Using Video Analytics to Improve the Employee Experience

Losing employee connection is an increasingly concerning challenge for HR teams. We’re all busier than ever before. We’re more distracted and less embedded in the company culture. Mass emails and intranets have their place, but to meet today’s challenges, internal communications will need to embrace video and learn from video analytics.

Why Video Improves the Employee Experience

No medium is better at connecting people than video. A July 2022 study commissioned by Brightcove reported 76% of non-management professionals feel more connected with leadership through video communications. In fact, 83% of all respondents agree that more video content would improve their overall employee experience.

However, only 31% of employees say their organizations use video for corporate communication from leadership (despite 80% preferring video). Similarly, about a third say their organizations use video for training or corporate events even though the majority prefer on-demand or livestreamed video.

In a disconnected world, it’s imperative to align an internal comms strategy with today’s content consumption habits. People are an organization’s most valuable resource and, just like customers, retaining them isn’t a given.

Successfully attracting, recruiting, and onboarding talent is just the beginning. Employees need to be nurtured with career development opportunities, engaged in the company culture, and ultimately retained to ensure knowledge stays within the organization.

Video has the potential to address every facet of the employee lifecycle. But it must be analyzed, optimized, and deployed at the right stages and with the right parameters during this journey to generate the most impact.

How to Improve the Employee Experience with Video

For many HR departments, data literacy is an obstacle to effectively tracking and optimizing video.

According to a survey Brightcove conducted with HRD Connect, 69% of organizations do not currently measure the engagement of their video communications (“Driving Employee Engagement and Culture Through Video 2022 Survey”). Moreover, 24% stated that video measurement is something they plan to start doing.

You can’t build a business case—let alone a strategy—for internal comms video if you don’t measure the impact it’s having on your workforce. You need to understand what you can measure, how you can measure it, and how you can apply it.

Beyond building the business case for video, the insights gleaned from video can inform your entire approach to internal communications. It’s often assumed that the total number of views is the extent of video analytics, but this barely scratches the surface of video metrics. In fact, video metrics can help make data-driven decisions to optimize internal comms throughout the employee experience.

Measure Play Rate to Assist Recruitment

Video is the best way to make a great first impression with prospective employees. From office tours to employee testimonials to describing your perks and benefits, video can convey your employer proposition in a meaningful and measurable way.

When recruiters share employer brand videos, you can easily see what resonates better with different people. Video metrics like play rate allow you to see how often a video was played by the audience who saw it. By comparing play rates, you can see what drives prospective employees to inquire about job opportunities as well as what will secure new hires and ultimately retain them.

Measure Engagement to Track Onboarding

Onboarding used to mean overextending multiple teams with endless meetings and forcing visual learners to sift through countless pages of documentation. Today, and especially for hybrid workplaces, video can equip new hires to execute their roles according to your unique procedures related to HR, Finance, and Legal.

Producing onboarding videos not only tracks onboarding progress, it improves employee comprehension. For example, engagement is a video metric that shows how much of a video viewers watched. Watching for high engagement rates can ensure new hires are up to speed on company policies, while lower rates can identify communication problems with a given protocol.

Measure Video Views to Support Development

Investing in your employee’s development is key to retaining them. Whether you’re training staff for management or training teams in a new technique, video allows you to upskill your workforce en masse.

With a career development video library, you can track which skills your employees are most interested in learning. Total video views will not only show the most popular skills, it will show you which employees are the most eager to develop. This data not only informs the kinds of trainings to invest in, it can frame the conversation with individual team members during annual reviews.

Harnessing Video’s Potential for Your Employees

As the working world continues to evolve, businesses need to reevaluate the efficacy of their current internal communications methods. Indeed, over 80% of organizations see company culture as the most significant challenge that video is equipped to solve (Brightcove/HRD Connect).

HR teams simply cannot afford to leave video on the back burner of their internal comms strategies. But with a good understanding of its data and applications, businesses can harness video’s potential to improve their employees’ experience.