Video continues to be imperative for employee collaboration, communication, and engagement. In a perfect world, your Training department would have the resources and equipment to function as an internal content studio, but this is rarely the case.
Your time is valuable, so you want to spend as much of it as possible focusing your efforts on creating workforce development content. Videos around high-value rollouts and critical trainings, for example, should originate from your department. But it’s time to leverage your content matter experts for other, lower-priority video content.
Perhaps there’s a tech support issue the IT department can explain, or a new workflow for the payroll system that HR can cover. Having different departments create these videos saves your time while empowering them to share their knowledge. And, contrary to what many think, video content doesn’t require fancy equipment or professional polish to be high-quality content (check out my previous column to learn why your mobile device might be the best video creation tool you have).
Free up your department’s time to focus on critical training content, by handing off these types of videos to others in your organization.
- Technical Support: Use technical support videos to show your employees how to solve a problem they’re having with internal systems. Teams also can provide answers to questions that are frequently asked, creating easy, repeatable responses for staff.
- Recorded Webinars and Live Events: If your marketing or product teams are hosting a Webinar or live event for customers, internally sharing the recordings will help keep all employees informed on updates. Those teams are already creating the content, so try to repurpose it.
- Information Delivery: Information delivery might consist of giving an update, providing context, or delivering additional background. If the information is coming out of a specific department, they may be able to explain the information quicker and easier, taking the burden off your team.
- Building Buzz: Use high-energy videos to get your staff excited about an event, new opportunity, or company milestone. And the best people to build a buzz around these scenarios are the teams involved. For instance, if your sales team surpassed its quota, that team would likely be excited to share the news with the rest of the organization.
- Education or How-To Videos: While onboarding or more formal training videos should fall in your team’s realm, let others make videos to support different departmental roles and responsibilities. These videos can include tutorials that walk staff through how to do a task or process.
Are there other types of videos you use in your organization? I’d love to hear about them! Tweet at me@piercemr.
Matt Pierce is Learning & Video ambassador at TechSmith Corp., the go-to company for visual communication. TechSmith empowers people to create remarkable content to share knowledge and information. A graduate of Indiana University’s School of Education’s Department of Instructional Systems Technology, Pierce has more than 10 years of experience working in learning and development with a focus on visual instruction. He has directly managed the training, user assistance, video, and other teams for TechSmith.
