3 Ways Video Can Enhance Employee Culture at Company Meetings

My company has grown tremendously during my five-year tenure. When I began as a starry-eyed IT specialist, our team was hovering around 50 employees; now, we span the globe and are nearing 200 people.

Like any growth spurt, we’ve experienced some pain points. One of the biggest ones we’ve iterated many times to address is connecting our expanding team.

Our company-wide All Hands meeting used to be held weekly, and was an extremely valuable way for all employees to have insight into the goings-on of each team. Nothing was excluded: finances, sales numbers, hiring updates - everything was relevant.

Fast forward a few years, and it became unrealistic to dive so deeply into each facet of our company. More importantly, as we grew into more offices and gained an international audience, it was more difficult to maintain the connectedness our smaller team once encompassed.

We re-engineered our company-wide meeting to a monthly cadence to keep content meaningful, and created a one-way broadcast from our main office in San Francisco to tackle the technology issue that came with more people dialed in. However, we needed a way to bring back that inclusivity we valued.

We did this by incorporating video content into our meetings. Here’s three ways it’s helped us maintain our awesome company culture.

Connect the Dots

Someone standing in front of a screen talking through a presentation is the most traditional form of company meetings, and it’s not going away. But sometimes it can be dry, and viewers are not engaged and thus get nothing out of the session.

Adding videos with engaging visuals has helped us bring the message home to our audience. While an expert might know everything about a particular topic, they may not be the best person to convey the information.

When editing videos for my company meetings, I’ve found that including engaging, simple visuals throughout helps viewers retain the information and make it easier to chew on.

It also gives the content a polished, finished look and feel that your audience will appreciate.

Get More People on Board

Many people are very comfortable standing up in front of a large audience and speaking on any number of topics. Even more aren’t.

If I could turn each “uh,” “um,” “you know” and “so” from company meetings into dollar bills, I would be a very rich woman.

When you have the ability to edit a piece of content into something refined and polished, the finished product is much better than a live presentation.

Further, people feel more at ease when they know their presentation will be edited into something with a high production value. You’ll be able to get a more diverse set of speakers who are comfortable volunteering to present.

Connect Your Team

When our meeting changed to a broadcast from our headquarters in San Francisco, many people wondered how we were going to give other locations a presence and voice.

With video, not only will you get more people on board to present, you’ll be able to open the door to other offices and teams within your company.

Video has allowed me to connect faces with a staticy voice coming from a phone, which wasn’t an ideal way for other offices to collaborate at these large meetings as we grew.

Allowing people from different regions to show their face at company meetings makes other offices feel included and have more ownership over what’s shared within the company. No longer will only those working out of our main office be able to contribute.

Engaging video content doesn’t end at company meetings. There are many more uses for for video to bring people together and convey important updates and information. I’m excited that my company has adopted this medium, and it’s definitely enhanced our culture of inclusivity that we value so highly.

Sketch Blue Studio is experienced in creating high quality branded video content for businesses of all sizes for both external and internal communications. Contact our office today to get started.

Jessica Warshaver is an Internal Communications Specialist at Sharethrough, an Adtech startup based in San Francisco. She runs all internal company communication, including the internal blog, newsletter, and monthly company-wide meeting.