Post Pandemic Learning Engagement Roadmap for 2023 and beyond.


When the pandemic first hit, many organizations were scrambling to figure out how to keep their employees learning and developing despite the disruptions. Many turned to online videos as a way to keep employees engaged in learning.

Now that we’re starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel, it’s time to take a look at how we can learn and develop in the post-pandemic world. Here are a few ideas:

1. Use videos to deliver just-in-time training.

In the past, employees might have been sent to off-site training courses that were expensive and time-consuming. With videos, you can provide employees with training on demand, whenever they need it. This is especially helpful for employees who are working remotely.

2. Create microlearning videos.

With attention spans shorter than ever, it’s important to keep learning videos short and to the point. Microlearning videos are a great way to do this. They can be used to deliver bite-sized pieces of information that employees can easily digest.

3. Make use of video analytics.

With video analytics, you can track who is watching your videos and how long they are watching for. This information can be used to improve the content of your videos and ensure that employees are getting the most out of them.

4. Use videos to promote social learning.

Videos can be used to facilitate social learning, which is when employees learn from each other. This can be done by creating videos that show employees working together to solve problems or by sharing video testimonials from employees about their experiences with a certain product or service.

5. Use videos to create a learning community.

A learning community is a group of employees who share a common interest in learning. You can use videos to create a learning community by sharing videos that employees can discuss and provide feedback on. This is a great way to create an environment where employees can learn from and support each other.

CircleHD is the perfect enterprise video learning platform for businesses who want to provide their employees with the best possible learning and development opportunities. Our platform is easy to use and provides access to a wide range of video content that can be used for training, development, and education purposes. We also offer a variety of features that make our platform the perfect solution for businesses of all sizes.

If you’d like to learn more about how CircleHD can help support your sales training and team enablement efforts, we’d love to speak with you. Get in touch here.



Welcome to CircleHD’s New UI Design

At CircleHD, we continue to invest in the innovation of workplace video and podcasting. We are always thriving to enable the media industry with the best use cases and workflows to power everything in an enterprise. Since the day we launched in 2016, we have gone a long way in understanding how enterprises can use media to their fullest in areas of learning and engagement, and empower their employees by having all information available to them quickly and easily.

Our UX design has gone through series of usability analysis to understand user’s unique preferences and patterns. And Our steady vision of simplifying user experience for smart learning and engagement has helped many customers succeed in all scenarios, may it be pandemic, work from home, remote or distributed global teams.  

This journey of continuous improvement wouldn’t have been possible without support from our large successful customer base. We thank all our Customers for putting their trust in our platform and allow us to contribute in meeting their goals of smart learning and engagement.

What’s new?

  1. New Responsive UI Design
    CircleHD believes that if an application design is simple, you don’t need to train anyone on how to use it. Simplicity is hard to achieve, and we have put a lot of efforts automating many scenarios in our platform, so each user can focus on their main requirement of creating, sharing, consuming and analyzing. The new UI breaks down the inactive and active components in a way that user can get to his content quickly with some personalized experience. User can also personalize between dark mode and light mode view, as per his preference.

  2. Powerful Performance for any bandwidth and device
    CircleHDs application has been highly performant from day one, we still feel we can do more. This constant push has allowed us to keep improving the application performance on all types of devices and bandwidths and given users the best possible experience in terms of speed, availability and reduced latency.

  3. Enterprise Podcasting Taken to the next level
    CircleHD is proud to be the first company that has successfully launched a podcasting solution that works with video and audio both at the same time. This is a big innovation step for CircleHD by using the full potential of active and passive employee engagement and leading the space of smart effective learning and engagement. Executives and Enterprises can share their messages and announcements with employees and also get statistics on its engagement.

  4. “Wizy” – AI based Smart Learning Platform
    In this release, CircleHD announces it latest Smart Learning Platform “Wizy” which will serve as the easiest platform to use for internal employee learning and external Partner or Customer Training. Not only is the platform simple to use for end users, but it’s equally simple and quick to create a new course or record a training video and make it available to all required teams or employees in no time, on any device. Wizy has been developed after years of pilots done with large enterprises and usability studies across various demographics and regions. This is the answer to all enterprises having distributed teams and want to increase their effectiveness in employee development and training, thus increasing their overall reach and ROI.


How to Engage Your Employees and Salesforce During a Pandemic

There’s no doubt that the spread of novel coronavirus (COVID-19) has turned the world upside down. From quarantined cities to a run on basic hygiene items, school closures, and beyond, it seems there isn’t one person who hasn’t been touched by the outbreak in some way. 

Global tech giants like Twitter, Google, Amazon, and Microsoft have advised their employees to work remotely, a tactic that’s being replicated by companies large and small across the globe. And while telecommuting has steadily been on the rise for the last few years, the pandemic may serve as a trigger for the greatest remote-working experiment ever conducted. 

For some workers, telecommuting can be a logistical nightmare. But it doesn’t have to be. By having the proper tech infrastructure in place, working from home can benefit both employees and employers. 

Setting Up a Tech Infrastructure That Works


The best time to set up a contingency plan is before you need it. Of course, now that the pandemic has drastically escalated over the last week, that time has passed and businesses need to act now. 

The first step to setting up any successful remote collaboration is to ensure your tech stack is up to snuff. You’ll need to figure out which everyday processes can be digitally replicated using the proper tools. For example, Zoom and WebEx, who have made their platform free during this time, are great ways to facilitate face-to-face interactions and meetings without having to be in the same room as your team. Some other programs you may want to consider for use at your company include:

  • Google Docs + Google Drive, which offers real-time collaboration, doc sharing, and storage
  • Slack is a great productivity app that is for just more than chatting. Not only does it cut down on emails, but its endless array of integrations (including with CircleHD) will help your employees keep up with projects and feedback from anywhere. Hot tip: As a distributed team ourselves, we’re also big fans of the Giphy integration, which helps the team express humor and emotions. 
  • Github is the ultimate tool for developers to host their code online. Even if you’re not a developer, it’s a great choice for a company wiki. 
  • Project management apps like Asana and Basecamp work well for remote teams because of all the options available to manage projects and track tasks

Secure Your Communications


Even if you’re using some of the above programs to fuel your organization’s productivity, you’ll also want to make sure you have a central, secure portal where sensitive information can be hosted away from prying eyes and malicious actors. Companies often try to achieve this through a corporate VPN (virtual private network), but they can be notoriously difficult to set up and can add a lot of stress on your team’s network connections. While VPN technology has come a long way, administering various network privileges is a cumbersome chore at best and will likely not provide you with nearly enough protection in the rapidly-changing cyber threat landscape.

Access permissions for content can create additional security concerns for enterprises. After all, you want to be sure that sensitive information isn’t leaked and is only being shared with your intended recipients. You should always train employees on how to detect and handle phishing attacks and confirm any information being stored or shared is encrypted in transit and at rest. 

Since we live in a time when companies need to be extra-vigilant about mitigating cyber threats, superior security protocols are at the heart of what we’ve built at CircleHD. We host your content in the Amazon cloud, which is a SOC-1 security facility so you can rest easy knowing that content is stored responsibly and served only with whom you permit using AES 256-bit encryption.


Engage Your Workforce From Anywhere


Chances are if your team is suddenly distributed, you’re looking for ways to continue to propel employee engagement and foster connections.  Here are a few ways you can use a portal like CircleHD for internal use at your organization:

Provide a central repository for company communications, announcements, and onboarding modules

Whether you make telecommuting a cornerstone of your organization’s work policy, or you’re responding to the coronavirus pandemic by incorporating it for the moment, it’s important to make sure everyone is on the same page and that there is a “single source of truth” for all company information. This can be easily accomplished with a portal where company assets are created, stored, and organized so teams can access them on demand. 

You might be thinking that many organizations have a company intranet that usually serves this purpose, and you’d be correct. However, these legacy systems are increasingly becoming outdated due to irrelevant and outdated content, poor organization, ineffective search capabilities, complicated UX, and a lack of native video support and mission-critical mobile optimizations. So it’s easy to see why an intranet may not be the best business communication tool.

Not only is CircleHD easy to use on desktop, but it’s also incredibly mobile-friendly, with native apps you can share with your team that allows them to access company content from anywhere at any time, even if there’s no wifi connection.

Record, store and share department and all-hands meetings

When teams work remotely, it’s imperative that they communicate more. Whether you’re utilizing on-demand messaging programs like Slack, a web conferencing tool like Zoom, or a platform that allows you to natively record video, adding all of this content into a central location can make it easy to access and refer to at a later date. It also is a great way to give everyone in your organization to attend the meetings at a time that is convenient for them, regardless of timezone or locale. 

Amplify executive to employee communications

In a time of crisis, it’s important that information flow from the top to the workforce as smoothly as possible. Obviously, this can be accomplished through an email or a message that is stored in your hub but seeing a member of the exec team on video can be incredibly powerful. Not only does it lend a human face to the crisis, but it also helps build employee trust and the credibility of the organization. 

The numbers don’t lie: According to a recent study, 76 percent of companies who used video found improved communications among remote employees, while 58 percent of companies found “increased alignment with company and organizational goals.”

Of course, this method is still incredibly effective when you’re not dealing with a pandemic. Video is one of the most effective tools for leaders. The best executive videos aren’t just a way to share what’s going on in the company, they’re a way to call people to action. 

Build an inclusive culture when all employees contribute

According to a recent Gallup poll, only 30 percent of full-time employees in the United States feel engaged or inspired at work. The study continues, “These employees are emotionally disconnected from their companies and may actually be working against their employers’ interests; they are less productive, are more likely to steal from their companies, negatively influence their coworkers, miss workdays, and drive customers away.”

Building a company culture that gets your workers excited should already be top of mind for any organization but the hurdles can seem insurmountable when your team is distributed. How do you encourage engagement when physical presence isn’t possible? After all, video conferencing and chatting to each other can only get you so far.

One solution is to build a video library where all your team members can upload and contribute their own content, such as:

  • Tips the department can use
  • A use case they are working on and how they solved the problem
  • Fun content that shows their office or workspace
  • How they are spending their day

Employees are often a company’s most effective storytellers and an under-utilized content resource. Not only can you build team connections through effective video exercises, but it can also become good fodder for your marketing department to use externally.

Encourage on-the-job training and continuous learning

Coronavirus has upended day-to-day operations for many companies. Even if your team is telecommuting, it’s likely not everything is going to be “business as usual”. For example, if your team relies heavily on calling potential customers, you’re not going to get as much traction if everyone in your target market is also out of the office and not answering their regular phone calls. 

That doesn’t mean all productivity needs to go out the window. Times like this are a great opportunity to reskill your workforce or offer additional learning opportunities. CircleHD helps you quickly put together a complete training module with your existing media.

Don’t have as much information as you’d like and need more content? Our platform has native video and podcast recording capabilities which can help you greatly reduce the time it would take to create courses using a traditional learning management system (LMS).

You can also assess how well knowledge is being retained and understood by creating quizzes and certifications for your workforce. 

Hot tip: Not all training needs to have extreme detail or be comprehensive. Nor is the human brain wired to pay attention for hours on end. Consider creating some bite-sized, or “micro-learning”, content that learners can take at their own pace. 

How to Engage Your Salesforce During a Pandemic


People are currently adapting and taking extra precautions to keep COVID-19 at bay. So too should your reps be flexible and agile at this time. There are several strategies you can employ to cope with the business impact of COVID-19 and keep the sales team functioning properly.

Bring marketing and sales together for better collaboration

If the virus has left you with a little bit of extra time on your hands, it’s a great time to take a step back and think about how your team is collaborating with marketing, and vice versa. Oftentimes, the two teams work in silos which can have some pretty awful effects on your bottom line. Case in point: Hubspot found when sales and marketing teams work together, companies see 36 percent higher customer retention and 38 percent higher sales win rates.

Sounds pretty great, right?  But how can you put that into something that is actionable? We recommend using CircleHD to create a central portal for sales and marketing to share things like:

  • Product demo videos
  • Content that can be shared with clients and prospects
  • Product sheets and updates
  • Notes from prospect and client conversations that can help marketing tailor their messaging in a way that helps sales win more business

    Look for new ways to engage your reps


    While many reps are used to telecommuting in some fashion, you want to make sure you’re taking every step necessary to keep them motivated during this quarantine period. Some content you should consider for your team might include:
  • Share winning stories: It’s not enough to know why a customer’s business was won, it’s also important to discuss how
  • Motivational talks: We’ve heard about leaders in the CircleHD community who do a quick pep-talk every morning to get their team excited about selling and, maybe we’re biased, but we think it’s a brilliant idea
  • Quote of the day: Similar to motivational talks, you can make a short video discussing why this thought is important and how it should inspire your salesforce to do great things
  • Recognition videos to call out reps who are crushing it
  • News and trends happening in your industry that may affect the way sales reps approach certain customers or products
  • A team podcast that reps can access from anywhere 

The good news is that quarantines don’t last forever and these motivational pieces can be used long after the chaos has passed.

Encourage the development of skills and tactics

There’s never been a better time to brush up on your sales skills than now. After all, what may have been effective yesterday doesn’t always work today. And since sales is moving faster than ever before, it’s more important than ever your team keeps their techniques fresh. 

By using a secure training system like CircleHD you can:

  • Put together modules and tracks that can support ongoing sales coaching and onboarding efforts 
  • Create on-demand training employees can browse and access, just like Netflix
  • Enable learning on-the-go (or, in the case of coronavirus, while doing other things around the house)
  • Set up role-playing scenarios that help your reps hone their negotiation skills
  • Create quizzes to facilitate knowledge retention
  • Play into your reps natural competitive instincts and set up a team leaderboard to encourage engagement

    Provide resources for virtual client meetings


    If there was ever a time to get creative with your sales prospecting and presentations, now is it. Coronavirus is forcing lots of businesses to cut down on travel and in-person meetings, which means web presentations and digital assets are more important than ever. This may require you to change the way your sales process works. There are many ways you can supplement an in-person meeting if your potential new client is working from home, including:
  • Giving them a virtual tour over FaceTime or a web conferencing application
  • Creating a pitch video you can share with prospects and leads
  • Putting together a video of your product or solution so your prospect can see it in action
  • Share some supplemental material the marketing department has put together to make a business case for your product and company knowledge

Just because you’re not able to meet in person, doesn’t mean you have to stop doing business. Deals may get stalled in your pipeline so it’s up to you to keep them warm. Keep checking on your leads and continue to offer them things of value. They may not be willing to make an investment until the storm passes but recognize that this is temporary. 

——————–

No matter where your teams are working from, it’s crucial that leaders don’t succumb to the panic.  Remain calm, be intentional about communications, put the proper tools and processes in place, and you’ll create a winning engagement strategy that survives long after this pandemic has passed. 


The Power of Employee Video and Self-Broadcasting for Enterprises

At CircleHD, we believe opportunities made available by employee video can transform knowledge into company wealth. While many are moving the needle with self-broadcast in video, it often does not go past the top 10% of performers. In order to break through that barrier, a newer, faster experience is needed to replace legacy roadblocks to adoption.

There are some best practices organizations are implementing to operationalize video into learning, while encouraging peer-to-peer and knowledge sharing to encourage team skills growth. Here’s just a few:

  • Cambridge Engineering & CircleHD: I believe the epicenter for employee generated video is in Chesterfield, Missouri. Marc Braun is a primary lead in a consortium of 500 companies, hacking culture with video.

    As President of Cambridge Engineering, Marc doubled revenue and tripled operating profit in an industry with a CAGR of just 6.62%. Marc’s employees are told, “if you see a problem or waste, you have the job autonomy to fix it.” Just shoot a 1-min before / after video, and it’s played next morning at the all-hands meeting.

    “I have learned video takes courage to make. There is mastery in self-broadcast. And when video is given a purpose, the gift is people that outgrow the company.”

    This video interview was released to LinkedIn, where it got 7,600 views, and 69 likes.
  • Dell: Video lets employees bypass the organizational chart and connect with colleagues in other silos in the pursuit of better customer experiences. Dell uses Sonic Foundry’s Mediasite to connect its salespeople with subject-matter experts.

    “There are a lot of salespeople at Dell, but there are only a few ph.D.s in big data or machine learning,” said Lawrence Grafton, Solutions Product Manager at Dell. “Those ph.D.s can post an explainer video so that sales can better understand the topic. 
  • Moffitt Cancer Center uses an enterprise video platform to deliver content externally. The Moffitt Cancer Center uses its enterprise platform from vBrick to deliver video externally to patients.

    “We use it internally but also use a guest portal for external use,” said John Maass. He added that a doctor could curate or record videos to help patients understand their specific prognosis, “rather than go out to WebMD and get scared.” 
  • Video for Sales Training: ‘In fact, peer-to-peer instruction is one of the main pillars of modern learning programs and the majority of reps prefer peer knowledge sharing over corporate or manager-generated content. 

    Our survey of sales reps and their managers found the majority (65 percent) of sales representatives agree that sales pitch advice from peers is more effective than training from the corporation and that top-performing sales organizations are 76 percent more likely to utilize peer-generated video content for training than other firms. 
  • CISCO Shorty Awards: While more social in nature, the results from Cisco in 2016 for employee-generated video and content are outstanding. Get tips from this Shorty awards entry
  • Video in HR: “Employees want that guidance in an easy-to-access format to help them translate a complex topic in a way that will lead them to the right decision. Advanced HR teams have picked up on this, making video their medium of choice and incorporating into their open enrollment communications strategy.” 

CircleHD is the first cloud-native enterprise video platform for employees and teams of any size. For more information about how we can help your organization implement video learning, schedule a demo.


8 Ways to Increase Employee Engagement with Video Content

Whenever an organization implements a new program, its success is contingent on employee engagement. But video can sometimes take a little encouragement to make and sometimes it’s difficult to know where to begin. Here are a few video content ideas you can share with your team, utilizing everything from gamification to vendor collaboration, and beyond.

Hot tip: CircleHD has plenty of features to help you easily set up “games” for your company. Users can set a start and end date and a rewards section which are all tied to a points-system displayed on your virtual leaderboard.

SharkTank 

Is there an opportunity the company should invest in? A 2-5 minute pitch video may be the way to go. Big ideas come from anyone regardless of position and the best storytellers often win support. Let the collective smarts of your team identify and incubate winners faster.

Improvement Videos

If you can identify waste, you should have the job autonomy to fix it. Shoot a one-minute “before and after” video yourself, and encourage others to follow suit by highlighting the best content at the next company meeting.

A consortium of 500 companies in manufacturing, healthcare, and technology sectors have entirely transformed with this simple but high-impact culture hack.

CEO to CEO Video Series

RIP It

Want to record a live web meeting? Just rip it live from the source. Record your screen, assign it to a channel, transcribe and upload. Within minutes (not hours or days) your video asset is uploaded and published. Find spoken words now in search. Listen later in the company TV app on the drive home.

Vendor Corner 

Do you have a vendor with a particularly interesting proposition? Ask them for a video to share in your “Vendor Corner” where new opportunities go to be vetted company-wide.

Hackathon 

Set goals. Explain rules. Put the innovation to a video pitch. Highlight winners.

Sales Influencer Awards

The brands with the best stories pull ahead of the pack. Challenge reps to create their own unique video pitches then allow the company to vote for the best using the CircleHD 5-star rating system.

Train

Create a lineup of videos and assign a playlist lesson to other users. Viewers can mark when a lesson is complete.

Looking for something more complicated? CircleHD can integrate out-of-the-box with your existing LMS.

——

Are you looking for a secure platform to host your original video content? Contact us for a demo and learn more about how CircleHD can facilitate better employee engagement and knowledge-sharing across your organization.


4 Ways to Build An Effective Sales Onboarding Program

A new team member is always exciting. In order to create a successful future for them at your company, you’ll want to engage them right from the start with an effective sales onboarding program. One example of this is to implement a “pre-hire program”, which will feature everything they need to know about working with your company. This will set the foundation for their tenure with your company and give them a structured engagement model that will enhance productivity.

How can you set your sales onboarding program up for success? Let us count the ways:

Start Before Their Hire Date

Since your pre-hire program will set the stage for the rest of the onboarding schedule, you’ll want to get them engaged with the company before they even start. You’ll want to show them your company’s value and mission and this can be done before their first start date. You can provide them with things like a mentor, an introduction to the team, provide them access to group technologies and more. This way they are more familiar with their job even before they start.

Be Structured and Consistent

Meet that new hire’s expectations with consistency and structure. This can be done in a number of ways, such as giving them a welcome package, linking them with a mentor or doing icebreakers with the team so that they feel excited about working with your company. You want new hires to feel excited because they’ll be more effective at their sales goals.

Have a Team Mentoring Program

It can be daunting coming into a new sales team, which is why a formal mentoring program might be a good idea. Have them link up with a more experienced member of the sales them so that they can see what’s expected of them at the company. This will also accelerate their professional development and help get the accumulated with how things are done.

Have a Sales Onboarding Playbook

Creating one sales playbook will provide new hires with specific knowledge on things should go, including product knowledge, selling activities and approaches. Give them a detailed understanding on how the sales process goes within your company so they can easily follow it.