Human memory is tricky. You may have heard that when people learn new information, they forget approximately 75% of it within two days. 

Research suggests that repetition is the key to boosting memory, and video makes rewatching (i.e., repetition) simple. By creating training videos for employees, you can increase the practice of repetition and help your team better retain knowledge, expand their skill set, and do their jobs better.

In this article, we’ll walk through everything you need to know when producing your employee training content. We’ve also included tips from learning and development professionals on how you can set every learner up for success.

What is a training video?

In a business context, a training video provides employees (both new and existing) with the guidance to learn a particular skill or area of knowledge.

When it comes to corporate training, the quality of content and the delivery method matters.
In order to make your training videos impactful and engaging to your staff, we have two main tips.

First, keep it short and sweet. If a video is under 60 seconds, 62% of viewers will watch it to the end. While longer videos may be packed with more information, they may not always be engaging for your audience. Only 26% of viewers will completely watch a video more than 20 minutes long. 

Second, you should consider video trends, like interactivity. When you create training videos for your employees, make sure you’re taking best practices, and your audience’s preferences and learning styles into account (more on this later).

The better the training, the more impact employees can have doing their jobs. By making video content short and sweet, you’re guaranteed to keep your audience’s attention. With interactivity, your team is brought into the story of the learning and helps cultivate an immersive learning environment. 

Investing in a robust training program with video can help your team feel more supported at work and fuel a positive employee experience.

Why make a corporate training video

One of the most important factors to consider during employee training video production is matching the right kind of training with the trainee. Most people are visual learners in some capacity — 90% of the information that is transmitted to your brain is visual in nature. However, people learn in all different ways, even within the medium of video.

Online training tools like videos can result in better information retention, higher engagement, and lower cost for training. Below, we’ve listed some of the top reasons businesses choose videos to train their workforce.

1. Easier to retain information

Video helps people recall information. Combining visual and auditory/verbal content allows learners to make more relevant connections and associations that assist with memory. 

One study shows that three days after learning, 65% of verbal/visual presentation (video, in this case) audiences can recall presentation information. Compared to only 10-20% who recall information that was spoken or given as a lecture, and 10% who recall only written information, it’s clear which method works best.

2. Higher engagement

People watch, on average, 17 hours of online video each week. Even branded video — 66% of consumers have viewed marketing content to learn about a product or brand.

When it comes to building brand advocates (which your employees should be), viewers are 52% more likely to share video than any other type of content. When you’re looking to create an engaging training experience, data says to look to video.

3. It’s cheaper

Since we’re talking about business here, one of the major benefits of using training videos instead of having in-person training sessions is that it keeps costs down — especially if you produce your own training videos.

In 2022, the Training Industry Report predicted a 6% increase in training budgets for this year and expected the global training market to grow by 2%. These days, remote training with video is about as useful as it can be — but you still need to maximize its benefits. 

So, what type of training video would be best for your organization? Let’s take a look at the different kinds you can use.

5 tips to master the art of online training videos

If you want to create the best training videos for your employees, there are a handful of considerations to keep top of mind. Our team chatted with Elizabeth Hodos and Emma Wisehart, Senior Sales Enablement Managers at Vimeo, to better understand what makes a successful video training program.

1. Understand training goals

The first step to making a great training video is matching the content to the learning outcome you want your employees to achieve. Before beginning the creation process, identify the main messages you’re trying to convey. For example, if you’re training a sales organization and want your sales team to learn how to create customer accounts using all the different tools in your tech stack, that means you’ll need videos that touch on your organization’s account setup process.

2. Make training content for all learner types

Employees’ ability to learn directly correlates with their ability to retain and apply the information they’ve recently acquired. Although there are additional (and hybrid) ways your team can learn, educators and leaders typically refer to four main styles:

• Reading/writing learners work well with text-based data and information through reading and/or writing. 
• Auditory learners excel when they’re able to listen to content.
• Kinesthetic learners are hands-on and rely on their tactile senses to learn.
• Visual learners — the most common type of learners — respond best to images, graphics, and video.

Video can actually help with all of these styles. For instance, you can supplement video with one-sheeters and other educational resources and activities.

3. Make training actionable

Learning means very little unless employees can put what they’ve learned into practice. When it comes to employee training videos, you want to design them to be actionable.

Leadership teams should immediately encourage employees to use what they’ve learned to reinforce their education. For example, once you’ve taught your employees how to use a tool from your company’s tech stack, make sure you provide a relevant test (or real-life) scenario for them to work through using the tool.

4. Identify knowledge gaps for learners

When an employee lacks the information they need to be able to complete an important business task, a knowledge gap forms. And if it’s not addressed quickly, it will lead to a skills gap and an inability to perform their job well.

To identify employee knowledge gaps, provide different types of skills assessments for them: pre-training, post-training, and self-assessments. Once employees receive the training they need, use video to share your company’s institutional knowledge. 

5. Find ways to track learning

With modern video production platforms, tracking video analytics is easier than ever. In fact, 83% of today’s companies use some form of analytics. Typically, organizations track functionalities like performance (views and engagements, for example) and CTA click-through rates.

For employee training videos, it’s important to see if your employees are watching all the way through and, if not, where they dropped off. Using this knowledge, you can make any necessary adjustments to your training materials.

6 types of training videos

When you’re creating employee training videos, you’ll quickly find out that certain skills are better learned through specific training approaches. Whether your video is lecture-style or an interactive presentation, each type of video serves a unique purpose in your training.

1. Tutorial videos

Tutorial or instructional videos can help your new employees understand step by step how to perform a certain task or follow a process. Great tutorial videos often include interactive visuals, quizzes, annotations, and more to help improve retention.

Even within tutorial videos, there are a couple of different approaches you can take, including:

• Animated videos. These are usually quite short and work well for data visualization, where having a real-life person explain might confuse viewers.
• How-tos. These are the most common type of instructional videos. These explain how to do something, usually in numbered steps.
• Demos. Similar to a “how-to,” demonstrations are what you’ll want to use if you want to show a process or product in action.

Tutorial videos are pretty flexible, and you can cover almost any topic with them.

2. Just-in-time training

Elizabeth Hodos, Senior Sales Enablement Manager at Vimeo, describes just-in-time learning as “serving up information for people when they need it.” She says the most important question to ask is, “What’s the one thing viewers need to remember?” 

With just-in-time training, employees are provided “microlearning” videos at specific touchpoints that help employees learn in the flow of work. This way, they’re more easily able to integrate what they’ve learned into their everyday roles. And since we already know about ol’ Ebbinghaus, we know it’s also important to serve up just-in-time training videos frequently because people will forget.

3. Live virtual trainings

The digital workforce is alive and well, as 97% of employees are open to onboarding virtually. And HR and onboarding teams agree — 69% find live video training to be most effective outside of in-person training. Creating a “virtual classroom” with a live streaming event can be a highly effective way to train a remote team. To best make use of your trainees’ time, consider including some pre-work in the form of presentation decks, reading material, visuals, or instructional video that your teams can sift through before meeting live. 

4. On-demand training

With on-demand training, employees can access video courses from wherever they want and at their own pace. On-demand training is also a great way to reuse and repurpose live training sessions that employees can catch later. Hosting your on-demand videos in a centralized place like a video library can help trainees search and find information quickly.

5. Interactive training

Interactive video is a way to let your employees interact with your training content within the video file itself. According to 47% of marketers, interactive video (and live streaming) is the most effective type of interactive content.

The main thing that sets interactive video apart from other video content is its nonlinear nature. Interactive video allows trainees to jump around and choose their own educational adventure.

6. Screencasts and screen recordings

Screencasts and screen recordings function the same way, but serve different types of training use cases. 

If you want to make short, quick explainer videos around a small computer-based task, screencasts or screen capture videos are for you.

For screencasts, presenters record their screen while explaining or performing a task. These recordings can be shared with specific team members who need them. And while quick explainers are the most obvious use case, there are a few others use cases including:

• Website walkthroughs
• HR explanations
• Project deep-dives
• Technical walkthroughs

These are also some of the easiest and budget-friendly types of training videos to produce and a great way to provide more training material for your team. 

Screen recording is great for capturing longer remote sessions like educational webinars. But if you have in-person presentations like product launches, you’ll also want to record those for playback.

Recording live events to keep inside your internal knowledge base is a great way to ensure valuable sessions are available for everyone, both for those who couldn’t attend and for future employees.

How to create an effective training video

So, now you know what benefits you can get from making training videos and what types you can create. Let’s take a look at the steps involved in training video production.

1. Choose a format

The very first step you need to take when producing a training video is to decide the format for it. Thinking about the types of videos we’ve already gone through, try to match one up with the type of training you want to provide.

One format, for example, can be using Vimeo Record. You can create a screencast-type training video walking the new employee through your customer interface.

However, if you want to use an animated instructional or interactive video (but you perhaps lack the skills of a professional animator), you can check out a Vimeo Create template for employee trainings.

Emma Wishart, Senior Sales Enablement Manager at Vimeo, shared the types of video learning content that work best for training sessions:

• Short-form video
• Repeatable, straightforward “process information” 
• Information that won’t change much (e.g., organizational definitions, etc.)
• Personalized content
• Marketing content that’s professional and inspirational
• Human-focused content

2. Film your video

So, here’s where you’ll start recording your training video unless you opt for an animated one (which you can make with Vimeo Create). In which case, at this step, you’ll be working through your template.

If you’re using Vimeo Record, all you’ll need to do is click on your Vimeo Record Chrome extension, decide if you’re recording just the screen, just the camera, or both, then hit Start Recording.

With other types of videos, like presentation captures or HR onboarding videos, you’ll likely want to invest in high-quality cameras. You might cringe at the initial costs, but you’ll be saving money in the long run since you only need to record these videos once.

3. Editing

The beauty of producing your own training videos is that you’re in control of how they come together. After filming or putting your animations together, you can edit the video files using video editing software.

While you don’t always need a video editor, especially for screen recordings, it can help polish the video up by adding branding, transitions, and editing out speaker pauses.

Some of the best video editing software tools on the market include:

• Adobe Premiere Pro
• Apple Final Cut Pro
• Apple iMovie
• Pinnacle Studio
• CyberLink PowerDirector 365
• Vimeo Create

Any of these tools will help get your video ready to train new employees in no time.

4. Host and distribute your training video to stakeholders

Once your video is filmed and edited to your liking, you’ll need a place to host it and share it with others in your organization.

If you need more privacy (say the training has sensitive company content) or easier ways to organize, find, and share your videos, Vimeo’s Video Library can help you out.

You can make sure your videos are only accessible by specific people or teams and use SSO.

For a free option, you may consider creating or publishing to a YouTube channel dedicated to employee training. Your training videos can be uploaded as YouTube videos, which are pretty easy to share. If you need them to be private, you can always keep the videos unlisted — just be aware that anyone with a link can watch them.

5. Follow up to ensure understanding

The final step in producing training videos is making sure the content does its job. When using videos to train new employees, it might not always be easy to gauge how well they’ve understood the content (unless you’ve included interactive quizzes).

However, one great feature of hosting videos on the Vimeo Video Library is that users who have access can comment on the videos they’re watching to ask questions at specific time codes.

Along similar lines, you can always ask your new employees to comment at the end of the videos or fill out a quick form to say they’ve watched and understood the content of the video. If you end up with lots of questions or feedback, it’s a good indication that you might need to go back over the content of the video and improve it.

Training video templates to try

If you’re still struggling with ideas on how to build an effective training video, you can always try out one of Vimeo’s corporate training video templates. These templates can help you hit the ground running and get a video set up in minutes. Here are a few you can take advantage of:

1. First Day:

The First Day template is a great option to help you give an overview of what an employee can expect on their first day and virtually tour the office.

2. First Six Months

Many new employees worry about expectations in their first few months. Help put their minds at ease with a friendly guide.

3. Workplace Safety

To cover the essentials, you can use the Workplace Safety Training template. You can use this to cover health and safety, food hygiene, fire safety, or any industry-specific safety standards.

Find more templates: Corporate training video templates

Creative training video examples

Before you go ahead and start creating awesome videos, let’s take a look at some examples of creative training videos to help fire up some inspiration.

CDS Agency Training Video

CDS Agency provides a neat and professional onboarding training video with a strong narrator explaining the expectations of its concierges.

Worksafe NZ

This training video covers health and safety in the construction industry. But despite the serious topic, they’ve managed to include humor and engaging graphics to hold your attention.

Greystone & Co

These types of videos help new employees get to know key people in the organization. They can help offer them motivation as well as inspiration from leadership. What’s more, they’re relatively easy to produce.

Training videos FAQ

Use video for your employee training

Video takes your organization’s training program out of the boring slideshow rut and into the modern business world. 

You don’t need a massive budget to create a range of engaging and effective training videos for your new employees. You can even start with an everyday smartphone or recording your screen and webcam using Vimeo Record.

If you’re short on time or you’d rather use a tried-and-tested format, check out the variety of corporate training templates available in Vimeo Create.

Learn how to boost team performance with video

Originally published on October 15, 2021 and updated June 6, 2023.

As today’s workforce continues to evolve — and turnover rates remain steadily high — organizational leadership teams worry about holding top talent. 

In fact, 93% of companies worry about employee retention. A key avenue to promote retention is to provide career growth with development opportunities, training, and sharing domain-specific knowledge.

According to LinkedIn’s 2023 Workplace Learning Report, the primary method leadership teams use to improve employee retention is through learning opportunities. One way to enable more learning opportunities is with knowledge base software. With the right tools and resources at their disposal, teams can get the information they need fast, learn important skills, and grow alongside your business. Similarly, your customers and users can leverage a knowledge base to deepen their understanding of your product using helpful resources.

If you’re looking to add knowledge base software to your tech stack, there are a few things you need to know. Discover knowledge base-ics (dad jokes, anyone?), use cases, benefits, and examples of knowledge base software in this guide.

For internal stakeholders

Managers and leadership teams can improve internal operations — in the following areas — using knowledge base tools.

• Explaining HR processes and legal policies
• Sharing IT and tech information
• Storing brand or sales presentations
• Training and onboarding staff 

Knowledge bases are especially important for employee upskilling, reskilling, and professional development.

For external stakeholders

Your company can use knowledge bases to provide external stakeholders like users and customers with self-service support and 24/7 customer service. This could include:

• Troubleshooting how-tos and guides
• Product and service tutorials
• Contact information
• FAQs

When it comes to self-service options, there’s a gap in what customers want and what businesses think they provide. A recent customer experience report from NICE shows that although 40% of companies believe they have ample customer self-service options, 81% of consumers expect more. According to Zendesk’s 2023 CX Trends report, 37% of customer service agents say customers become noticeably frustrated, stressed, or angry when they can’t complete a simple task without agent assistance. A knowledge base that encourages your customers to self-serve will help increase customer satisfaction and likely reduce service costs, helping to strengthen your bottom line.

What are the uses of a knowledge base?

Typically, a knowledge base will serve one of two core purposes: employee education or customer education.

Employee education

Expanding teams anywhere in the business can be a daunting task for any HR or legal representatives. A knowledge base can store essential training information (for new and existing staff) so that all of the basics are covered.

Customer education

These days, when a customer has a question, the first place they’ll go for an answer is the internet. A knowledge base can be a valuable tool for customers seeking self-service assistance.

Benefits of knowledge base software

There are a lot of great benefits to using knowledge base solutions depending on industry or use case. Streamlining communications, lowering overhead costs, and engaging your audience are a few reasons why businesses invest in knowledge management software. Below, we’ve broken out some key benefits for both.

Internal benefits of knowledge base software

• Lower training costs. When you create a solid knowledge base that’s regularly updated and maintained, you’ll reduce overhead costs associated with basic employee training. Your knowledge base can answer common questions from new hires, helping you reduce how much time (and money) you spend on in-person training.
• Higher customer success rates. When customers get quick answers, it can increase your resolution and success rates considerably. It will also help free up space for more complex customer support tickets and serve as your customers’ “single source of truth.”

External benefits of knowledge base software 

• 24/7 customer service. A common pain point customers go through is not being able to contact support teams outside of office hours. Knowledge base software helps solve that problem since it lets your support services “stay open” 24/7.
• Better customer experience. Has your team ever thought a customer query was simple but had to spend several minutes (or even hours?) helping solve it by phone or email? When the customer can self-serve using knowledge base software, they can get their queries answered immediately.
• Easy to host. Building and maintaining a knowledge base on your website is relatively simple with the right tools.

Three knowledge base examples

There are many great examples of public knowledge bases from both an organizational and a customer perspective. While these examples may differ in design specifics, they all share a few common features:

• Internal search engine and search bar
• Topical (or customizable) organization
• Contact information

Here are our favorite knowledge base examples you can use to find inspiration for building a knowledge base for your organization’s content management needs.

1. Toggl Track

If you’re into productivity tools, chances are you might have come across Toggl Plan, a time-tracking tool to help you figure out where your time really goes. Currently, its knowledge base is organized simply by topic, which then includes subtopics related to using its product.

Interestingly, it has a different knowledge base for each of its products, which can be a pro or a con depending on the user’s perspective. If someone wants to get a bird’s-eye view of the available solutions, they may prefer a consolidated knowledge base.

2. ManyChat

If you’ve ever encountered a chatbot powered by Facebook Messenger or Instagram (collectively known as Meta Platforms), there’s a strong chance that the website or social media page used ManyChat to build it. Building a chatbot can seem pretty daunting. ManyChat knows this, so it has a large knowledge base to help boost the user experience.

It covers topics from the basics of using its product to more advanced topics like using widgets, plugins, and API dev tools. So if you’re building a chatbot-based knowledge base for your organization, ManyChat has a ton of resources to help.

3. Vimeo

Of course, Vimeo also has some extensive knowledge base content where customers can get information on just about everything Vimeo. Users can find anything, from uploading creative videos, learning how to live stream, to different ways of watching Vimeo video content.

For internal teams, Vimeo uses a video library to store video content. Creating a hub of internal content, events, resources, and updates allows teams to organize, share, and find video content easily and intuitively.

Three questions to ask before you create a knowledge base

Since knowledge bases can differ according to the needs of your business (and its internal and external audiences), we’ll cover three main considerations to take into account when creating one.

1. Should I use video in my knowledge base?

Many people consider themselves visual learners and prefer to see exactly what you’re talking about rather than reading about it. It’s a good idea to incorporate video (and video transcriptions and captions) into your knowledge base wherever possible. 

You may want to consider using video in your knowledge base if your content:

• is easier to “show” than “tell”
• has high traffic or requires frequent access
• benefits from an emotional connection or “human touch”
• does not change often
• includes many smaller pieces of content (e.g., documenting a process over time)

Video content can be used in a number of ways, including:

• Introducing or launching a new product or service
• Explaining a process (e.g., “how-to” videos)
• Demonstrating a use case or a product or service

You can turn existing content into videos and embed them on the same page (and host them in a video library) to help give customers a choice of how they want to learn.

In this case, it’s usually worth having a dedicated knowledge management team or person who works to create and maintain these videos.

2. Should I build an internal or external knowledge base?

Deciding whether to create an internal or external knowledge base depends on your audience and use case. Below, we’ve outlined some of the key benefits of both types.

We’ve discussed the overall uses for internal knowledge bases, but it’s worth getting a bit more specific. If you’re trying to figure out if you should build an internal knowledge base, first determine if you need to accomplish one of the following.

Staff onboarding:

• An internal knowledge base is a great place to talk about employee benefits, products or services, and company guidelines.
• An internal directory can let new employees feel more confident about asking the right people for help if the knowledge base doesn’t cover their questions.
• The base can also store blank versions of legal and HR documentation for onboarding purposes and review, saving time on both sides.

Staff training:

• Creating standardized workflows can help with initial staff training and serve as a reference point when they forget the information (happens to all of us).
• Knowledge teams can create videos on how to properly use any of the company systems and cover common troubleshooting issues.
• When you release a new product, service, or feature, you can use the internal base to keep demonstrations and key bullet points for staff members to reference.

3. What is the best knowledge base software?

The short answer is that it depends on your answers to the above questions, and different knowledge base software options offer various features to serve those needs. In general, ask yourself the following questions to find out the best fit for you:

1. How much does the software cost, and does it fit within our budget?
2. Can it assign different levels of access for specific users?
3. Is it easy to navigate?
4. Does the software include any metrics or reporting features?
5. Do we need to worry about integration?
6. Do we need community forum functionality included?

Getting answers to these questions will help you narrow down the list of options.

Knowledge base FAQs

Creating a knowledge base is probably easier than you think

Now you have a broad understanding of what a knowledge base software is and the benefits of a knowledge management solution. Depending on your use case, you may consider an internal knowledge base, external knowledge base, or both. Implementing a knowledge management solution is a great way to provide the knowledge autonomy your employees and customers want. 

Put your internal and external stakeholder resources to good use by building your own knowledge hub with the help of a developer or with a secure, enterprise video solution.

Tour Vimeo’s Video Library solution today

Originally published August 15, 2022. Updated May 24, 2023.

Last month I participated in a discussion on Quiet Quitting at the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting in Davos. Workforces are changing fast, and it strikes me that we, as leaders, are engaging in many of the right questions: the pros and cons of remote work, the risks and opportunities presented by AI, the need to create more inclusive and sustainable organizations.

But one question is worthy of more attention: if our workforce is changing, technology is changing, and post-pandemic behaviors and expectations are changing…don’t we as leaders need to change too?

There is an entire generation of digital natives entering the workforce. They grew up creating and sharing videos instead of calling or texting, and consider TikTok or YouTube their best source of information. In their personal lives, they are hyper-connected and equally hyper-engaged.

Yet in their work lives, it’s a different story. We’re seeing significant declines in engagement and employee satisfaction among remote Gen Z and younger millennials. Fewer than four in ten young remote or hybrid employees know clearly what is expected of them at work, and more than half of Gen Z employees are ambivalent or not engaged at work. If we think of employee engagement as a leading indicator for workforce productivity, this has major implications for every company and every bottom line. 

What is causing this disconnect? In work as in life, we all want to be part of something greater than ourselves. We have an innate need to belong, to feel a sense of community that is transparent, unfiltered, and human. Yet the more our workforce becomes digitally distributed and AI-enabled, the more difficult it becomes to experience true connection every day. Particularly when we haven’t evolved how we work to meet the next generation. We still ask our employees to digest dense documentation, write lengthy emails, and attend inefficient meetings. They learn about layoffs and company priorities through comms so scripted and robotic that they could have been generated by ChatGPT. And the only pulse we as leaders have on this comes through cookie-cutter engagement surveys, live events with low tune-in and high drop-off rates, and the occasional snarky chat or Q&A.

The traditional managerial model is failing us. It’s time to adapt how we as leaders show up and connect with our employees. Just as we are focused on reskilling our workforce in the face of changing population, demographic and technology trends, we also need to reskill ourselves as leaders, to better build trust and connection at scale.

I’ve experimented with much of this over the last few years at Vimeo. Here are the skills I’m learning and embracing, that I believe can help us show up differently and lead more effectively:

1. Be real, be you.

At the start of the pandemic, I ran a global town hall from my parents’ house in Flint, Michigan — sleep deprived, wearing my velour pajamas, with both my toddler son and my grandma shuffling in and out of the background.

It might have been my most effective communication ever.

Why? Because it was unscripted, vulnerable, and messy. We tend to gravitate to “us versus them” dynamics when we work at a company, particularly in times of stress and challenge. It’s so easy to think of “leadership” as a nameless, faceless machine. Being video-first and visual in your communication is a powerful antidote. It forces you to remove the mask and protection of written and edited comms. The best way to break through is to show up as you are.

By the way, there are definitely examples of leaders being vulnerable and it backfiring…but I suspect in most of those cases, the issue was that it was too performative. You have to be willing for that raw version of yourself to fail in front of your team. Flaws are what make us human. And we all want to see our leaders be brave — it only makes us want to follow them more.

2. Start with the “why.”

Like many leaders, I’ve made difficult decisions in the last year. From layoffs and executive changes to re-organizing and shutting down projects in the name of efficiency. It is my job to make the hard, unpopular calls and enact changes quickly across our organization.

Increasingly, I see employees craving transparency behind these decisions— not just the “what” but the “why”. This includes a desire to understand the broader market or competitive context, the trade-offs balanced and weighed, and the process of who was involved and when.

The old comms playbook would say that when you have a piece of critical communication and limited attention, you start with the “what” and get to the point and needed actions. But I have been far more successful getting people to embrace a difficult decision when I treat my team as key stakeholders who deserve to understand the context.

As a result, starting with “why” is a first principle for all comms at Vimeo. Of course there are always constraints to being fully transparent (legal, PR, governance, customer risk), but I’ve found that most of the time perceived obstacles to transparency are just that. Perceived. People will not always agree with your decisions, and I could argue that if they do, you probably aren’t doing your job. But they will respect and embrace those decisions when you start with the why.

3. Invest in in-person, and get personal.

Yes, I recognize the irony of the CEO of a video company saying this. But one of my biggest lessons over the last few months is that we waited too long and weren’t intentional enough in bringing our teams together in real life.

In January, a week after conducting layoffs, we hosted a company kickoff in NYC. We flew in employees from more than a dozen countries. We had employees based in Ukraine who took trains, planes, and cars to get there. We ditched the typical event confetti and opted for a low-key vibe on a budget. It was one of the most energizing and needed investments I’ve made.

It is even more powerful when, as leaders, you get on a plane and meet your team where they are. I have a fully distributed executive team spread across eight locations from Seattle to Switzerland. Most were hired in the last year so are still new, and we are just starting to gel as a team. To help accelerate this gelling, we started hosting offsites in each leader’s home city. We met our CFO’s mom around her fire pit in Vermont. Our Head of Sales wore his apron and made us frittatas for breakfast. We held working sessions around our Head of Product’s dining table.

The pandemic gave us a literal window into each others’ homes and personal lives — if we lean into that, and integrate it into our day-to-day, we have the potential to create better connected and higher-performing teams.

4. Go from “lean back” to “lean forward” experiences.

A critical communication skill will soon be the ability to create “lean forward” experiences, instead of “lean back” broadcasts. As humans, our attention spans are getting shorter (now less than eight seconds, less than a goldfish!). Yet we still communicate primarily through one-to-many messages, whether through an email you read or a highly produced town hall you sit back and watch.

At Vimeo we see this tax on engagement appearing in our own data, where the average time to drop off from watching a Vimeo video has been declining over the past few years. If we don’t change our approach, tune-out is going to seriously hamper our ability to keep our teams aligned and productive.

The good news is that we have the tools at our fingertips to break through the noise. An example I’m versed in is video. Today leaders can communicate updates asynchronously, with a quick and casual video recording that feels more like TikTok than a 60 Minutes segment. We can start making all our video updates snackable and searchable in a cinematic video library that feels more like Netflix than work. We can easily turn any piece of training content or documentation into an interactive video where our employees actively participate and build their own personalized journey.

The key here is to shift our mindset and willingness to try new things. We have a new generation entering the workforce who are ahead of us in their ability to create and capture rich and authentic information. They are ahead because they are free of the constraints our generation experienced for decades in traditional communication modes at work.

They say that employees don’t leave jobs; they leave managers. Well, CEOs are the ultimate managers, and according to a study of more than 113,000 leaders, the number one factor for effective leadership is trust. As leaders we must teach ourselves how to show up in more authentic, interesting, and trustworthy ways. I’m betting that the CEOs who embrace this brave new world will be far more successful in leading the next generation of workers. They will better inform and engage distributed teams, align people to more productive outcomes, and build lasting relationships that bring out exceptional work. They will stop communicating more, and instead, connect better.

Your Video Library is home to all the valuable video content your company creates, centralizing your video comms, meetings, training, works-in-progress, and archives. That means every team can access the content they need at any time — no late night pings for permissions granted required. 

The trick to a successful Video Library? Ruthless organization.

If you’re not well-organized, all this interconnectivity can have drawbacks…because no one wants to dig for a video file for a half hour. It’s not a great use of company time (or company dime). And since every company’s goals, workflow, and internal organization are drastically different, there is no one-size-fits-all setup. 

To make spring cleaning your Video Library easy-peasy, we’ve got a few classic Marie Kondo tips that’ll make organizing your company’s collateral ultra-efficient. Cherry-pick any of these best practices and you’ll be well on your way to a better Video Library experience for the entire team.

Ready? 

1. Know your roles 

You can easily separate your team members into specific roles, like: 

• Contributors will create content
• Viewers will watch and review content 

Understanding roles within Vimeo will make your Video Library easier to use and provide an added layer of security. For instance, you can make recorded Town Halls available to everyone while keeping internal project folders limited to specific groups or contributors. 

Knowing exactly what content will live in your library helps you set up folders and subfolders that are intuitive for your team. 

Before making your folders, create a table or spreadsheet for the different types of content you’ll create. You’ll outline what teams or stakeholders are responsible for the content, who the contributors are, who needs access, and how content relates to each other. Here’s an example: 

2. Simplify folder structures for quicker navigation

How you should structure the content in your Video Library is up to you. 

Remember: content is why members come to the library. Since working memory for most people can hold between three and four items of information at any one time, you need to make sure your library isn’t overwhelming and assets are easy to find. 

A good rule of thumb? Keep the top-level folders and the subfolders to nine or fewer. 

3. Customize who sees what, securely

Using Single Sign-On (SSO) makes logging into Vimeo quicker and more secure. User identities are centralized in your company’s cloud-hosted Identity Provider (IdP), like Azure or Okta. 

SCIM (System for Cross-domain Identity Management) adds the ability to automatically provision and remove users based on when they join or leave the company, so team seats are up to date with your current employees. 

Plus, SCIM lets you send over groups and automatically update, so instead of sharing content with 35 members individually; you can share with the entire “Marketing” group in one go. 

4. Organize the way your company thinks

When it comes down to creating your folder structure, you’ll probably be between two choices: (1) organize by your company’s departments (2) or by the initiatives your teams work on. This decision is purely based on your preference, and it doesn’t have to be exclusively one or the other.

By Team

Setting your folder structure by team is an intuitive call, especially for brands focused on selling products. Here’s an example of how to structure your Video Library by team: 

By Topic

Another way to organize your folder structure is by topic area, which is popular among service-based companies or institutions like those in healthcare, non-profits, schools, places of worship or financial institutions. Here’s what that could look like: 

5. Give specific folders a job

Once top-level folders are set, determining the subfolders should be the responsibility of a member closest to the content who can foresee alllllllll the use cases for the subfolders. 

For instance, someone in marketing might determine marketing subfolders, but that someone should understand the entire department. Special Folder admin privileges can be assigned to contributors, allowing them to create subfolders within a designated folder. This will free up account admins from having to micromanage the library.

6. Add colorful flair to your folders 

Even if you’re a pro at organizing your top-level folders, odds are you’ll still end up with a hefty library to navigate. 

Assigning colors to folders can make parsing a library much easier. Folder settings allow you to give folders in your library colors that you can then coordinate based on the department or topic. For instance, all published videos could be blue while works-in-progress could be red. This makes a large library much more understandable at a glance.

7. Tag your videos to surface the right content faster

Organizing videos based on similarities sounds simple enough, but different videos overlap with different categories. Metadata tags can make similar content easier to find without duplicating files into multiple folders.

Although every video you add to the library includes a searchable transcription, hashtags (tags, for short) can add to discoverability by assigning types of words not covered in the transcriptions. To systematize the process, create a guide that members can reference as they’re tagging.

When adding tags, think about these three main types: 

1. Descriptive tags are the most common because they simply describe the video content. The people in the video, recording location, and usage rights are common descriptive tags. 
2. Administrative tags are technical file information like resolution or frame rate. It can also be information about the recording device, like using the tag “Zoom” for a Zoom meeting recording.
3. Structural tags are the words that describe how the video is organized. In Vimeo, it is typically done using Chapter markers that identify sections of a video.

Some examples of good tags not usually included in transcriptions:

• Video type (Social Ad, Meeting, Internal Comms, Interview, How To)
• Client’s name
• Department name
• Work order
• Product name
• Location
• Version

8. Put high-priority content front and center

Featured videos 

At the top of the Video Library homepage is the Featured Video area where you can present the content you want your entire team to watch. 

Use it for the latest exec team town hall, recent product release videos, or just a place to brand your library and bring the company together. 

Pro tip: Team owners and admins can set the featured video on the Video Library homepage by clicking the Featured Content button in the lower right corner of the featured video area. 

Live events 

Owners, Admins, and Contributor Plus members can organize live events into Video Library folders, (instead of keeping them within the live events page) so you can find recorded live events more quickly.  

This allows you to stream events and automatically save their recordings to folders where they will be easier to find by your entire team or just the Contributors and Viewers who have folder access. 

9. Automate regulatory and legal compliance

Save time and energy worrying about legal compliance with Video Library’s data retention tool. 

Maybe you have videos from weekly executive office hours that you want to be deleted after one month. Or, maybe there are historical company videos that should never be deleted. 

Instead of manually manipulating each asset, Admins can set lifecycle policies for content. This is often done to comply with regulatory or legal rulings and general media management.

You can set the policies per folder, and if a video gets deleted accidentally, the history log lets you recover videos up to 30 days after they’re deleted. 

10. Search titles, tags, and talking points

Search is a crucial part of any Video Library. You already know how you can search for tags on your video content but—let’s face it—we are all busy, and sometimes tags don’t get added. (We highly recommend it, though! It’s a few extra minutes of work per video for long term organizational payoff. ) 

Instead, leverage Vimeo’s automatic video transcriptions to help you find exactly what you need. Each video in your Video Library gets transcribed, which means any spoken word or phrase can be easily searched. It’s the quickest way to find a video — if you know what to search for, that is.  

Searching is simple: 

1. Enter the phrase/term you’re searching for 
2. Open the video at the exact time stamp where the word is spoken 
3. Or, click the “Results” page, where you can filter your findings by date, video title, or even the person who uploaded the video 

Putting it all together 

Okay, your turn! Pick a few of these ten and try them out. 

You’ll see how an organized Video Library will improve team productivity, and tenfold the value everyone will get out of your video assets. 

Welcome home, videos. Demo Video Library today.

Remote onboarding and training has never been easy. In fact, only 12% of employees report that their organization effectively trains and onboards new hires. And it’s no surprise because so much of training and employee communications in a remote world are made up of on-demand videos, documentation across silos (Google drive, PDFs, Slack or Microsoft Teams messages), and live video calls packed with text-heavy slides. 

It’s not easy to take it all in at once. That’s why training and enablement teams are experimenting with different ways – like interactive video and quizzes –  to break up complex topics, make knowledge more accessible, and help new employees retain important information.

To help get your new hires up to speed, it’s important to incorporate a variety of ways to learn and interact with learning materials. By leveraging shorter training videos and adding interactive quiz questions, training and enablement professionals can help set new employees up for success.

In this article, we’ll discuss video quizzes, what impact they can make, and how to get started with interactive video.

What is a video quiz?

A video quiz provides an immersive and interactive learning experience for employees. As employees go through modules of training, an overlay featuring a quiz question related to the content, can help them put their learnings into context. Interactive video quizzes allow employees to sit back, consider the content they’ve viewed, and interact with the video in real time. It’s also an easy way to break up long segments of training content that actually helps reinforce information and drive up participation. 

Interactive video elements like hotspots, overlays, branching, and time triggers allow you to create multiple choice, true/false, or this-or-that scenarios to help reinforce learning and training content. 

Video quizzes can fold into a variety of training materials. Think: company-wide onboarding sessions all the way to role-specific training for sales, retail, engineering, product, marketing, and other departments.

4 elements of interactive video for training and onboarding

Hotspots: These clickable points can be added anywhere in your video, leading viewers to more contextual content, quiz questions, or additional training videos. Think of hotspots as the foundational feature that triggers an action when a user clicks on it.

Overlays: Overlays allow you to add more interactive content. They can be completely customizable and take shape as an iframe, a video, a PDF, an image. Overlays are a great way to display quiz questions, call-to-actions, polls, or additional videos that add more dimension to the standard training and onboarding experience.

Branching: Branching allows the viewer to jump between points in a video or pause the video to allow the viewer to choose their own path. When designing an onboarding video, branching can be a great way to introduce different teams or spotlight employees, products, or create multiple journeys within a single video. For a video quiz, branching is great for running through different scenarios and playing out both correct and incorrect answers to specific questions.

Time Triggers: Drive more engagement with your videos by triggering events within a video at any time without a viewer taking an action. While hotspots trigger actions when clicked, time triggers initiate an action at a specified time

4 reasons to add interactive video to your training and onboarding

Layer in more context

One of the easiest ways to add interactivity to a video is to add clickable elements to an existing piece of learning content. If you already have training and onboarding content, you can add clickable hotspots and overlays to provide your employees with more context. That might include more information on specific products, teams, topics, processes, individuals, or other helpful information.

Drive interactivity and engagement

Trends in interactive video – specifically for marketing – have shown higher levels of viewer engagement than static video content. For example, survey data from IPG Media Lab reveals that interactive video is 32% more memorable than passive video. Additionally, Mediafly reported interactive content is 52% more engaging than static content.

Leveraging interactive video for internal trainings can help unlock new ways of engaging employees and communicating important knowledge. Interactive elements allow organizations to create immersive onboarding and ongoing training experiences that provide depth of context and insights along different learning tracks all within a single video. 

Hotspots and quiz overlays help viewers retain information and break up video content. Time triggers and branching provides scenario-based question and answer formats that help drive up engagement during training.

Provide reinforcement to learning material

To help employees retain information, look for fun and interactive ways to engage with training information. For example, you may separate training in to several modules and prompt quiz questions to help bookend and reinforce important concepts.

By reinforcing content before, during, or after a video module, employees get a chance to recall essential information. It also helps gamify the learning experience and interjects a degree of fun.

Collect important training insights

Designing interactive videos doesn’t just help drive engagement, it’s a way to collect data that can inform your onboarding and learning and development strategy. Interactive video quiz content is customizable, allowing trainers to assign scores and correct/incorrect to individual questions and later serve up a results card that allows viewers to track their progress.

By managing your questions and polls in your interactive video segments, you can track key data including:

• Total score
• Total correct score
• Total correct answers
• Individual score as a percentage of maxim
• Total number of questions completed
• Total questions answered correctly
• Time to answer

Quick note: You can aggregate quiz data for a whole video, per question, or per session. However, because Vimeo doesn’t track personal identifiable information, individual employees or user data can’t be tracked or segmented.

Capture real-time feedback with polls. Capture more in-depth reporting related to engagement, retention, and collect your viewers content preferences.

How to create an interactive video quiz with Vimeo

Vimeo allows creators to assign values to a question from a hotspot or overlay element, and manage a slate of questions and answers that vary from multiple choice, true/false, or this-or-that scenarios. Displaying the quiz results at the end of the video can help viewers understand their performance, encourage them to improve their scores, and help them remember important training knowledge.

There are a few ways to create quiz questions. We’ll break down all the steps you need to create an immersive training and onboarding experience with video. 

Prep your video content and quiz questions

Before you start, you’ll need:

• An existing video or newly uploaded video ready to be made interactive
• A list of questions, and potential answers that you wish to quiz your viewer on.

Any hotspot or clickable element in an overlay (shapes, images, and buttons) can be designated as a quiz answer. 

Add a hotspot and action

To start adding in your video quiz, choose a spot in your video and create a hotspot. This is where your questions can pop up during a video.

1. To add your hotspot, find the object/person/area in your video where you want to add your hotspot.
   Click the (+) icon in the top right-hand corner of the screen under the Hotspot section. Create your hotspot by picking or creating a design
2. Define where the clickable area of your hotspot should be by adjusting the position and size of your grad net. Be sure to position your hotspot design relative to the object you want to make interactive for your quiz.

Next, you’ll want to give your hotspot an action. The action will signal to your viewer that they’ve answered the question. Here are a few actions a hotspot can take:

• Open an overlay that tells the player if they got the question correct or incorrect.
• Jump to a time in the video where they see the result of their answer play out.
• Fire a custom payload that triggers an action on the webpage or records the response to tell the player.

Toggle on your quiz question hotspot once you’ve determined which action makes sense.

Create multiple-choice questions by linking hotspots

Let’s say your question will include a few different answers or outcomes. Linking multiple hotspots will make quiz questions more dynamic, with various options for answers and corresponding reactions.

Linking multiple hotspots is great for tracking viewer click rates and engagement.

1. To link hotspots on Vimeo, head to the Question manager and create, edit, or delete questions to link back to your hotspot. This will inform the data you pull  from the quiz metrics. 
2. After linking your question to the hotspot, you can fill in details for the answer, the score, and if the answer is correct. 
3. Save your selection by clicking Add. 

Pro tip: Choose from a wide range of quiz hotspot images in the template picker to get started or create your own.

Create a hotspot with an interactive overlay

You can use an overlay in your interactive video to propose a question, with the answers being clickable elements within the overlay, such as buttons, shapes, or images.

1. To start, create a hotspot or time trigger. 
2. In the Action dropdown menu, select Open overlay
3. Click Create overlay to pop into the overlay editor.
4. Next, scroll down on the right-side menu and select “Is an answer to a quiz question” to expand the menu.
5. Click Question Manager, add your question or select a previously created question.
6. Once you select a question, you’ll be prompted to fill out the answer name, the value associated with the answer (ex. 10 points) and if the answer is correct or incorrect.
7. Repeat this for all answer options on your overlay and make sure you choose one as the correct answer to properly track the quiz performance.

Jump in time in the video to see results play out

Sometimes showing the outcome of a quiz question answer can really help the viewer understand the question.

To do this, you can select the action Jump to a time in the video in the hotspot settings panel or drag the tail of the flowline on the timeline to the desired frame.

Monitor quiz results with a quiz results panel

It wouldn’t be a quiz without a score! When training employees with interactive videos, you can include a final quiz score at the end of the video so the viewer can review their performance. 

To create a results panel at the end of your Vimeo video, you’ll need to create a time-triggered overlay.

• Start by heading to the interactive editor and scrub the timeline near the end of your video.
• Create a time trigger and select the action Open overlay, then click Create overlay.
• In the overlay editor, design your results panel to suit your needs.

Add quiz results to the overlay by selecting Results from the left-hand menu.

Learn more about interactive video for your training

An intuitive video recorder is your solution to improved team productivity and communication. It’s also an antidote to Zoom fatigue — working as an effective, time-saving way to walk teammates through project briefs, updates, and feedback without calling meeting after meeting.

A video screen recording also adds a human touch to sales outreach and customer support, reminding viewers of the people behind the tools and services you use.

But that’s not all. There are tons of use cases and benefits of using video recorder apps — we’ll talk about them in detail. We’ve also got video recorder software recommendations to help you get started.

But first, here’s the 101 on video recorder software.

What is a video recorder?

A screen video recorder is software that records whatever’s going on your desktop or mobile screen. You can choose to record a specific window or the entire screen with or without recording yourself and your voice.

It’s a handy tool for quickly sharing your thoughts with your team or customers without having to write (and edit) long paragraphs explaining something. 

You also don’t have to worry about taking accurate screenshots and marking them to show specific things. Instead, simply walk viewers through the steps with a screen recording and your audio explaining things. 

The team at Sol Marketing loves using video recorder software. Tom McAllister, their Digital Marketing Strategist shares:

“I’m able to use audio and video to easily explain complex topics now, whereas I previously would take multiple screenshots and then spend time editing them to highlight the areas of focus.” 

When would I need to use a video recorder?

From enabling async communication to helping educate users about your products, there are tons of ways to use video recorder apps. Let’s take you through some of the most prominent use cases: 

1. Comms with your workforce

Instead of calling a meeting every now and then, the executive team can simply create a screen recorded video to share announcements, updates, and/or new policies — just about anything, really.

Not only does this help save everyone’s time but it also means all communication is recorded and saved to a folder that teams can access anytime. 

2. Product walkthroughs

Video recording software makes it uber-easy to create product tutorials for everyone on the team.

You can use these videos to:

• Onboard and educate new customers
• Announce how to use a new feature
• Explain confused users how to do something specific with your tool
• Teach your team how to use your tool so they can use it too (or create content around it)

All you’ll have to do is to log into your product, record your screen using a video recorder such as Vimeo Record, and explain the steps you’re taking on the screen. This will create a video sharing the exact steps you took to use a feature in your SaaS tool, for instance.

(The best part? Our free video recorder lets you record two hours of video. Meaning: you can batch-create multiple product education videos in one sitting. Once you’re done, edit the long video into bite-sized videos explaining one feature each.)

At Vimeo, we drink our own champagne by using Vimeo Record to create product educational videos. For example, we’ll pop into Vimeo Create, use our Vimeo Record extension, and walk viewers through steps to, for instance, make a social media video in Vimeo Create. We then save the video and share, so it’s accessible to all relevant team members. 

3. Project management

Another excellent reason to create screen recorded videos? Explain project goals and KPIs, walking your team through the project brief, train new team members through a complex workflow without adding an hour-long training sesh to the calendar.

The Shopify team, for example, uses a screen recorded video to explain their payment process to all new freelancers they onboard to their content team. Not only does this save them time but it also makes it easy for freelance writers to understand exactly how they’ll get paid — minimizing confusion and back and forth emails about the payment process.

Also exciting? Vimeo Record integrates with Github and JIRA. This way, the embedded player for the video you create will automatically be inserted into the issue description or comment, allowing others on that issue to watch your recording directly within the ticket. You’ll have tons of institutional knowledge at your fingertips — no need to rummage through old emails or Slack archives.

Pro tip: create a specific folder in your Vimeo Video Library for saving all evergreen screen recorded content, like videos on your workflows and processes in one, easily accessible place.

4. Video messaging

You can also use a screen recorder for efficient video messaging. For example, create a video recording to:

• Pitch a new feature/campaign idea to your team
• Walk team members through your project contribution
• Update your manager on what you’ve been working on
• Reimagine your weekly standup as a short 2-3 minute video

Vimeo Record adds to the ease of recording these videos with its Gmail integration, so you can record your video message from within your email — simply hit the red button, select your video’s destinations, and hit record.

Another example of a company using video messaging? Mailchimp.

5. Video email for training and knowledge share

Video recorder apps also make educating marketing, customer support, product, and sales teams easy.

For example, you can create employee training videos explaining a concept or new feature update, for instance.

Learned a new tip or found a new resource or tool that can help your team? Great, share it in a video — explaining how the team can benefit from it and how to add it to their workflow.

The CMO & Co-founder of Trainual (and Vimeo Record user ), Jonathan Ronzio shares they use screen recording for training and documentation for their marketing team. Ronzio explains, “Video is probably the most crucial part of process documentation for me because everything in the world of marketing and brand building is so visual, and so reliant on feeling communicated through a narrative.”

What’s more, you can prompt peer to peer knowledge sharing in this way too. Instead of having to explain the new tactic that worked for them to different colleagues at different times, encourage employees to create one video sharing their new results-driving tactic or finding and send it to all their peers.

6. Video sales pitches via recording

Lastly, train your sales team on using video to send out personalized sales pitches to prospects.

Reps can also use video messaging to nurture leads and educate them on how the solution they’re selling can help solve their specific problem.   

In fact, the marketing team can use a video recorder to foster relationships. They might strike up a partnership, dream up guest post topics, or take a more personalized approach to link building.

Not to mention, video messaging is great for promoting sales and marketing team alignment. For example, each team shares who their ideal buyer is, how well MQLs are converting, or how an ABM campaign is performing.

Popular video recorder apps and software out there

When choosing a video recorder, go through its features to see how well the tool serves the purpose you want to use it for. You’ll also want to review its integrations and pricing. The more intuitive the video recorder software, the better for your entire team!

With that, here are three options to explore:

1. Vimeo Record

Vimeo Record is a free, easy-to-use Chrome extension for capturing your camera, full screen, or a specific window — letting you record videos as long as two hours.

Should you choose to record yourself along with the screen recording, you can easily reposition the camera preview from the default bottom left corner to any place you prefer in the video.

Vimeo Record also offers multiple integrations such as with Gmail and GibHub. You can also create video content from your mobile devices.

Once you’ve recorded your video, easily resize, edit, even add captions to it using Vimeo Create. Lastly, organize all the video content in one place in different folders with Video Library — setting different access permissions to them.

2. Zappy

Zappy by Zapier is another free video recorder software to try. It’s fast and lets you quickly create, annotate, and share screen recordings. Like Vimeo Record, it also integrates with a handful of tools such as Slack and the G-suite.

If you aren’t a Zapier user though, you’ll have to self-host your video content. Otherwise, you get free cloud hosting as paid Zapier customers.

3. Movavi

Lastly, Movavi is a paid screen recorder with a 30-day free trial. There’s a basic, free version available too but it doesn’t let you download recorded videos without their watermark.

The paid tool allows you to create videos in 4K. Using Movavi’s Video Editor, you can also annotate and edit videos you create. 

Use screen recorded videos to your benefit today

In a nutshell, screen recordings are perfect for educating customers, training employees, and improving async team collaboration while cutting down on meetings. You can use these videos to personalize your sales outreach as well.

Use video messaging to boost team productivity Vimeo Record.

Looking good on camera isn’t about investing in the right setup alone. It’s about the subtle tweaks too.

For example, moving the monstera plant behind you slightly to the left so it frames your background instead of your head. Or positioning your lamp correctly so that it doesn’t leave harsh shadows on your face — all these small tweaks make a big impact.

Not sure where to start to look good on video? We’ve got you covered with tips on how to look good on camera, whether you’re joining live or pre-recording videos to send later.

How to look good on camera when…

You could wing your on-camera look if it were just one or two times that you had to be on video. But with hybrid work here to stay and the video format only growing, you really can’t let your on-screen look compromise your confidence.

So let’s start with looking at some of the top video use cases and take you through quick and easy tips to look good on each of them.

You’re speaking at a virtual event 

Spend less time getting ready and more time testing your WiFi connection and setup.

Sean Doyle, Experiential Lead at Pinterest who co-hosted Vimeo’s Webinar Horror Stories advises, “Test everything in the real environment [including] your computer, your microphone, and WiFi.”

If you’re the one hosting a virtual event — not joining as a speaker alone — testing can make a significant difference in the success of your show. Do a dry run or event rehearsal with the guests a few days before the event itself. 

Marketing expert and Webinar Horror Stories host Katie Martell also recommends that as you prep guest speakers, you ask them assumed questions on top of a tech check with them.

Katie shares, “Ask your guests: ‘Is this where you’ll be calling in from?’ This will help you avoid horrible situations where guests are joining from their car or similar.”   

And to make sure you’re looking your best on the event, invest in live streaming equipment including a camera, lighting gear, and a mic.

Jay Clouse, the person behind Creator Science and host of the video podcast, Creative Elements, advises the same. “It may seem like overkill, but if you’re in a position to invest in professional equipment, it makes a huge difference. A DSLR camera as your webcam and effective lighting go a long, long way. There are great lighting tools that fit any size of space and if you can leave your equipment so that you don’t have to take it down when you’re not working, it’s a huge upgrade.”

Recommended reading

You’re sending a sales pitch over video 

Unlike live events, you have a lot more control on pre-recorded video sales pitches.

But to make sure you leave a lasting first impression on your prospects, it’s important to use a high-quality screen recorder that captures you and your screen for a personalized pitch. 

You’ll also want to distance yourself from your desktop’s camera just a bit. This is so that your face doesn’t appear bloated and broad. Don’t go too far away though as that would add a lot of distance between you and the mic, which compromises audio quality.

Lastly, don’t move your hands too much as that can distract viewers and take the spotlight from your message.

You’re training new hires with onboarding videos

Gone are the days of boring training sessions. With onboarding videos, you can personalize training material while keeping it human. Plus, new hires can watch the training videos at their own pace — even go back to them whenever needed.

To make sure you’re looking your best in these videos, aim for coming across as conversational, not perfect. Be careful though — conversational doesn’t mean you go off on tangents. Creating and loosely sticking to a script will help you create on-point videos that respect viewers’ time (and keep their attention and comprehension).

It’s also helpful to maintain a consistent setup for video series as it helps viewers focus on the content you’re delivering rather than the background. 

Recommended reading

You want to look fresh in a hybrid work environment 

Get the lighting and audio right so your coworkers can hear you right and clearly see your face. You don’t need a fancy setup for this though. Here are a few tips: 

First, join your work video calls from a well-lit, quiet room. If there’s a window in the room, make sure it’s not behind you or to your side as that can leave shadows on your face on camera. Instead, always position yourself in front of a window so it lights your face properly.

Two, express your sense of style from the waist up. Add one element to your look that feels most like ‘you.’ This could be a necklace or a bandanna, for instance. But it’s best to avoid chunky bracelets as those hitting on your desk during the call will interfere with the audio.

Finally, work on your audio quality with small tweaks. Mute your mic when you aren’t speaking to prevent noises — like your keyboard clacking — from escaping into the virtual room. Close any windows to further reduce external noise. And to reduce echo from your noise, join from a carpeted room that has curtains.  

Recommended reading

Consider these 5 elements any time you’re on video 

Whatever the nature of your online meet-up, keep the following tips in mind to look good on Zoom: 

1. Camera angle

A camera that’s too high makes it difficult for viewers to see your expressions. And if it’s too low, it can exaggerate your face’s angles, creating an unflattering look on screen.

The perfect position for your webcam then is just above your hairline — slightly angled downward.

If you’re using your desktop’s in-built camera, adjust its position using a laptop or monitor stand to set the positioning. Don’t have a desktop stand? Add some books under your monitor. 

2. Where to look 

Look directly in the camera to mimic IRL eye contact. Get distracted by your own image? Hide your own video in a Zoom call to make sure you can be fully present for your colleagues.  

3. Clothing and colors 

Wear colors that suit your skin tone and hair color. Dark colors such as deep purple and gray look good on people with light skin tone, for example. The inverse is true for dark skin-toned people.

You’ll also want to avoid patterns, wrinkled clothes, and big logos as those can come across as distracting on camera.

Also make sure the color you choose contrasts with the background. This helps you stand out against the background instead of showing as a floating head on camera.

One last thing to remember here: you want your message to stand out, not your outfit. So pick something that represents your brand. If you’re a fitness instructor, for example, you’ll want to wear shorts and a t-shirt. 

4. Lighting

We’ve already talked about positioning yourself in front of a window for optimal lighting. But if you’re joining from another time zone or don’t have a window in the room you’re recording videos from, position a lamp in front of you.

Place this lamp behind the camera so that it throws sufficient light on your face — all while not flooding the camera lens with too much light.

You also don’t want to use overhead lighting because that leaves sharp shadows on your face on video.

The ideal lighting setup for a Zoom call is having two light sources — both positioned behind the camera and facing each other from opposite angles to fill in your face from both the sides.

If you’re hosting a live event or recording a video series, consider creating a 3-point lighting setup.  

5. Your background

The most important tip here is being mindful of how busy your background is. You don’t want it to be cluttered or untidy as that can get distracting for viewers. Instead, strive for a simple décor to add visual interest.

For example, add plants, a colorful throw, or books to your background. If you want to use the classic full bookshelf background, make sure the shelves are neatly arranged.

Lastly, check where your plant or any other background item sits in the frame. After all, you wouldn’t want it to give you a strange hairdo.

Final takeaways

TL;DR? Start with getting the basics right for recording videos or joining Zoom calls:

• Position your camera at eye-level
• Position yourself in front of the window
• Join from a quiet, well-carpeted room
• Create a ‘less is more,’ clutter-free, tidy background
• Look in the camera, not at yourself
• Wear neutral colors that suit your complexion and contrast with the background

Ready to look great and be confident on your video calls?

When you’re ready to level up or if you’re already doing virtual events, create a dedicated studio for a consistent setup. Use the right video conferencing equipment (no, you don’t need a big budget for that). And don’t forget to invest in a reliable video streaming software that has your back at all times.

In the past few years, remote work has become ubiquitous. Organizations have tested different ways to keep teams connected and empowered with tools and processes to do their best work.

But it hasn’t always been easy for employees. A typical day of remote work might include wading a flood of messages across channels, training a new hire, providing feedback on a project, and scheduling time for deep work in the midst of meeting marathons and at-home priorities.

It can be hard to stay engaged and productive in a disconnected world. So the big question is, how do you set your employees up for success in a remote and distributed world? 

We talked with Vimeo’s Chief People Officer, Crystal Boysen, to get her perspective on how Vimeo approaches remote work today. If you’re just starting your enterprise-scale remote journey, we have a quick primer on remote work along with recommendations on how to foster an inclusive and collaborative environment with video.

What is remote work?

A remote-first workplace allows employees to carry out their roles from outside a company office. Remote companies might ask some employees to come into the office (depending on their role), but allow flexibility for others.

Before 2020, remote work was often limited to freelancers, small business owners, or the rare digital nomad. However, that has changed in the past few years with over 45% of full-time employees in the United States working from home at least part of the time in 2021 according to Gallup research. And now that offices are re-opening, those same employees don’t want to go back: according to a Gallup poll, 9 in 10 remote workers want to remain at least partially remote going forward.

Vimeo operated remotely for over two years, and now, as organizations reopen our offices, Vimeo will be embracing a hybrid model. Certain staff (such as office facilities managers, receptionists, and IT support) come into the office full-time, whereas others will remain 100% remote. Close to half of our staff plan to take on hybrid or flex roles, where they can come into the office as often as they’d like, but there aren’t any dedicated days they need to come in. They simply get the flexibility to work the way that they work best.

Of course, since Vimeo’s team has both remote and hybrid employees, our workspace still remains 100% remote-first.

How to build a remote work culture

1. Audit your existing work processes

The first step to build a remote work culture is to take a good, hard look at your current systems and processes. Ask yourself:

• What do your company’s decision-making structures look like? 
• How are teams held accountable to goals? 
• How are individuals celebrated? 
• How do you keep information flowing across the entire company? 
• Where can employees go to find the details that they need?

In many ways, making a sudden shift to remote working can expose deficiencies in your organizational processes. Fortunately, once you’ve explored how every system in your company operates, you can identify gaps to work on.

For example, your organization might find that going remote helps teams build better organizational documentation and using consistent decision-making processes.

2. Set up rules of engagement

Great cultures don’t happen accidentally, so make sure to take the time to outline and communicate what you want your remote work culture to look like. At Vimeo, we really prize flexibility and inclusion, so we’ve set up rules of engagement that reflect that.

In terms of flexibility, Boysen says, Vimeo created both hybrid and remote roles that let employees work the way that they do best. In surveys, employees said they enjoy things like extra time in the morning to spend with family or getting children ready for school. Being able to skip their daily commute increased their mental health. And since it’s important at Vimeo that employees feel good as human beings, not just employees, that flexibility became really important to our remote work culture.

Inclusion is also built into our rules of engagement. In a hybrid environment, it can be easy for remote workers to feel like second-class citizens, so setting rules that make sure everyone feels valued and included is important.

For instance, if there’s a meeting of any type, all in-office employees should consider joining a video call on their laptops, from separate rooms. This helps ensure that remote employees don’t feel left out of group conversations.

Because remote work can so easily bleed into people’s home lives, it’s also helpful to set rules that help employees create boundaries around work. That might mean company-wide, meeting-free afternoons to combat Zoom fatigue and let people focus on their work. Employees can also set their calendars so that all meetings end 10 minutes before the hour, so that no one gets stuck in back-to-back meetings.

3. Invest in tools that support remote collaboration

To work well from a distance, employees need to be able to collaborate with one another just as easily from home as they do in the office. That requires specialized tools that promote intentional communication.

For easy communication day-to-day, Vimeo uses Vimeo Record to record videos and screengrabs for coworkers and clients, and we store and organize all of our videos (including town halls, employee trainings, and team meetings) in our video library. This allows teams to better communicate asynchronously to keep everyone up-to-date. 

For other collaboration across teams, Vimeo uses a chat app (Slack) and a video call provider (Zoom). We use an online whiteboard app, Miro, that allows teams to brainstorm and collaborate on projects asynchronously. We’ve also invested in a platform that allows us to share our goals, objectives, and key results. That way, we can all align on our priorities and make sure we’re working towards the same goals.

4. Increase your focus on communication

So much communication happens throughout the workday in an office, and it’s really important not to lose that when you go remote. It might not be very sexy or cool, but upping your asynchronous communication and documentation game is essential when building a remote culture.

When Vimeo first went remote, it was important to increase the frequency of our communication in order to avoid falling into siloes, so we started running our virtual all-hands meetings — which we call “State of the Vimeo” — more often. This helped ensure that everyone was consistently on the same page. We also made sure to keep the content engaging and interactive by using our live streaming feature and allowing employees to respond with emojis, cheers, and questions and comments throughout the meetings.

Of course, on the other side of communication is documentation: we also realized we needed to become really good at documenting everything, from our meeting minutes to project updates to decisions made. So we overhauled our intranet site and made it easy for everyone to find and access the information they needed.

As an example, Vimeo brought on the first internal communications hire during COVID-19. With teams far more dispersed than they’d been before, it’s important to have dedicated resources to ensure information flows freely between departments and over 1,000 employees.

5. Train leaders to manage teams remotely

What we’ve learned is that managing remotely requires different skills than managing teams in-person. When we first moved to a remote work culture, some of our managers struggled with the transition, and we realized we needed to do more to support them.

To help leaders become better remote managers, start by thinking through what you want your remote environment to look like, and then provide support for people managers to reach that level of success. For us, that meant providing training and building out a hybrid work playbook for your team leaders and managers.

A playbook can touch on all aspects of managing a team remotely — including how to set a good example of setting communication boundaries, how to run effective meetings remotely, and what proper email etiquette looks like.

6. Prioritize connection and collaboration

When Vimeo polled their employees after moving to a remote work culture, the number one thing that they said they missed was a sense of connection to their colleagues. The personal connection and community that you can foster fairly organically at the office requires much more intentionality when everyone is remote.

For Vimeo, that meant finding ways to proactively bring folks together. There were lots of ideas on fostering new ways to spark connection remotely, including:

• Launching a #CoffeeDate channel in our Slack, which pairs coworkers once a month for 30-minute, virtual coffee dates. 
• Creating a #ShoutOut channel in Slack where employees can give kudos to anyone in the organization.
• Giving teams budgets for online team-building activities, such as trivia nights or art classes.
• Having new hires create short videos introducing themselves that are then shared out to the entire organization.

Create an engaged, inclusive, and flexible remote culture

If you’ve traditionally operated as an in-office work culture, it can be challenging to shift to a remote-first work model. However, with intentionality and dedication, you can build an environment that supports all of your employees — no matter where they log in.

Discover how to improve employee communications for your remote team

Employees have settled into the flexibility of working from home — and over 90% of them don’t want to go back. In fact, 39% of Americans would consider quitting their jobs if their employers asked them to return to the office full-time.

Surprisingly, employees don’t want to work from home full-time, either. What’s emerged after two years of remote working is that employees want flexibility — including the ability to choose where they work. Today, 59% of Americans say they’d prefer working in a hybrid environment, where they can alternate between working from home or the office.

Clearly, the future of work is flexible, but there’s more to building a successful hybrid environment than simply calling yourself “hybrid” and calling it a day. We talked with Vimeo’s Chief People Officer, Crystal Boysen, to get her perspective on how large-scale organizations can set up a hybrid environment that fosters connectivity and better employee communication for every team member.

What is hybrid work?

Hybrid work is a type of flexible environment that combines in-office and remote working for employees. It stands apart from remote-first or office-first environments where teams are either completely dispersed or together in a dedicated workspace. Video, project management tools, chat and collaboration tools, and other resources help connect hybrid employees so they primarily share a digital workspace.

Flexible work environments empower employees to choose where they deliver their best work. It can improve their commute times and work-life balance. It also benefits companies by expanding the potential talent pool while helping reduce carbon emissions.

However, the term “hybrid work” comes with variations. Some organizations may have a mix of fully in-office and fully remote employees, while others may ask all employees to come into the office a couple of times a week.

What are the most common hybrid work models?

When we talk about hybrid work models, it’s important to be clear about what we mean. One company’s definition of a “hybrid” workplace will differ from another’s. Most hybrid work models, though, fall into one of the categories below.

An office-first hybrid work model

In an office-first model, employees are expected to come into the office most of the time, but they can each choose a day or two to work from home. This approach ensures that employees work together in-person most of the time, while still providing employees with some flexibility to their schedule.

A flexible hybrid work model

This is often the model people think of when they think of a “hybrid” approach to work. In a flexible hybrid model, it’s entirely up to employees to choose where they work from on any given day. Companies that adopt flex models will often downsize their office spaces and adopt hot desks, where employees can choose to work from any open desk for the day.

A fixed hybrid work model

In a fixed hybrid model, employees need to come into the office on set days and times. For instance, the sales team might be required to come in on Mondays and Thursdays, while the marketing team meets Wednesdays and Fridays. Compared to a flexible hybrid work model, this option allows companies to forecast how many employees they’ll have on site each day.

A remote-first hybrid work model

In a remote-first model, employees will primarily work from home, but they’ll be expected to join the office for the occasional event — such as an all-hands meeting, team-building events, customer meetings, or training. If employees live outside of office hubs, they may be flown into the office to join for onboarding, training, and special events.

A hybrid-remote work model

In a hybrid-remote model, different rules apply to different teams. Depending on their roles, one subset of employees will work from the office, another subset will be completely remote, while yet another category has the flexibility to choose where they work.

A hybrid work model in action

As an example, let’s take a look at Vimeo’s own hybrid work model, which can be categorized as a hybrid-remote model.

Pre-pandemic, Vimeo had a traditional, in-office culture. But today, we’ve embraced a hybrid-remote mix made up of three distinct types of roles:

In-office

Some roles require employees to be in office daily in order to carry out their roles effectively, so they’re 100% in-office. This includes office facilities managers, receptionists, some IT support roles, and a few sales roles.

Fully remote

If employees don’t need to be at the office to carry out their role, then they can choose to operate 100% remotely.

Hybrid or “flex” mode

If employees live near one of Vimeo’s global hubs, they can choose to come into the office as often as they’d like — with zero expectation for them to be there. They can come and go as they please.

“Over the last few years, we heard loud and clear from our employees that flexibility was the thing they cared about most,” Boysen says. “We’ve become a lot more intentional about how we approach working.”

7 tips to build and implement a hybrid work model

Think through your company and your employee needs

There are a number of ways to structure a hybrid work model. To decide which works best for your company, think through the various roles employees hold and how amenable they are to remote work. You might find that a remote-first hybrid model works well for your company, or a fixed hybrid model is better suited to accommodate ongoing, in-person needs.

Then, talk to your employees about what work models they prefer. At Vimeo, Boysen and her team surveyed employees multiple times to understand their needs and desires.

“Folks said that, number one, they wanted more flexibility, but at the same time, they missed that collaboration and connection that happens in person,” says Boysen. That led to the creation of the “flex” role that allows for hybrid working.

Once you understand everyone’s needs, you can get started on building a hybrid environment that aligns with folks’ needs and values.

Invest in a virtual workspace

In any type of hybrid environment, it’s critical that employees carry out their work in a virtual workspace. Even if some employees work on-site, all of your information and communication needs to live online, so that remote and hybrid employees remain connected and informed.To get started, here are a few basic tools you’ll want to consider:

• A video provider. Video for employee communications is a key component for a lot of touchpoints in a hybrid environment, including: collaborative work managed in real-time or async, executive communications, training and onboarding, internal and external events, as well as client communications.
• A knowledge management system. No matter where they’re working from, employees need to have a go-to place where they can find the resources they need — from meeting minutes to sales assets to customer FAQs.
• A project management tool. This can not only keep teams organized, but it can help managers understand their team members’ capacities to prevent burnout.
• A chat app. Carry out any non-sensitive, work-related conversations in public channels. Better communication helps employees synthesize what’s going on behind the scenes of different projects and deals, which helps reduce the chance of siloes developing in your hybrid organization.

Boysen also recommends investing in tools that allow employees to brainstorm remotely, track objectives and key results, and connect socially. For more ideas on remote tools for your team, check out our top tools for remote work.

Train managers to lead remotely

When the pandemic hit in 2020, people managers suddenly had to manage their teams in an entirely new way: they couldn’t gauge employees’ emotions or energy levels by walking around the room, they lost the ability to gather their teams, and many weren’t used to tracking work progress remotely.

“Providing training and education for managers on remote working is so important, because it does require a very different leadership and management style,” says Boysen. 

“Managers that may have been really effective in an office setting might struggle in a dispersed environment. So it’s essential to create a support system around managers to help them lead in a really different way.”

At Vimeo, Boysen’s team recognized the need and created a playbook for team leaders. The guide walks managers through all aspects of managing a team remotely, including how to lead effective remote 1:1s, encourage team members to set digital communication boundaries, and proactively foster a sense of connection from afar.

Don’t just stop at a playbook, either. Get feedback from managers on the people management skills that they’re struggling with, and then provide education and training to help them adapt.

Communicate often — and always online

With a distributed workforce, the need for clear and frequent communication increases. Boysen recommends dialing up the frequency of all-hands meetings to ensure everyone is kept in the loop on different projects and initiatives.

“We increased the frequency of our kind of global communication, so people could get on the same page more consistently,” she says. “There’s a need to get better information on a more frequent basis out to your employee base.”

Use a video events platform like Vimeo Enterprise to produce all-hands, team meetings, or training. To keep employees engaged and combat Zoom fatigue, make sure to make meetings interactive, with Q&As, polls, and the ability for the audience to ask questions and chat.

Keep things documented

When your employees are working primarily in a virtual workspace, it’s important for everything to be recorded and easy to find. That means using a knowledge management system, document storage, and video library, and keeping everything up to date and easy to navigate.

If an employee is looking for a certain sales asset or needs to rewatch the most recent update from the product management team, they should know exactly where to go — and be able to find everything they need. 

A good example is how our sales enablement team at Vimeo has organized their content: within their Video Library, Vimeo sales people can search for trainings, sales assets, and case studies by content type, product, use case, or persona.

Make hybrid working an even playing field

In the past, in traditional in-office environments, it was easy for remote or hybrid employees to feel like “second-class citizens,” says Boysen. If there was an in-office meeting, for instance, remote workers might be relegated to watching the all-hands from someone’s laptop camera in the back of the room. An “out of sight, out of mind” philosophy meant remote workers might be passed up for well-deserved promotions.

“One of the strongest guiding principles we have at Vimeo is we want to create an inclusive environment — and that means inclusive of all work modes,” Boysen says. “That means coming to the table with some guidelines of what you want to be in a hybrid environment.”

To make sure all employees feel equally supported, included, and valued, set guardrails around your hybrid culture. For instance, if there’s a team meeting where even one participant will be remote, every person on the call should go into separate rooms to join the video call. This ensures that the remote worker doesn’t feel excluded or miss anyone’s contributions.

Don’t forget about the fun

While making fun intentional doesn’t sound very fun, it’s a necessary part of fostering connection in a hybrid environment.

“In hindsight, one thing I wish we had done earlier was invest in recreating in-person connections online,” Boysen says. “In a hybrid environment, you have to be more proactive about setting aside time for water-cooler chit-chat and getting to know people, because people tend to just jump right into work.”

Fortunately, there are some great ways that you can foster connection from a distance:

• Have new employees record short videos introducing themselves, and then share them across the entire organization.
• Don’t just throw events in-office. Give teams budgets for online team-building activities, like trivia, a remote escape room, or a wine- and cheese-tasting.
• Create new Slack channels that encourage sharing kudos, stories outside of work, and casual chats over hobbies.
• Pair employees up for mentoring or coffee chats once a month.
• Open team meetings with ice-breakers instead of diving straight into work.

6 ways to leverage video to connect a hybrid workforce

Hybrid work is an exercise in constant learning and refinement as organizations experiment, calibrate, and adapt to foster collaboration and productivity. As companies start to roll out and refine strategies, video will be key for hybrid success. Check out ways you can start using video to power every hybrid employee.

1. Provide full onboarding resources with an internal video library

An internal video library can help teams streamline communication and centralize important knowledge. A central knowledge base is critical not only for current employees but for new hires who need to train and skill-up for success in a hybrid and remote world.

Make sure you have the resources to produce training live and on-demand for easy employee access. Blend on-demand training videos with in-person and live working sessions to help new hires absorb information and get help from senior team members.

2. Celebrate employee milestones with video

Whether you’re welcoming a new hire or celebrating a team win — video is a perfect way to connect. We’ve got a couple examples of how to use Vimeo Create to celebrate a milestone.

Welcome a new hire

Bring in all the good energy for an employee’s first day with a personalized welcome video. Customize the agenda for the day so your new employee knows what to expect!

Here’s an example of a new hire first-day training template:

Spotlight departments, teams, and employees

Teams and employees are working hard to bring projects to fruition. Use video to spotlight their great work and thank them for all their contributions.

Here’s an example of a team appreciation video template:

3. Master the art of asynchronous communication

Asynchronous communication can help distributed teams collaborate and complete projects without the need for real-time communication. Leverage tools like Vimeo record, Slack, or Asana (just to name a few) to help teams meet asynchronously.

Here are three examples of how to power hybrid communication with video:

• Try sending a screen record to asynchronously share Google or PowerPoint presentations, project kickoffs, or share a product demo to your internal team in lieu of scheduling a meeting.
• Need eyes on an important email? Leverage video email to engage employees while distilling important information.
• Host important video content in folders based on teams, projects, or topics for easy access.

4. Connect with employees using a live streaming town hall or all-hands meeting

Employee engagement can be especially difficult to sustain in a remote environment. Executives and communications team should consider live streaming video to connect with employees and communicate company-wide updates, spotlight projects, and recognize employees for their work.

5. Organize calendars for collaboration and deep-work

Time management is key to a productive and sustainable work environment. Encourage employees to build a schedule that offers time for video meetings and calls, in-person collaboration and team building, and quiet focus time. For larger internal events where multiple employees converge, like a sales kick off, virtual event, or summit, consider how to bring the team together for a hybrid event experience.

6. Stay flexible and focus on impact

A successful hybrid work environment can empower employees to choose when and where they do their best work, provide more opportunities to attract and recruit talent, and prioritize a healthy and safe working environment. However, it’s important to note that hybrid isn’t a one-size-fits all solution.

Each organization will need to implement and refine their hybrid strategy with clear goals and the openness for change. As Cal Newport mentioned in his recent New Yorker article, “the very definition of “work” itself, moving it away from surveillance and visible busyness, and toward defined outcomes and trust.” To make hybrid work, organizations will need to focus on how to empower employees to deliver outcomes wherever they plan to work.

Stay flexible with hybrid work

One of the most important parts of building a connected and engaged hybrid work environment? Stay flexible, says Boysen. Building a strong culture takes consistent work, and you should continuously be asking employees for feedback. Over time — and with plenty of on screen time — you’ll find teams can work together seamlessly, whether that’s from home or in the office.

Keep your workplace connected with video

Originally written by Bianca Galvez in July 2021 and updated by Kenza Moller on Oct 4, 2022.

The average business in the US loses $47 million (!) per year in productivity due to insufficient knowledge sharing.

Overlooking company-wide knowledge kept with individual employees (technically known as institutional knowledge) can take a toll on employee performance and motivation.

If you’re serious about preserving institutional knowledge, you’ll find this guide helpful. We’ll cover the basics of what institutional knowledge is and lay out steps to start retaining it.

What is institutional knowledge?

Institutional knowledge is the collective knowledge of a company’s employees including information on workflows, processes, best practices learned over years of projects.

Think of it as an organization’s collective memory.

As employees retire or take on other jobs, they take their experiences, expertise, and lessons learned over the job with them — leaving nothing with the company.

Institutional knowledge is the sum of employee insights, experiences, information, and context that preserves a company’s memory center.

What institutional knowledge does though is that it preserves this collective employee memories, so the company develops its own memory center.

4 ways institutional knowledge positively impacts business

Besides serving as a company’s memory center over the years, institutional knowledge helps improve productivity, employee performance, and more.

Let’s look at these benefits of storing and using institutional knowledge:

1. Improves company processes, efficiency, and accessibility

Easily and quickly accessing preserved information helps you improve a team onboarding process, employee trainings, and customer education.

Panopto’s research reveals employees spend 5.3 hours per week sourcing information from their colleagues. 60% of them also say it’s difficult, nearly difficult, or nearly impossible to get project-required information from colleagues.

Thankfully, institutional knowledge decentralizes information, making it available and accessible for everyone. This is particularly useful for remote companies where employees work at their own pace in different time zones.

2. Boosts employee job satisfaction and performance

An institutional knowledge bank reduces the unnecessary back and forth needed to obtain information, leaving employees with more room for focused work.

The free information flow — otherwise lost to team silos — also empowers employees with the data they need to do their job, improving performance.Not to mention, institutional knowledge sharing also reduces the frustration that 81% of employees experience when they can’t access information they need to do get their job done.

3. Improves company productivity and bottom line

New hires spend 200 hours on average trying to find lost information or attempting to recreate processes. That’s lost productivity and efficiency.

To add, inefficient knowledge sharing contributes revenue losses between $2.7 million to $265 million depending on a business’s size. Better knowledge sharing practices can help organizations reduce the time new hires spend searching for necessary information to do their jobs.

4. Creates a culture of learning

As more and more employees get in the habit of documenting their processes, workflows, and work principles, they can trade information to optimize processes.

Taking the time to create info-sharing documents and videos also gives employees the chance to reflect on their learnings, identifying gaps in it.

5 ways to retain, share, and scale institutional knowledge

Creating a company-wide knowledge hub can seem like a daunting task — especially if you’re only just realizing you need to document things. But it’s nothing that having a defined process and invested employees can’t solve.

1. Leverage internal subject matter experts

Leverage employees to deliver knowledge-sharing workshops and create short courses.

For example, Trello hosts Coffee Talks on Friday afternoons where peers share their knowledge in 30-60 min long presentations.Request department heads and managers to ask their teams who they’d like to learn from and about what. Then plan fortnightly or monthly workshops — live stream them if you’re a remote company.

Bonus points for recording sessions as it preserves content, making them available in the long haul.

2. Build an internal intranet or wiki

An intranet site is a private website an organization creates for company-wide community, collaboration, and knowledge sharing.

You can also create a wiki-style knowledge playbook in a knowledge management tool such as Notion. It lets you format pages the way you prefer. You can also easily embed training videos and screenshots.

Pro tip: If you’re a small team and unsure where to start, comb through the more frequent questions your team asks you and document the answers.

3. Create a video library to host all your trainings, town halls, product information

A video library is a central home for all your knowledge-sharing videos so employees can easily access them anytime. From the peer-to-peer presentation videos to internal experts’ workshops and town halls, make sure you add all video content to your library.

You don’t have to create new content for this library — although using Vimeo’s Video Library, you can record new videos within the video hub too. Add the following:

• Peer-to-peer presentation videos, internal experts workshops, and town halls
• Edited, screen-recorded videos created for individual employees but containing information that’s useful for others too

For one, Vimeo lets you organize video content in workplaces and subfolders. Take it from the team at Axalta that uses the Video Library for knowledge sharing. Their Virtual Training Manager, Steve Hamaday, shares:

“The subfolder and folder organization is extremely useful when organizing our content, whether it’s external-facing, or just for our team on the back end. This has made it so much easier for our team to collaborate, organize, and minimize the time searching for assets.”

Secondly, it automatically transcribes the videos so staff can search for videos by captions by typing in whatever words they remember in the search box.4. Build documentation of new processes a part of your team’s workflow

4. Build documentation of new processes a part of your team’s workflow

Teams won’t get in the habit of documenting their processes overnight. Two things that help though:

• Get employees on board by sharing the benefits of knowledge sharing for them. Highlight how it’ll help them save time and increase productivity — even grow their own knowledge in the process.

• Get employees involved. Instead of sharing a set of steps to take, collaborate with them on the best way to build a process for documentation. Suggest tools and take recommendations. Share examples of how others are doing it. And source feedback on which format(s) they’d prefer to document their processes in.

Once you’ve taken all suggestions, distill down to an efficient documentation process and record a guide sharing it. Identify:

• Who will be responsible for what?
• What tools will employees use for documentation?
• What makes an idea suitable for documentation?

Share quality-boosting best practices as well. For example, advise employees to keep their training videos to 5-mins long. If they’re creating long videos, ask them to add video chapters.

Pro tip: Encourage employees to pencil in time to document their processes, work principles, and best practices. Without scheduling time, they’ll likely keep pushing the project down their priority list.

5. Create a workflow

You also need a documentation workflow on top of the process, tools, and examples. This should outline the stages the content will pass through from production to its addition to your knowledge share central hub.

Here’s an example workflow:

• Ideation. Work out ideas and processes to document
• Outlining. Pre-plan what to share in each video/document before creating
• Create. Record the raw material — video or text, whatever format suits the idea
• Edit. Either work with an editor or pass it on to a dedicated team with a brief sharing the creator’s ideas for improving the content’s brevity, readability, and usability.

Build your library of institutional knowledge

To recap, preserving institutional knowledge helps improve company-wide processes. It also boosts employee motivation, performance, and productivity levels.

Before you start retaining and storing knowledge, make sure you:

• Identify the tools to use for documentation and pick out a central library to host all institutional knowledge.
• Audit prevailing content to identify videos and previously shared feedback notes that is worth editing and adding to your internal knowledge center.
• Create a production workflow and lay out a process to standardize creating easy-to-digest documentation.

And if you’re looking for a home for all those videos that you create, we recommend you take Video Library for a spin.

Unlock knowledge with video library