“There is a real cultural change in everyone’s day-to-day life that impacts the business: we consume videos. This cultural transformation must be adopted by businesses. They have to adapt.”
Carole Danancher, CEO de Kannelle.
It’s September 2021 and, finally, the Kannelle team was able to join a physical event. What a treat! The Digital Workplace panels our CEO Carole joined were a perfect opportunity to debate about video and its role in tackling Human Resources‘ current challenges. Here are our takeaways.
Clearly, video has proven its effectiveness in many if not all sectors: it is possible to create original, dynamic, short and easily consumable videos. Video is great to tackle new post-lockdown objectives: to transmit information to all teams and to maintain group cohesion. For Yann Philippe of SociĂ©tĂ© GĂ©nĂ©rale, there is “a real problem with the quantity/quality ratio of information: there is more and more information to circulate and also a lot of distributed content (through several MS Teams groups, grouped emails, etc.). It is difficult to capture the attention of some people. So we have to mix formats using webinars and video to try to catch all employees.”
So let’s look at how video can be used to convey information in a fun and engaging way to all employees and help reinvigorate managers and teams in a work place combining on-site and virtual interactions.
1. Adopting video to get your messages across and capitalise on knowledge
The war for content and attention is also raging in businesses: in order to arouse employees’ interest and make sure that information is clearly and fluidly conveyed to teams, it is necessary to convey the message in a dynamic and effective format.
To do this, several channels are available: webinars, videoconference meetings, corporate social networks, etc. Any of which can be used to reach everyone in the business, including those working from home and those whose schedule prevents to attend the right meetings. However, to foster knowledge management and capitalisation, it is not enough to post anything and everything on your network, or to organise hundreds of meetings per week. You have to be strategic and here are our key tips.
Prioritise content
Pick video first, because it is engaging and visual, and it maximises the ratio of information integration to content consumption time. When not possible, choose pictures and podcasts, and lastly articles.
Don’t be like Dwight : prioritise.
Choose the right format and go for asynchronous
Tutorials, interviews, microlearning videos can be an HR manager’s best allies. There are strong reasons to favour asynchronous content:
- It avoids the repetition of information in several live meetings
- It allows information capitalisation (it does not disappear like a visioconference)
- It makes the information available to everyone, regardless of time zone or employee schedule
As Carole pointed out: “A digital workplace is good to facilitate the information flow, but how do you prioritise? You have to create interesting content in terms of topics and format. The Kannelle solution helps to implement video in companies. Video is no longer limited to the realm of communications. For example, in HR, a small article is not interesting to employees. In training, PowerPoint slides are no longer the format that is desired. Video is.” She adds that video is key to “getting the information across in a pleasant and interesting way. It must become the priority of internal communication teams.”
Choose the right channel
You can use a newsletter, a corporate social networks such as Jamespot, an intranet such as Inside, a digital “Bulletin Board” Ă la Steeple, or a workplace like Lumapps. It all depends on the preferences of the employees and the technical possibilities granted by the organisation.
Good communication is necessary for good collaboration. The aim should be to balance or even re-balance asynchronous and synchronous communications in order to avoid “zoom-fatigue” (boredom or even annoyance linked to the multiplication of video conferences) and to keep employees as alert and focused as possible.
2. Recreating esprit de corps and redefining the role of the manager
The health crisis revealed a new need: maintaining team cohesion at a distance. It was therefore necessary to create moments of conviviality: how to do this on video, without falling into the trap of meeting-mania? How to interest these employees who have adopted new behaviours following months of full remote work?
Some employees no longer wish to return to the office and face an open space again. Even managers are struggling to maintain their traditional role in these new hybrid work modes. This makes human resources management complex. In fact, in France “the proportion of work stoppages among managers is exploding compared to that of non-managers: in May, an average of 23% of managers took at least one work stoppage, compared to 13% of non-managers” according to healthcare specialist Malakoff-Humanis. It seems that remote working brought to light some management challenges that managers and employees alike want to address.
Here are some ways for managers to adapt to the new expectations of their employees:
Establish or maintain remote rituals
During a panel at the Digital Workplace event, Julie from Jamespot reminded us of the importance of rituals such as a “Hello Team!” at the beginning of the day and a goodbye at the end of the work day: “This lets people really switch off at the end of the day and create a break between personal and professional lives, even as, for many, the two are now held in the same place.”
Revisiting the role of the manager as expected by the organisation
According to Carole, “the crisis has revealed problems linked to micromanagement. Even for managers, this was painful: ‘I don’t want to do this anymore’. Hence the ‘fatigue’ when meetings are only used to control or to be controlled. This leads to a rethink with 2 objectives:
- To motivate and unite in the absence of physical presence
- To control to ensure that the work is done and the objectives (and not the presence) are achieved
It is necessary to find the right balance between relationships and performance, at a distance, with new digital means such as Slack, Google Chat or Teams.
Asking for the opinion of their employees
Managers also have a role to play as representatives of their employees in order to meet the cohesion and well-being goals. They must therefore provide information on the feelings of their employees and try to improve them.
Training to this new management style using video
Video is the perfect tool for training and onboarding managers on these new expectations, in order to enable asynchronous training as seen previously. Find out more about video training.
Make video part of the manager’s toolbox
Managers must feel comfortable with this format and make it a new skill, which will let them better develop the internal and external communications of their team or company. They must become better communicators for their teams to perfectly express their needs.
As Sophie Picard from Atos pointed out in 2020 during one of our webinars, “Managers must switch to video. (âŠ) If the person is not natural when speaking to employees on camera, there is no point in insisting. It only works if it is credible.”
In summary, the panels confirmed the trends for the use of video in the HR field: videos published internally or externally help to create team spirit, reinforce the company culture and, beyond the tools, inflect the role of the manager who becomes the perfect mediator and communicator for his or her team.
Your turn !
