If your business is like so many others trying to survive the pandemic, most or all of your workforce has probably been working remotely in recent months. In fact, a survey from Gartner found that almost 50% of organizations let 81% or more of its workforce work from home during the COVID-19 shutdown. And Gartner predicts that 41% of employees will likely continue to work remotely for the foreseeable future. Twitter’s CEO has already said many of its employees can work remotely for as long as they want, and it’s likely that many other companies will follow suit.
If you’re thinking about doing the same, this means you’ll be relying heavily on video for communication—as you’ve likely already been doing for months. Everything from townhall events and employee training to announcements from the CEO can take place on video. But how good are the videos your company has produced, and how engaged are your employees after watching them? And did you learn anything about video production for live events in the last several months, such as video reach, quality, and whether your network handles traffic well? If you don’t know the answers, you’re not alone. Many executives struggle with determining how good their corporate videos are. Here’s what you need to know to improve.
Why Employee Engagement Matters
Did you know research by Gallup shows that only 15% of employees are engaged? Even worse, 18% are actively disengaged in their workplace, and 67% are just not engaged at all. Maybe this lack of employee engagement is why just 7% of Fortune 500 companies are good at keeping their high performers!
As you might guess, none of these statistics are good. But you might not know exactly why employee engagement is so critical. The answer is that an engaged workforce has a noticeably positive impact for the business as a whole. In particular, Gallup found that when comparing businesses in the bottom quartile of its database to the top quartile, an engaged workforce can increase sales by 20% and profit by 21%
If these numbers sound good to you, it’s time to check on employee engagement when it comes to the videos your executives are hosting. If you suspect the executives at your company are not engaging employees as well as they should be, use the tips below to change that so your whole company can reap the rewards.
Measuring Engagement
So how can you tell how engaging your videos are? You can use tools that tell you the metrics you need to know to determine who is watching and for how long. For example, Hive Insights 2.0 tells you aggregated event metrics, including viewing time, viewer participation, video quality, network impact, and other important factors. You’ll also see specific details about your live video events broken down by location, quality of experience, and more.
This way, you’ll know if viewers are watching your videos the whole way through, or turning them off 30 seconds in. If it’s the latter, you know you need to fix your engagement. With tools like Hive Insights 2.0, you’ll also see unique network visualizations that show you how your streaming videos affect your network. This tells you if your network can easily handle the traffic or if it needs some help, as the results let you determine the best time to plan your event and how long it should be for each region. This level of detail is critical to create a smooth viewing experience for everyone.
How to Improve Engagement
If you’ve realized it’s time to improve the engagement you’re getting from your company videos, there are some quick fixes to try. First, consider what kinds of videos you can make. If you’ve only been producing one type of video—such as an occasional company update—you may be missing out. There are plenty of other reasons to make videos for your employees to watch. The most popular types of videos include:
- Training videos to teach new employees different concepts
- Webinars meant to educate your workforce on a particular topic
- Company updates from the CEO
- Interviews with the employee-of-the-month or other employees you want to highlight
- Day-in-the-life of an executive
- Videos highlighting the key selling points of new products or services
All of these video ideas are great ways to address and engage hundreds or even thousands of employees at once. Think about which types of videos would be most appropriate for your business and most interesting to your workforce. Then start making them regularly so your employees know when to expect new video content they can watch and learn from as they work from home.
Try to keep your videos short and sweet if possible, as it’s recommended that you keep them no longer than six minutes, with two minutes being the best length for engagement. If you’re having trouble sticking to short videos, consider making a series of several short ones so viewers can take a break between videos if necessary. This will keep up engagement among your employees.
Finally, make sure the whole experience goes smoothly if you want your employees to keep watching. This means ensuring the video is high quality, with clear audio and visuals and minimal buffering. You want the right bitrate for maximum video quality, as this determines the quality and size of the video. Note that videos lower than 800 kbps tend to result in shorter viewing time and less viewer engagement, so make sure your bitrate is better than that.
In fact, just to give you an example of how important bitrate is, one of our clients temporarily turned off Hive in May, and quickly went from 78% of viewers reaching 1.7 mbps streams to just 34% afterwards. That’s a huge drop in video quality! And it had noticeable consequences, as about 50% of viewers stopped watching the video about halfway through the live stream. Don’t let this happen to you! Fortunately, you can avoid it by simply maintaining a decent bitrate that results in good video quality, which Hive can help with.
As you can see, there are many ways you can improve engagement in video presentations. If you have any questions about further improving video quality or want to know how Hive can help, contact us today to talk about your options!
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Eric Vidal
CEO at The Marketing Scope Eric Vidal, an industry expert with over 25 years of marketing and technology experience is passionate about providing insight and education on the latest martech trends and techniques. Eric speaks and writes for various publications like The Marketing Scope and Future Of Work to name a couple. Eric has been a marketing leader for companies of all sizes. He has extensive experience working to achieve measurable business results for organizations like IBM, Cisco, WebEx, Canon USA, West Corp., Dynamic Signal, SAP and more. Connect with Eric on LinkedIn.