One of the biggest communication challenges in the EMEA is that of communicating important and complex content into simple messaging. It’s a skill that many internal communicators recognize they need, yet many are limited by time, budget, or resources.
At its core, effective internal communication is about connecting your people with the right messages. This could mean your business objectives, mission and values, a change announcement, corporate news and information, or the sharing of employee news. Whatever the message or content is, it must be communicated correctly, or the message becomes lost.
According to 35% of employees, their organization’s important information gets buried by too much unnecessary detail being included in internal communication campaigns. Put simply, employees do not have time in their busy schedules to be searching for content, and reading articles that don’t make sense to them. It is our jobs as internal communicators to make internal content delivery easy.
Instead of relying on traditional methods of delivering content (thinking emails, office memos, or even notes tacked to the lunchroom bulletin board), we can help facilitate learning efficiency by using video as the means to delivering readily available, not to mention easy to consume, content for our people. Since most of us are already consuming video content already (whether through watching last night’s football results or watching videos of funny corgis) on a daily basis, it follows that using this medium as an internal communication method simply makes sense.
So how can internal communications professionals master video-based content delivery in 2018? Here are a few tips:
Make content discoverable
It’s a waste of employee and company time to have information that isn’t easily visible. Important video content simply must be easily identified by employees. There are many ways to make content discoverable, either through effective navigation on a communication platform, or through adding tags to surface the content faster.
Make content brief
Video content doesn’t have to be long. In fact, a video that is less than 90 seconds in length sees a retention rate of 53% whereas a video that is over 30 minutes in length sees only a 10% retention of viewership from beginning to end. Therefore, if you have extensive topics to cover, consider breaking your videos up into different short sections.
Use simple language
Whether your audience has a PhD or not, using simple language in your videos will increase the ability that your message is easily understood. Put yourself in your audiences’ shoes and think about what they want to see and how they want to see it. And if you have any doubts, share your script with someone else — perhaps not someone that has a technical background, but rather someone who might not be totally versed in what your business does, and ask their opinion. If they don’t get your messaging, chances are your intended audience may have trouble with it as well.
Create in-house content
Who knows your products or messaging better than you and your in-house colleagues? Hopefully, the answer is obvious (no-one does), so producing your own content for internal consumption just makes sense. In 2017, 85% of businesses reported that they were using internal resources to create content whereas only 15% were outsourcing it to third party agencies. It goes without saying that following the in-house route is a much more cost-effective model as well.
Encourage sharing of content
If you want your content consumed by your staff, you need to ensure it is shared often. Perhaps include links to your video library in new employees welcome messaging, or highlight certain links to videos on your company intranet. Another suggestion might be to hold internal contests to see who has consumed the most content and offer rewards to those individuals.
While the above steps may seem overly basic, keeping them in mind as you go about creating and delivering video content to your employees will ensure that you’re more able to deliver complex content in a much simpler way.