Messages matter. But if employees don’t tune in, the messaging won’t connect, and employers won’t get the desired results. Workers prefer to get their employee communication using the same technologies they like for communication and entertainment away from work – and for many, that means video they can watch on cellphones and other mobile devices.

The numbers are overwhelming: 71% of employees don’t read email or text messages. But adding video to emails and texts can make a huge difference, increasing your click-through rates (CTR) more than 90%. Just using the word “video” in the subject line of your employee communication can increase CTR by 65%.

“We used to try and keep everybody on the same page with a long series of emails. But what I’ve found is it’s much more interesting, much more compelling, much more effective, frankly, to try to communicate to the whole team with videos,” says renowned business strategist Jay Baer, a best-selling author and keynote speaker.

Benefits of Video in Employee Communication

Here are more statistics illustrating the power of video in employee communication and beyond:

• Employees are 75% more likely to watch a video than read text. And viewers in surveys say they retain 95% of a message when they watch it in a video, compared with 10% when reading it in text.
• Video is considered the most engaging form of internal communication by 48% of all employees, compared with 37% who prefer text with images and 15% who prefer text-based emails. Executives prefer video too, with 59% saying they would rather watch a video than read text.
• Using more video and less text in internal communication can save companies time and money, with one study finding that it can save an employee an average of six minutes and 43 seconds a day, or over half an hour per week and over 25 hours per year.
• The number of viewers continues to grow in 2020, with 78% of people already saying they watch videos online every week, and 55% of them saying they’re watching every day. As much as 82% of all consumer internet traffic is expected to come from online videos by 2022, up from 72.3% in 2017.

Video Communication Strategies

Video is key to engaging your employees, getting them to pay attention to your communication and maybe even retain the information they’re soaking up. But it takes skill and know-how to be effective.

We’re moving away from the ‘content is king’ phrase to ‘employee-generated content is becoming king.’

– Branding strategist Manuel Diaz

Here are eight valuable tips and strategies:

1. Make your videos easily accessible on mobile devices.
   Mobile video consumption is rising by 100% every year, and that’s clearly how many employees want to watch – wherever they are, whenever they like. After all, they’re already living, playing and working on mobile devices, so it’s a natural, intuitive way for employers to increase employee engagement. About 90% of employees say they believe using mobile technology is critical to getting their work done.
2. Make interactive videos part of your mix.
   One increasingly popular method is using 360-degree videos that allow users to take a tour of an office or work facility in an interactive, immersive way. A 360-degree video is effective for training, onboarding and interactive eLearning. Interactive videos that incorporate gamification are a fun way to boost employee engagement. .
3. Use real people to tell real stories.
   Encourage employees to step forward to share their personal experiences in your communication. This can produce compelling storytelling that will enhance employee engagement, boost authenticity and build your employer brand. “We’re moving away from the ‘content is king’ phrase to ‘employee-generated content is becoming king,’” says Manuel Diaz, an employer brand strategist at Intel.
4. Personalize content by targeting audiences.
   Using video marketing strategy to tailor messages to specific groups can boost employee engagement. Targeting specific audience segments along geographic and demographic lines is effective. Behavioral segmentation is becoming more popular as employers use technology to determine their audience’s likes, dislikes and attitudes.
5. Use live video streaming.
   Social media channels make it easier than ever for companies to use live video streaming for internal communication. It’s a real-time way to engage viewers because they tend to watch livestreaming three times longer than prerecorded video, and live videos can produce six times more interactions. Team meetings and company-wide town halls are common uses for livestreaming.
6. The sound of silence.
   Dynamic, high-quality sound can be important in grabbing viewers’ attention a lot of the time – but not always. Be mindful that many viewers will have the sound on their devices turned off or be viewing a video on a digital screen in one of their offices So, you’ve got to produce content that has captions and makes sense when muted.
7. Keep it short.
   There’s a time and place for longer videos, especially when you’re dealing with storytelling, and it takes time for your story to unfold. But shorter is usually better because people have limited time and attention. As video branding expert Sunny Lenarduzzi says, “People don’t have big attention spans in this day and age, and we’re just getting fed so many messages. So, my biggest thing is … you want to be as efficient as possible with your content.”
8. Beware of autoplay.
   Having videos begin automatically on websites became popular several years ago, but there has been a backlash from viewers who consider them an abomination that can wreck the user experience.

Lisa Lubin, an Emmy Award-winning broadcast journalist, says it’s a “no brainer” that video sells in all types of marketing and communication: “Video informs and entertains people and, good or bad, today most people prefer to watch a video rather than read a page of text.”