Perhaps you have considered videos for marketing, but did you know your teams can also be strengthened through video? As evidence suggests, using video will not only help coordinate and connect departments that are usually separated, but they can also improve your ROI, mainly if you take the leap and become one of the first businesses to use video for team building!

Read on to learn how video can dynamically work to transfer your business culture, coordinate employees in different departments, enable professional growth in novel ways, and overall strengthen your company's team.

1. Transfer Company Culture

Your business culture tells a complex story that is difficult to convey to new employees over time. In fact, the longer your company has been established, the more involved the story becomes! Video enables you to capture the unique picture of your company's culture. It can help you:

• Bring teams up to speed

• Transfer legacy team knowledge

• Reduce onboarding time

Video can highlight the varying perspectives from different departments and be used to bring employees up to speed or reveal comprehensive snapshots of your business' trajectory. Similarly, video can easily allow you to infuse your current teams with legacy knowledge from the past. Video also has the incredible ability to reduce the training time needed for new hires.

Give it a shot! When recording your culture videos, play with different formats. Document team meetings or project deliveries for first-hand takes, screenshots of software for training, interview employees for rich insights, or try a combination of the above by creating a video montage. Check out these culture videos for more inspiration!

2. Differentiated Professional Growth

When it comes to training your team, research suggests that the more individualized the process, the more meaningful the outcome will be. Video instruction has numerous benefits, including:

• One on one learning

• Standardized curriculum

• Ability to reference in the future

The ability of video training to enable your employees to learn in a one-on-one style is priceless. Prerecorded content can be given to new recruits for them to learn at their pace. The material would be standardized without the hassle of leaving out important material until a mistake down the line necessitates the instruction. And because video can be played back as often as needed, it works as a terrific reference tool when a new employee is taking on tasks in real-time and wants to verify their understanding.

Give it a shot! There are many ways to leverage video for professional development. Try using it for virtual coaching, self-learning for employee promotion tracks, or leverage team collaboration outcomes.

3. Business Track Record

While most companies know that videos can share information, some companies miss out on the insights videos can give to the content creators. Video analytics can provide:

• A measure of reach and retention

• The ability to refine training the curriculum over time

Video analytics available through YouTube, Vimeo, or other CRM platforms are a means for your business to measure your team's engagement. Is 100 percent of your team up to speed on the latest training requirements? Were there areas in the training that frequently resulted in pausing or drop-offs? This information can help you better understand your team's abilities and also help to refine onboarding techniques.

Give it a shot! Try creating a video tutorial for team collaboration. Shoot a brief perspective of each team and then share. Ask your employees for feedback on their new understanding. Look at the engagement numbers and the personnel feedback and brainstorm how you might refine future video curriculum, whether by making it shorter, more or less informative, etc.

4. Team Building ROI

Team building is an investment in your business and its future. For many companies, it's an upfront cost without a measurable return on investment. However, team-building with videos can enable you to:

• Invest upfront but continuously reap the benefit

• Analyze learning material in relation to team growth

Rather than continue to invest in printed materials, personnel trainers, or dedicated office space, the use of videos for onboarding and professional development exercises requires an initial investment that can be reused over time. Plus, your ability to compare engagement and retention to real-life outcomes such as performance and company growth will provide a complete look at your business' return on its investment. Team building with video is an upfront cost that saves time and makes money in the long run. The result is an additional avenue to achieve an ROI for your business.

Give it a shot! Try creating a fun team-building video that highlights a problem and then invites employees to brainstorm and share possible solutions. Take a closer look at the numbers and measure every stage of the initiative, from the engagement training video to ideas submitted and ultimate outcomes.

5. First Mover Advantage 

The early bird gets the worm, or so the saying goes. Because team building through video is still uncharted territory, it offers a novel way for your brand to get noticed. Here's how to take advantage:

• Don't overthink your videos

• Share videos outside of your company to gain recognition

The few companies using video for their team building programs are gaining recognition, such as T-Mobile's Magenta program, where employees can participate in training and professional development through self-driven video technology. Excitingly T-Mobile won an award for undertaking this cutting-edge approach to team growth.

Yet, to become a first mover, you have to move! Don't aim for perfection, as videos that have been over orchestrated are less likely to connect with viewers. Plus, early adopters are usually forgiven for mistakes and celebrated for their ingenuity and effort. The goal is to progress over time with a tool that will lead to strong ROIs for your business.

Give it a shot! When it comes to having a first-mover advantage, the key is to jump in and get your feet wet! Don't obsess over perfection, but try to refine your team development efforts over time as you gain data and evaluate your efforts.

6. Tips to Get Started

Ready to begin team-building with video today? Keep these strategies in mind when jump-starting your video team-building efforts:

• Learn from others breaking into videos for team building.

• Consider your company's team building needs: recruit training, cross-team collaboration, and professional development.

• Commit to trying a few different video approaches to team building: first-person recordings of teamwork, interviews of employees or customers, screenshots of work in action, or a montage of different formats.

• Analyze the engagement and retention of your videos! Was there 100 percent participation? Did any participant have a lack of clarity or drop-off during the video training exercise?

• Refine your video content and approaches over time, aiming for progress over perfection!

• Measure your business outcomes in relation to video data and track your business ROI.

• Share your efforts outside of your business to raise awareness about your early adoption of team building through video tools.

Click through to learn more about how to successfully set up videos. Are you new to using video for your business? Take advantage of the internet's changing algorithms that give preference to video content and consider more ways of adopting it for your company, such as marketing with video, ad campaigns, clarifying public relations initiatives, and employee recruitment.

Whether you're new to video or already using it, contact Tabrizi for insights on how to create and optimize videos for your business! Each company has a unique story that can lend itself to both new as well as proven video strategies, and the Tabrizi team is ready to help you navigate this fast-growing tool.

Final Thoughts

Team building is underdeveloped for most companies with outdated practices or none at all. Video offers a unique approach to team-building with many incredible benefits, including:

• Bringing teams up to speed

• Transferring legacy team knowledge

• Reducing onboarding time

• Providing one on one learning

• Standardizing curriculum

• Providing the ability to reference it in the future

• Offering a measure of reach and retention

• Enabling the refinement of the training curriculum over time

• Investing upfront but continuously reaping the benefits

Team building with video is a novel way to transfer an understanding of your company culture to new hires across time. It's a strategy that offers economical training and professional development that provides data for further curriculum refinement. The use of video for team building requires upfront costs, but the potential to save time and money over time results in a measurable ROI for your business.

If your business is already using video for other purposes, such as marketing, consider adding team development content to your video plans. Whether you're new or experienced at video integration for your business, I'm thrilled to help bring your video ideas into reality. 

Tabrizi Productions would love to help you build your video marketing strategy. Tabrizi Productions is a boutique video production company with a mission to make video accessible for all. We offer authentic, affordable video storytelling for companies large and small.

We are locally serving Oakland, Palo Alto, Santa Clara, San Francisco, San Jose, San Mateo, and the surroundings of the Silicon Valley area. Sound like a fit? Fill out this form to schedule a free consultation.