Employee engagement is crucial to ensuring your organization’s work culture remains consistent and transparent. It helps foster a meaningful connection with your employees, keeping them content and respected at the workplace.
But if you’re relying on the usual tactics for employee engagement, such as anonymous feedback and one-sided townhalls, you’re missing out. These tactics aren’t engaging enough, and can instead destabilize the work culture.
In fact, a 2022 Brightcove study found that 83% of employees consider video communication to elevate their work experience. So, if you truly want to inculcate the best work culture, it’s time to consider interactive video marketing for your organization.
This is what we’ll explore in this post. Let’s dive right into it!
Understanding Workplace Culture
Your workplace culture is the practices your organization follows to provide employees with a healthy working environment. This includes their processes to interact with each other, collaborate, and work together. The culture is also defined based on how conflicts are handled, wins are celebrated, and the decision-making processes.
To put this into perspective, a University of Warwick study found that happy employees perform 12% more than average workers. So, your workplace culture is directly tied to employee productivity, and revenue in the long run.
Here’s how you know that your workplace culture isn’t cutting it for your employees:
- Employees show signs of low engagement or quietly “quitting” the job, performing the bare minimum. Workers are often absent from important meetings or arrive late
- Employees don’t contribute ideas or implement new processes. A very high attrition rate every financial year.
If you see any of these signs at your workplace, then you know that the culture needs to change!
Benefits of Interactive Videos for Employee Engagement
Using interactive videos, you can turn the workplace culture around and ensure that your employees are satisfied and willing to contribute wholeheartedly. Here are the benefits that you get when you use interactive videos for employee engagement:
- Increase Participation and Retention: Interactive video turns passive viewers into active participants through interactive elements. This makes them stand out from the usual static images or traditional videos, and increases the employees’ information retention.
- Two-way Communication: Employees are most disgruntled when the workplace communication is only one-way, from the upper management to the rest of the employees. With interactive video, you can take feedback and opinions from employees through forms and surveys, encouraging two-way communication.
- Better Training: Employees can find the traditional training material dull. If you want to engage them, interactive videos can use gamified elements to align with the workers’ competitive spirits. This results in more engaging and effective training.
- Improves Relatability: Interactive videos containing behind-the-scenes moments, customer or employee testimonials, and personalized messages for achievements or wins humanize your work culture. These types of videos make employees feel welcome at the organization and boost their productivity.
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Personalization: Interactive videos are easy to customize, so you can personalize your video message, whether it’s for a work anniversary, achievement, farewell, or birthday. This increases the emotional connection of the employee to the organization!
Implementing Interactive Video to Drive Cultural Change
Your organization’s culture won’t change with just a few clicks. You need to reinforce certain values in a way that engages the employees and makes them feel welcome. They must feel aligned with the company’s principles, and for this, you need to showcase empathy.
Interactive video can help you do this, especially due to its customization accessibility. This allows you to deploy videos with creativity and personalization.
Using Videos for Internal Communication
Visual communication for your internal announcements is an excellent way to gain the attention and favor of your employees. Since they can be personalized, they’re relatable to a wider range of organization members.
You can use interactive video for internal communication in the following ways:
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Personalize videos for different employee or organization occasions, such as a birthday or to celebrate a company milestone.
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Tailor the onboarding journeys of new recruits to make them feel welcome.
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Add interactive elements for company policy changes, allowing employees to dig deeper for a better understanding.
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Share changes in company strategy with survey forms or polls to get employee feedback.
Gamification and Engagement Strategies
To get more out of your employees, you can increase their productivity by using gamified engagement strategies. Add leaderboards, badges, incentives, and prizes for reaching certain milestones, creating a healthy, competitive work environment.
With this strategy, you can increase employee productivity and engagement, as well as create a workplace culture that believes in rewarding and recognizing employees for their hard work.
Best Practices for Using Interactive Video in Workplace Culture
Before you start implementing interactive videos to solidify your workplace culture, here are a few best practices you need to follow:
- Define Culture Goals: Creating interactive videos for your workplace without having a particular goal in mind will result in less ROI and leave employees confused. You’ll have to clearly define your vision or goal before creating these videos. These could be inclusion, innovation, improving productivity, etc.
- Authenticity: Before creating the videos, understand what the employees want. They don’t want impersonal messages as they can’t relate to them. Understand your workforce’s pain points and address those through upper management or leadership to give credibility and authenticity.
- Interactive Elements: Ensure that you give employees the chance to voice their thoughts, either through survey forms, polls, or Q&A. This ensures that you’re varying the interactive elements to keep their interest and aren’t just focusing on aesthetics. Plus, you get clear feedback from these elements!
- Integration: Interactive videos on your workplace culture shouldn’t be a one-off thing. They should be integrated into your daily workflows, either through organizational newsletters, announcements, or Slack channels. It’s important for the employees to know that you value their frequent feedback.
Measuring the Impact of Video Marketing on Culture
To know if your videos are actually effective, here are the metrics you need to measure or observe:
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Engagement: First and foremost, you can monitor how many employees are engaging with your videos. You can check engagement rates, time spent watching, drop-off rates, and more.
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Behavior: Add interactive elements like polls to monitor changes in how employees feel about the current workplace culture, before and after your interactive video implementation.
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Feedback: For other forms of feedback, you can provide survey forms for employees to fill in after watching certain videos.
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Productivity: Measure your productivity metrics after the successful implementation of interactive videos into your daily workflows. This will help you understand the real impact of your video campaign.
And if you really want to understand the effectiveness of interactive videos for workplace culture, here are some real-world examples to be inspired by:
- Microsoft: Satya Nadella, the Microsoft CEO, enforced his “growth mindset” philosophy through video storytelling. The organization deployed multiple clips on leadership and situational scenarios, encouraging employees to experiment in their thinking processes.
- Deloitte: One of the biggest organizations in the world of consulting, Deloitte gamified its approach to ethics training. It provided various role-play scenarios, allowing employees to choose their own virtual adventure and approach different situations as they would in the real world. They also use gamification and simulation for various other objectives!
Overcoming Challenges in Changing Workplace Culture
When you’re aiming for a workplace culture transformation, it’s natural to face some resistance. So here’s how you can overcome these challenges:
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Storytelling: You can use interactive storytelling to inform employees about why the culture change is important. This is especially useful if employees resist changes due to adjustments in the prevalent norm.
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Leadership: Workplace culture changes only happen organically when the employees see that leadership is also invested in these changes. Create personalized and authentic videos with leaders, addressing employee concerns about changes in the workplace culture.
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Frequency: Be consistent and frequent with your messaging regarding the workplace culture. Use in-house newsletters or Slack updates; it all works as long as you’re using a medium that employees can access easily.
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Tracking: Abstract measurements of culture changes will negatively affect your employees. Set certain targets or standards (like the number of weekly survey form submissions) to gauge employee engagement.
Future of Interactive Video in Workplace Culture
Interactive video isn’t just a fad. Since the world’s workforce is now increasingly towards a more digital, remote-first role, you’ll have to find new ways to engage your employees in the company culture.
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AI-assisted Personalization: While interactive video is now somewhat limited to just branching storylines, AI-assisted personalization for these videos will soon become a reality. You’ll be able to customize videos for different demographics, moods, occasions, and more, and that too at a rapid pace!
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VR and AR: Interactivity can be taken to the next level by incorporating Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality into the videos. This will allow your organization to include gamified elements in completely interactive and simulated environments!
- Data-driven Culture: Due to the ability of interactive videos to deliver data from viewers, they can be used to formulate strategies based on data. These data-driven insights can help you implement exercises that align with both business and employee goals.
How Life Inside Helps You Create Interactive Videos for Workplace Culture
Life Inside is an interactive video platform that helps you create, collect, and distribute interactive videos across your organization. You can add various interactive elements (like polls, quizzes, surveys, etc.) to measure your workplace culture shifts. The platform also automates the collection of videos like employee testimonials and distributes them across all your channels.
You get a lightweight and intuitive software that integrates seamlessly with your tech stack. Once integrated, you can then use Life Inside’s analytics tools to monitor the engagement metrics and optimize or personalize content for better results!
Last, but not least, Life Inside’s dedicated in-house team ensures that you face no delays, allowing you to measure results from day one!
Sign up for Life Inside today to experience the benefits of interactive video and change the way you approach employee engagement strategies!
Frequently Asked Questions
1. Why is workplace culture important for business success?
Your workplace culture determines the satisfaction of your employees. If the culture isn’t transparent, then employees tend to leave for better opportunities and feel demotivated at work. This lowers the productivity and overall opinion of your company. So, a good workplace culture is essential for the organization’s optics!
2. Can small businesses use interactive video marketing for cultural change?
Yes, of course! Small businesses can use interactive videos to gather feedback from their employees and use the data to optimize their culture for more innovation and inclusivity. Plus, due to the lower number of employees, they can implement changes faster and don’t have to deal with the red tape that’s prevalent in bigger organizations.
