Happy employees form the backbone of well-performing companies, and this is no secret. Even then, it is not uncommon for company leadership to deprioritize employee engagement over other aspects of business, a practice that can reap negative results over the long term.

Just like your customers, your employees are human too, and respond to stimuli in a similar manner. Engaging your employees can be as straightforward as engaging your customers once you figure out the right mediums that make them click.

And in 2019, for a vast majority of audiences: both customers and employees, that medium is video. By far, video is the best way to reach out to your employees, second only to actual physical presence, and come on, we already know that no form of communication can beat a face-to-face conversation. Fortunately, though, video comes close.

In this article, we take a look at 3 reasons why incorporating video into your internal communications strategy might be the masterstroke your organization was waiting for:

Using videos for internal communication helps build camaraderie among employees.

Because Video Engages, Entertains, And Is Remembered

Text-based communication is frequently impersonal. While text can be remarkably good at delivering large chunks of information in a concise package, it does so at the expense of missing out a large volume of implicit information that is carried in the mannerisms and body language of the speaker. While text is objective, body language adds a layer of subjective stress to each word, which lends the communication material a more human touch. Video does a rather good job of encapsulating these nuances.

Mutual trust and an emotional connection is key towards a healthy work environment, and building a more vibrant communications strategy can be a foundational pillar towards achieving that goal.

Your Employees Can Be Your 'Champions'

When building a startup, entrepreneurs are often told to build something that a few people absolutely love, as opposed to something that is mildly appealing to a large userbase. This is because engaged customers who absolutely adore your product/company can be your champions in the market, convincing decision-makers in their immediate circles to give your product a go. While this is almost conventional wisdom at this point, one has to agree that few, if any, firms give the same attention to detail when interacting with their own employees.

Internal-communications-strategy
When people are happy with a product or a company, they tend to talk about it.

Forget first customers: your first champions should be your very own workforce. That can happen when you strengthen their relationship with the company by the means of, wait for it, video. While other forms of communication can work, video works better for reasons that have been outlined in the previous subheading of this article.

Video has better recall value and engages individuals far more than text or still images. In addition, this makes the viewer extremely likely to share the video. By some estimates, videos are shared 1,200% more times than links and text combined. Moreover, brand messages shared by employees are re-shared 24 times more frequently than those that are distributed by the marketing efforts of the brand itself. Now those are some serious numbers.

Video Has Way Better Analytics

When using a capable video platform like StoryXpress, you receive in-depth analytics that can help you understand exactly what part of your message or information incites the most employee interest, or, on the contrary, causes them to drop off and stop watching the video. Additional features like custom CTAs and forms can help you collect data directly from your workforce, and the information available to you can be nailed down to the individual viewer and their response to your content.

Conventional methods of communication, like emails, on the other hand, do not have a way for you to measure engagement within the body of your message. All the information you have essentially boils down to your emails being read (or not), and the data related to that one particular action, which isn't particularly insightful. In addition, collecting data to form aggregate opinions from the workforce can be a major pain that can be easily solved by integrating data collections solutions like forms and CTAs within the video itself, instead of housing them in a separate location to be visited by each employee on their devices. Eliminating friction, both emotional and operational, between the employees and their leaders is the primary objective of any communications strategy, and in 2019, it is becoming increasingly clear that video is head-and-shoulders ahead of the pack in accomplishing those goals.