What A Work Culture Video Can Do For Your Workforce

Culture cannot be prescribed.

The best way to disseminate culture is to hire and promote people who embody your company’s values, from the top all the way down. Find good cultural representatives. Show off (i.e. reward, acknowledge) the good models.

The next best way to disseminate culture is to inspire your workforce to act within your culture’s values, in other words, to change individual behaviors by teaching, which can then radically affect the group mentality.

So imagine for a moment the important changes that require addressing in your internal communications (video) messaging, the ones that represent your company’s shifting culture, for example:

→ Your company is a bit lumbering and slow to react. You want to be fast and nimble.

→ Your company is innovative but sometimes for its own sake. You want to be innovative in ways that explicitly solve your customers’ needs.

→ Your company is not getting the most from its talented people. You want to place a premium on employee development.

From an internal communications or human resources perspective, therefore, it’s imperative that frequent and clear messaging addresses these concerns. The best company culture videos can be tailored to address specific issues:

→ In order to be fast and nimble, every individual must be empowered to make decisions, and you want video that will recruit innovative new employees.

→ In order to be innovative in ways that solve customer problems, your R&D group must better understand who your customers are.

→ In order to get better at employee development, your employees must be incentivized to care about improving themselves.

All communication trumpets these themes. Your leadership team is armed with them, your writing addresses them, your Town Halls hammer them home, along with consistent reminders of your mission. So why not have an internal communications video to bring the message home?

Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s CEO, describes his company’s success at distributing culture this way: “I think it’s been a process over time of building a culture where people think about the mission in the same way that I do. That’s allowed us to take on more and more products and things that we can try to solve for the world.”

If it’s true, to paraphrase Peter Drucker, that culture eats strategy for brunch, than culture is the wellspring for a company’s bottom-line. It’s not an indirect reality. It’s not so abstract.
That is a scary thought because it’s easier to control product than it is to empower people to be decision-makers. It’s easier to impose a top-down hierarchy than to create internally what Seth Godin calls “linchpins,” those individuals who accept responsibility and are willing to lead from anywhere in the corporate hierarchy.

Making an emotional connection (through messages of teamwork, pride, success, vision) to your employees is the surest way they will act. We here at Tribe Pictures naturally believe that video is the best communication mechanism for culture change because it is the most direct way to stir emotion that leads to action.

Nobody needs a corporate video. As a communications professional you need to solve a communications problem and video content is often the best delivery mechanism.

Some of the strongest, most effective work we’ve done at Tribe concerns communications strategy on an advanced level: internal communications delivered by a CEO on camera.

There’s really no better alternative when you need to:

Send your company’s important messages
               delivered by its top leader
                       in a way that creates emotion
                                  to inspire your people to act
                                               in five minutes or less.

The CEO video messages to employees and the Quarterly Reports that Tribe produces are not for public consumption but I would be happy to set up a private screening to show you some examples of just what’s possible.

Feel free to send me an email.