Category: Thought Leadership

If you’ve been creating learning videos, you probably already have your entire process down to a science. But what if there were certain things you could do to improve your next learning video? Just because you’ve been creating videos for a while doesn’t mean you can’t enhance your skills and knowledge about the niche! Here are a few things to consider before creating your next learning video that will help with engagement and more:

Are you including keywords?

Keywords are vital to getting your content ranked on the first few pages of search engines. Although they’re important for websites and blog posts, your learning videos can benefit with adding them in, too, especially when you use YouTube to upload your videos. Make sure you research what your important keywords are and use them in your content.

Do you have a promotion schedule in place?

You can’t just release your learning video without any set promotional plan set in place or else you won’t get any views. Just as you’d market your blog post or website, your learning video requires a certain promotional strategy to get seen, which is why you need to develop a schedule before you release it. This way, you’ll be able to garner more views and get people talking about your learning video.

Do you have a target audience in mind?

You can’t just create a learning video without a target audience in mind. You should define who your target audience is before creating any learning video so that you can create the right content for that specific audience. Without any target audience in mind, you’re just creating a learning video to create one and it won’t have any real value for anyone. This will also help with your promotional schedule since you’ll be able to target the people you created the video for specifically.

Is there a call to action?

After you’ve finished your learning video, did you include a specific call to action? What do you want people to do after seeing your video? A call to action can be heading to your website, buying a product or service or anything else you’d like the person watching the video to do after it’s done.

If you need a platform to enhance your learning videos, look no further than CircleHD! You’ll be provided all the tools necessary for creating a learning and development portal to serve all of your training needs.

In order to gauge how satisfied, productive and motivated your employees are, it’s essential that you conduct performance evaluations. It’s necessary to keep your employees on track so that your company can further grow as a business with motivated staff. Accurate and consistent appraisals for your employees will let them know if they are simply reaching or exceeding goals and where they can improve. Although they might seem tedious and time consuming to do if you have a large enterprise, with the right preparation, they can be very beneficial and performance enhancing for your company. Here are some effective ways of conducting performance evaluations in large enterprises:

Evaluations Based On Objectives

Many large enterprises use their performance evaluations based on objectives, which should be agreed upon before any assessment takes place. Have your HR team and employees team up to work together so that they can agree on objectives to meet. Then once a quarter or year, they can meet again and go over the objectives and results to see what objectives have been met or not. Just make sure that the objectives are relatable to the employee’s job and are easy to track and obtain.

Evaluations Based On Production

Some companies use a performance-based system, especially for those interested in results-based positions. This is usually smart for those who have manufacturing businesses so that they can track results on any units that the employee made or handled. These results are then tracked against a certain time period or against averages. You can also use this performance evaluation method for sales people who have certain sales goals to meet. It may be hard to use for employees whose jobs don’t have number-based results.

360-Degree Feedback

This is a new type of performance evaluation, where employees receive anonymous feedback from those that they work with. This can include people like manager, co-workers or anyone else they come into contact with on a regular basis in their job. A survey is filled out with questions regarding that employee’s behavior, performance and competency. Then the employee will also take the same survey as a beneficial self-review. This allows other employees to chime in and provide valuable information on all employees. But know that this method isn’t supposed to be used for measuring any hard data like sales performance or job attendance. It’s more like a helpful way to understand subjective qualities that are usually harder for managers to fully grasp like listening, attitude, abilities, friendliness and teamwork.

We live in a digital world and many of today’s new technologies have found themselves in the workplace. Enterprises are constantly adopting new digital tools to help them succeed, be more productive, get more leads, generate more sales and so on. Even today’s workforce is much different than generations before with younger employees more inclined to adopt these new technologies than generations before them.

These new software platforms have expanded into every part of an enterprise, from sales, to IT, marketing, payroll and more. While some platforms work independently of each other, it’s the ones that place everything in one convenient place that are gaining more traction and popularity.

What About HR Departments?

So this leaves the question about HR leaders and their new role in such a digital age in business. Well, HR departments need to evolve to catch up with the times, changing from a supporting and administrative function to becoming a true business enabler. As the HR department becomes more digitalized, it will greatly impact a company’s chances to succeed over the competition.

HR staff needs to not just sit back and let the IT department handle the responsibilities of a digital transformation for the rest of its employees and needs take ownership of some aspects of it to get all employees on board. Having the HR department behind the technological transformation will not only showcase leadership and better adoption with the rest of the staff, but it will also raise the department as a strategic partner in the entire process rather than just a support function.

And there are many digital programs for businesses that are meant for HR departments and their particular job tasks. Many of these platforms help streamline some of their everyday tasks so that they can easily focus their attention on other matters like creating a corporate culture that’s more inclusive and positive or implementing ongoing employee education.

Accessibility is for everybody, not just for the people with a disability.

But a large section of the population is disabled in some way; in the UK alone at least 11 million people – over 15% of population has some form of impairment. The level of online effectiveness and satisfaction experienced by people with disabilities is significantly lowered when the needs of these users are not taken into account. It is estimated that at least 80% of sites fail to meet minimum requirements for accessibility .

When choosing how to deliver your video, it is important to consider options that are fully accessible. Whether you are delivering content for training or communicating internal messages, the following questions should be answered about the available options:

• Does the media player support closed captions?
• Does the media player support audio description in a way that enables users to toggle the narration on and off?
• Can the media player’s buttons and controls be operated without a mouse?
• Are the media player’s buttons and controls properly labeled so they can be operated by a blind person using a screen reader?
• Is the media player fully functional, including all of its accessibility features, across platforms and in all major browsers?

CircleHD’s video player is designed after PayPal’s accessible HTML5 player. It supports Closed captioning as well as keyboard and mouse accessible.

If you are building solutions, you can learn more about HTML5 video support for close captioning and accessibility from Google talk below. Today we support closed captioning both in srt and webvtt format. Less work for you, as we take care of the conversation of the formats, so you can focus on creating great content for your employees.

Want to Try it today! Ask for a free trial with CircleHD

Your employees are the core of your business operations. Keeping them happy, engaged, and motivated translates to better productivity and contributes to reaching higher revenues. Creating a better employee experience in the workplace is not just good for your staff’s morale and well-being. It is good for your company overall.

How satisfied is your workforce with their current working conditions at the moment? What have you been doing to improve your employee experience? We’ve prepared a list of proven ways and strategies that will help you.  

Apply principles of customer experience and put your employees at the center

Just like with keeping your customers happy, improving your employee experience involves understanding your employees – their needs, expectations, and goals. Use this information to come up with solutions to the issues they face. You may not get it right the first time so make sure you test out different approaches, evaluate the results, and adjust accordingly.

Put value in what your employees have to say

Have empathy and genuinely care about your employees. Employees are better engaged when they know they are involved in the process. Constantly seek feedback from your employees. Give them an avenue to voice out their concerns, opinions, and suggestions. Remember that each employee is unique and has different needs. The more attuned you are to what they have to say, the more insights you’ll get on how to provide them with better employee experience.

Don’t be afraid to be different

You should be able to adapt to the dynamic nature of your workforce. Embrace technologies that would encourage collaboration and interaction among your employees. Introduce creative ways for them to create and share their stories like videos and other interactive messaging platforms.

Conclusion

Happy and satisfied employees translate to dedicated and productive ones. Creating a great work experience for your employees is greatly beneficial not just to the employees’ morale and well-being but also to your overall company performance. Have you been doing your share in improving the employee experience in your workplace?

Interactive and creative internal communications solutions are available at CircleHD. We can help you set up systems and tools that can help improve your employee experience. Contact us and we will be happy to walk you through the different ways our technology can keep your workforce engaged, productive, and happy.