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.

We surveyed 2,000 US and UK office workers on current workplace communication. Download the Generation Now report (below) to further understand why you need to put your content where your people are. 

You can’t browse LinkedIn these days without seeing article after article about digital transformation. At Kollective, we’re as “guilty” as everyone else in the industry in focusing our content around the challenges and opportunities facing companies as they undertake their digital transformation initiatives.

The topic is both broad and deep, and with technologies like artificial intelligence, machine learning, Big Data, the cloud, IoT, and enterprise collaboration and communication tools reinventing the way we all work, there’s always something fascinating to learn.

This can be fascinating if you’re a company leader. For employees, the words “digital transformation” are just as likely to elicit eye rolls as they are perked ears.

At least, that’s the takeaway from Gartner’s 2019 Strategic Priorities for Communicators report. According to their survey, employee change fatigue is the top strategic challenge facing employers and their communications teams, with audience information overload a close second.

With employees experiencing an average of three major changes each year, it’s no wonder they’re exhausted. While change has always been a constant in business, employees have never had to manage this much; as recently as 2012, employees only had to manage 1.75 major changes per year.

When employees are required to learn a whole new technology or process every few months just to do their jobs, it can leave them stressed and overwhelmed, impacting their performance. This is not exactly the reason you decided to modernize in the first place, is it?

Interestingly, while employers list employee fatigue as their top challenge, they also list employee fatigue as the challenge they’re least confident in their ability to solve, followed by declining employee engagement.

I get it. As a tech startup CEO, my job is built on change, but even I have to work to keep up with the constant change in my industry. I’ve also had employees question change in our organization and ask why we can’t do things the way we’ve always done it. If this is something I experience at a tech company filled with engineers, programmers, and self-professed geeks, you can only imagine what it must be like at an employer in a traditional industry like finance, healthcare, insurance, or retail.

However, those traditional companies and industries don’t get a pass. There’s no longer such a thing as a tech company. All companies are now technology oriented in some fashion regardless of industry. From customer platforms to e-commerce to instant transactions, the way every company works is powered by many of the same digital transformation trends. When it comes to change, the pace of the tech industry is now the norm across the board, not the exception.

While employees are experiencing far more change than before, employee change fatigue is not a new problem. Gartner notes that combatting employee change fatigue has been either the top or second highest priority for improving the effectiveness of the communications function for five years running.

If you’re in charge of enterprise communications, you must ask yourself: What will be different this year? How will you use communications to overcome employee change fatigue? What shifts do you need to make to help make change easier for employees?

For many companies, the use of video to effectively communicate is key. From video conferencing to on-demand video content to livestreams of major corporate events or CEO town halls, enterprises are using video to create connections with employees at scale. With today’s Millennial workforce and our Netflix/YouTube/Snapchat-fueled culture, video has become the preferred way people like to communicate, collaborate, and learn. There’s a reason YouTube is second only to Google in search volume; video is simply a more effective way to understand and retain information.

By embracing video as an employee communication tool, your company leaders can speak directly to your employees to share company strategy and help employees better understand the “why” behind the latest change. Imagine you have a new initiative you need to share – what is easy to communicate in a video livestream would likely go unread if delivered as an end-of-week email.

Of course, video isn’t as simple as sending out an all-hands invitation. It takes a strategy, leadership buy-in, and a reliable technology solution to deliver your content at scale. However, given the challenges companies face with employee change fatigue, this is the one change that can make all the others easier to swallow.