather, what’s the best experience.
A Better Portal Enhances Employee Video
It’s important to remember that the videos themselves are but one part of a comprehensive training experience.
As you develop, update, or optimize your learning initiatives, you’ll want to consider all aspects of the user experience. This ranges from how easily they can find, access, and navigate the training to implementing active learning within the videos. The branding, layout, and functionality will also play an important role.
Similarly, you’ll want to make sure your program is as efficient and easily manageable as possible for content managers. A holistic and successful training program must consider the experiences of both the end user and the person responsible for maintaining it.
Where will your video training programs live?
One of the first steps in creating a video training program is to determine where the videos will live and how employees will access them. There are several common ways that businesses house them.

Internal servers or cloud storage. This approach often aligns with a broader internal content management structure, particularly for working files and documents. However, internal drives or collaborative cloud platforms can be less intuitive and lack the branding that adds to the overall experience. Further, navigating folders to find the different training videos and series is designed for digital librarians, not diverse employees with different learning styles.
Digital Asset Management platforms (DAMs). DAMs excel at managing high volumes of internal digital content, offering meta-tagging and versioning capabilities that allow for advanced search functions. But they’re not meant for content consumption. Not only do their interfaces lack branding, most can’t support high volumes of concurrent high-quality video streams.
Unlisted YouTube channels. YouTube is used by some companies who want to organize training videos by playlists. In theory, the videos can only be accessed by users through an unlisted link. However, most companies want better security, robust video content management, or hosting destinations they own and fully control. For them, YouTube doesn’t quite meet their needs.
Company intranet. Company intranets are perhaps the most common destination for training videos. They often combine one or more of the preceding approaches and act as a navigation overlay that users are already familiar with. So users get a much better, branded experience, and content managers get a waking nightmare. They not only have to manage all the places the content lives, they also have to manage the interface—ensuring every link is up to date and in the right place.

Creating an effective experience for the user
While each of the above systems have pros and cons, let’s look at some of the features and benefits of today’s most effective learning experiences. With tools like Brightcove Gallery’s Immersion template, you can combine the best of the above approaches and create an all-in-one training portal that both the users and content managers will love.
The first consideration is the ease with which users can access it. An often overlooked but important part of the experience is a branded, customized URL that takes them directly to the training portal.
Once they arrive at the training portal, the layout should be a completely branded, intuitive gallery that features all of the videos in any particular series. With a layout similar to the streaming services they’re already used to, users can easily see, navigate, and watch all of the videos in a given series. Additionally, related series will be easily accessible with a single click—or, if needed, quickly found through a powerful internal search engine.
Keep in mind that training videos don’t have to be a one-way experience. To be truly effective, you’ll need to keep your viewers engaged. Through Brightcove Gallery, you’re able to add an interactive experience to any video. For example, quizzes will help to ensure they retain the information. You could also have different paths within each video to give the user a “choose your own adventure” experience.
Creating an efficient experience for the content manager
Beyond the end user, it’s also important to ensure the content manager has the features and functionality they need to make the program a success. This includes ease of use and efficiency for ongoing use on a long-term basis. Take into consideration things like how quickly you can publish videos and how easily you can organize them. Choosing and adding videos to each collection should be a simple task.
For example, through the Brightcove Gallery you can select the videos you want by tags, existing playlists, or custom fields like keywords and search criteria. Similarly, if there are videos you want to exclude, those can be managed by tags as well. Finally, when it comes to creating the full training portal, you’ll want to be able to fully customize the look and feel of the page without the need for a designer or developer.
All of these features are easily accessible through the Brightcove Gallery template, Immersion. It’s ideal for companies with significant training and development needs and who want to provide users with the best experience possible.
In addition to having an effective and efficient way to create training portals, it also offers insights into employee engagement that you haven’t been able to measure before. By reviewing the video analytics, you’re able to see how often the videos are being watched, the percentage of each one being watched, and which topics employees are most interested in. This information will be vital to use for future training programs to ensure their success.
Finally, like all Brightcove Gallery templates, Immersion comes equipped with critical business features like SSO and role-based access to ensure your content stays secure.
Brightcove Enhances the Employee Experience
Delivering your learning and development programs through video is a simple, yet effective way to remain competitive as a company while retaining and attracting top talent. Brightcove’s Immersion template for Communications Studio makes it easy to customize the experience and create intuitive pages that mimic many of the most popular streaming services. By combining the power of enterprise-leading streaming technology with the interactivity employees want and security organizations need, you can provide the best experience for everyone.

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Do You Engage Independent Contractors in California? Be Afraid. Be Very Afraid.

CMMA Blog

It truly is a tightrope walk doing business in California, especially if you engage independent contractors. Still, you don’t panic. Let’s talk about what makes California high risk (hint: worker classification tops the list), what’s at stake, and how businesses can protect themselves. 

Why is California Considered High Risk? 

California is considered the riskiest of the risky states for doing business. The Golden State is often the first to legislate an issue surrounding employment and other states often follow suit with similar laws. Whether you do business in the state or not, what happens there will affect you in one way or another. 

In addition to California’s worker classification rules (which are some of the most stringent in the country and where our focus will be today), California requires employers to walk a narrow path when it comes to sexual harassment training, privacy protections, meal wages, and more. 

Worker Classification

This is where California’s rules affect employers the most because it’s where it’s hardest for companies to classify workers as independent contractors. California’s approach to worker classification (among other topics) purportedly intend to protect workers and provide “the labor law protections to which they are entitled.” In addition to the federal legislation, states have free reign to make some of their own rules. True to form, California has some of the strictest requirements surrounding worker classification and it’s important for companies to pay attention because violators can expect to be subject to strict penalties such as fines, possible jail time, and damage to their reputations. 

What Makes Worker Classification Extra Tricky in California?

When California replaced the long-standing Borello test with the ABC test, it eliminated some of the gray area in deciding whether a worker is an employee or not. Workers can only be considered an independent contractor if all of the following apply:

(A) that the worker is free from the control and direction of the hiring entity in connection with the performance of the work, both under the contract for the performance of the work and in fact;

(B) that the worker performs work that is outside the usual course of the hiring entity’s business; and (C) that the worker is customarily engaged in an independently established trade, occupation, or business of the same nature as the work performed.

This is the narrowest definition of an independent contractor to date and puts more pressure on point “B” than ever before.

What’s at Stake For The Government?

Whenever a government agency legislates an issue, it’s reasonable to ask what the stakes are and how much attention they’ll give it. In this case, there is a ton of money on the line. To date, determining the differences and properly classifying workers have been highly complicated tasks, depending on factors such as the ability to hire or fire a worker, the kind of occupation, the method of payment, location and more. According to the court’s ruling in the Dynamex case, “the misclassification of workers as independent contractors rather than employees is a very serious problem, depriving federal and state governments of billions of dollars in tax revenue.”

The government’s concerns center around the fact that:

  • Independent contractors write off business expenses and may underreport income
  • Small businesses can avoid certain taxes with fewer W2 employees
  • ICs are more difficult to track and tax accurately than W2 employees

What Does it Mean For Business?

Some employers like this way of structuring worker classification because in theory, it gives workers more ownership in the company’s success. Others say it makes their business model unsustainable.

It’s point “B” of the ABC test that can be most challenging to the way many businesses operate. It states that a worker must perform “work that is outside the usual course of the hiring entity’s business” to be classified as an independent contractor. 

Some companies have restructured operations completely to avoid hiring more W2 employees (new laws have a way of precipitating new ways to get around said laws). Another way to avoid reclassifying is simply to operate business as usual and wait to be challenged. Smaller companies have been known to get away with this approach indefinitely.

What About The Workers?

Still, some independent contractors have been unhappy with the changes and expressed concern for their livelihood. Even if all the perks afforded an employee (healthcare, time off, etc.) bring them close to their original pay in practice, their paycheck may look a lot smaller on the surface. Many industries have been granted exemptions from the ruling, indicating that, as always, there is no simple cut and dry answer to an issue this complicated. 

Independent contractors set their own schedule and manage their own businesses. While independent contractors are still responsible for paying taxes, they can also take advantage of many write-offs. Along with the perks, they do have the responsibilities that come with owning their own business. They run their own books, pay quarterly taxes, advertise, purchase their own equipment, and deal with the seasonal nature of the biz. Independent contractors also don’t get paid time off and are responsible for purchasing their own health insurance.

Some workers prefer the stability and possibility for advancement that come with having a greater presence at the office and familiarity with the ins and outs of the company.

How Can Companies Mitigate Risk?

Unless a company is made up 100% of full-time employees, this subject is relevant. Mistakes could result in fines, back taxes, and even jail time. The first step is to stay well on top of worker classification rules. There are exemptions to the ABC test and they continue to evolve. Independent contractors fall outside the wage order’s protections so even some “employees” could still potentially qualify as independent contractors for all other purposes. Stay on top of classification news and how these changes play out in practice will continue to shake out in the courts and in the market going forward. Stay ahead of the game to see how these changes affect your business. California is embarking on the real-time evolution of the economy.

What Are The Stakes for Mistakes? 

Big companies like Uber make headlines for their missteps and pay equally big fines for their worker classification choices. Still, it can be a costly mistake to think it’s only the big companies that face consequences. By rescinding the Trump Administration’s “Worker Classification Rule,” the Biden administration made it easier for workers to argue for minimum wage and overtime protections/compensation. In addition to having to pay back 100% of the matching FICA taxes they would have paid had they classified the worker correctly up front, employers can end up subject to additional penalties such as the following:

  • $50 fine for each W-2 form they failed to file
  • A penalty equal to 1.5% of the employee’s wages 
  • $5,000 penalty for the first misclassified employee and up to $25,000 for each subsequent violation

Suffice to say, misclassifying workers does not save money in the long run. Perhaps scarier than the possibility of monetary damages, misclassification has landed some business leaders under house arrest . 

In addition, class-action lawsuits, failed audits, and negative headlines can damage a company’s reputation to the point where both workers and consumers are hesitant to engage with the company. It’s just not worth it!     

Bottom Line 

The most common mistakes when engaging contractors in California are misclassifying workers, (of course!), being lax about training requirements or privacy, and meal wage/overtime errors. 

As the economic landscape shifts and independent contractors rise in prevalence, the financial stakes and potential for missed revenue rise, too. In response, government agencies have been ramping up their focus on the subject. The IRS and DOL are not alone. States are joining the fray, attempting to crack down on misclassification while tightening the reins on training requirements, and payroll guidelines.

Where the money goes, lawyers follow. There’s big money in class action lawsuits and new cases are always being filed. While fear is never productive, you should be very, very conscientious when engaging independent contractors in California. Companies must be very vigilant to protect your business, stay compliant, and reduce the risk for fines and unpleasant attention from the IRS.

When is Engaging a Partner a Good Idea?

Examine your options: Working with an Employer of Record (EOR) or Professional Employer Organization (PEO) is standard best practice in this evolving freelancer economy. While both provide payroll and insurance services, the differentiating factor is that an EOR relieves employers of much of the regulatory risk involved in working with independent contractors while a PEO operates as a co-employer and does not assume the employment risk.

If you don’t have the in-house team to do it yourself, it’s worth considering working with a partner. The bottom line is that doing business in California is complicated and the consequences of errors can be immense. While the onus is on employers to classify workers correctly and stay in line with the state’s changing requirements, it’s possible to navigate a rocky landscape with relative ease.

In our world, accurate worker classification and top-notch risk management when it comes to overtime, meal wage, and other laws are always the priority. We are the first to be aware when change is in the air. We track rules in every state as well as on a federal level and offer services to help clients stay compliant. 

If you think a partner would help your business, contact us now. 

The post Do You Engage Independent Contractors in California? Be Afraid. Be Very Afraid. appeared first on PayReel .

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Optimizing the Content Life Cycle in the Age of Streaming

CMMA Blog

Several things hold organizations back from creating content, according to Lisa Gately, Principal Analyst at Forrester .

Siloed content
Lack of alignment on audience needs
Outdated manual processes or tools that don’t scale
Inability to see audience interactions across the full life cycle
Content management chaos

“These things are holding everybody back in this shift to a digital world,” said Gately during Brightcove’s PLAY Season 1. In her guest episode, she identifies the four major parts of the content life cycle and how to optimize them to overcome these hurdles.
Content Planning
Content planning is a foundational part of the content life cycle and should be a defined, repeatable approach across the organization. Gately observed, “In reality, this is not happening for most teams.”
In Forrester’s 2022 State of B2B Content Survey , Gately noted that almost half the respondents said they don’t have a defined approach. “That leads to a lot of siloed, reactive, ad hoc planning. It means things happen on a first-come, first-served basis, or maybe a very reactive basis, that they decide what content to put out in front of an audience.”
Marketers should approach content knowing not just what to say to the market, but knowing how audiences search for their products. “What do they call things? What did they use when they talk about issues and topics?” said Gately. This process helps marketers become very precise in their content recommendations: adjusting the content mix, knowing about past content performance, and being intentional about where future investments in content are going.
Practically, this means looking across the organization through the lens of a shared content inventory. “Is there existing content you can use? Could you get there faster? Could you reuse, customize some of the content that you have? Or think about repurposing it for some of those audiences?” asked Gately.
Content Production
“This is really the area when most people think about content,” said Gately. However, content production is more than just making content; it’s about smoothing out workflows and processes. “You’re building content with others, and you need it to go more smoothly.”
Furthermore, content is created everywhere, “whether it’s your content team, different parts of the organization, or the relationships you have with agencies and vendors, partners—even your customers,” explained Gately. Therefore, establishing repeatable processes is key.
Content Promotion
Creating content is exciting, but making sure it’s seen by the right people ensures the hard work is worthwhile. “Don’t leave content promotion to chance,” warned Gately. “We spend so much time thinking about the content we want to build, the creativity and expertise of creating the content, but we really need to focus on how it’s activated or promoted.”
To master this, Gately recommends that all marketers be prescriptive. “Think about this in terms of understanding your audience. It is knowing where they go for information, and what kinds of information they are looking for.”
The same applies for content for internal audiences as well. “When you make this content available to your internal audience, how are they going about getting this content? You want to make sure you tap into internal communications methods.”
Distribution is part of promotion too. Marketers should ask how certain content can be distributed easily for internal customer-facing stakeholders so that they can use it as quickly as possible.
“You want to make sure your analytics are right there. You want to notice who is using the content. And go back, take some extra effort. Notice how they set it up, how they customize it or serve it to the end audience,” explained Gately.
For both internal and external content, marketers need to make sure that they’re using tagging in metadata to best effect. “This is what helps you in noticing all those things from analytics.”
Content Operations
Content operations constitute the final stage of the content life cycle. “This is really an area that stands up to a big word like ‘transformation,’” said Gately. And as businesses begin acting more like media companies, this is a skill that sets them up for success. “I’m not understating it,” Gately continued. “Most marketers tell us this is the one area across the content life cycle where they want to get better.”
Gately says this is good news: “When you think about the power of content operations, that involves understanding what content you have, your use of metadata, taxonomy, the content technologies and processes in your organization, how you measure things. All of that is what sets you up for success.”
Emphasizing metadata, Gately added, “Master the metadata and taxonomy. That really is the key to the kingdom. This will help teams get a handle on content, its value, and whether they’re hitting business objectives with it.”
From there, Gately recommended streamlining workflows to make better use of what content a company does have. “Start talking about and rewarding teams for doing that,” she advised. And of course, invest in content operations, specifically by designating some leaders or dedicating resources to this. “They are going to help you build the competencies to go farther and faster.”

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