Revolutionize knowledge sharing with employee-generated video

This article was originally published in the April issue of Training and Development Excellence Essentials on HR.com.

Employee-generated video can help to unlock the knowledge trapped in the minds of your busy SMEs.

Valuable institutional knowledge is spread throughout an organization. From key executives and managers to front-line workers, everyone has useful information and expertise to share. The question is, how do you capture and package this knowledge and make it easily available to the rest of the organization?

You can’t afford not to distribute best practices across your organization; but you also can’t afford to have your best employees taking too much time away from their primary responsibilities to host live training sessions or write up lengthy documentation.

On the surface, video feels like a more difficult and time-intensive investment. You see visions of studios, expensive cameras, and complicated editing software, and that seems more than a little daunting. But I’ll tell you a secret that we, at uStudio, tell our customers all the time:

The greater the utility of the content, the lower the production value needs to be.

Think about it. If every sales rep in an organization needs to know how to properly document a closed deal, what difference does it make if they watch a highly produced tutorial or an unedited screen recording? The answer is: not much.

Once people get over the fear of hearing their voice and seeing their face on video, employee-generated videos take much less time to create than well-written content. A sales ops team member could take two minutes to record herself walking through a product demo, or spend 30 minutes to an hour assembling a document that explains the same thing.

So, what do you need to get started with employee-generated video inside your organization?

1. Make sure employees have what they need to easily create videos
   • Smartphones and smartphone stands to record live action videos
   • Screen recording software for screen-based tutorials
2. Make it easy for employees to share their videos
   • Desktop and mobile access to upload their videos into the company’s video management platform (video files are typically too large to email)
   • Bonus points for the ability to upload any video file type (.mov, .mp4, etc.)
3. Make it easy for the learning department to review and publish videos
   • Employ a video management platform where employees can upload employee-generated videos “for review” and have the platform notify reviewers
   • Utilize a drag-and-drop style publishing workflow so reviewers can drag approved videos to their final destination
4. Make it easy for employees to watch and engage with videos
   • Create a secure video learning portal or add a video learning section to an existing portal
     • Make videos searchable by title, creator, tags and other metadata
     • Enable social interactions (likes, comments, shares) that allow content to go viral internally
     • Make the portal mobile-friendly to encourage people to consume content on the go
     • Utilize video analytics to keep tabs on who’s watching what

Once you have the operational infrastructure in place, you can start having more fun with it. We’ve seen customers create video wish lists and introduce elements of gamification to increase employee motivation and engagement. Team members can be awarded points for contributing video tutorials and best practices to increase their leaderboard rank. Or maybe introduce a contest to see who can create the most liked or most watched video. The sky’s the limit.

By utilizing employee-generated video to share knowledge within your organization, you’re reinforcing organizational alignment, emphasizing individual impact, and encouraging peer sharing while increasing your organizational IQ.

Learn more about how uStudio powers innovative video learning strategies >>