Millennials have changed the way how companies relate to their employees. Making their first corporate steps in a world largely defined by startup culture, millennial employees have come to demand more from their place of work. They seek to be inspired and to be part of a positive, unique working environment, and many industries have adjusted their corporate culture.
In short, the company culture serves as an indicator of whether a potential employee identifies with its values and mission.
Therefore, enticing prospecting employees to join the organization. Some companies have a team-based culture, where employee satisfaction is a high priority, while others are managed in a more traditional style.
Research by Deloitte shows that 94% of executives and 88% of employees believe having a strong company culture identity is at the core of a business’ success.
There is also a real correlation between employee satisfaction in their overall work environment and their positive mindset towards the company’s culture.
This is all well and good, but how do you translate your company’s values and turn it into a compelling video?
In today’s evolving workplace, successfully executed culture videos are key to welcome new talent.
Here are some tips to get you started:
Share your story in a compelling way
You company’s culture should take center stage. These videos shouldn’t be about upper management and its accomplishments. Few people can relate to their perspective.
A good company culture video should highlight how an average employee feels and fits within the company.
The best way to do this? Find someone to share a story about their personal experience. If your employees converse most naturally in a foreign language, let them do so. You can always add closed captions while editing the video.
Employees should be encouraged to talk about the workplace environment as well as all the perks their company provides, such as extra vacation time, bonuses, friendly teams and such. Try to capture your employees in an environment they feel most comfortable. That way, they will be more likely to come off as genuine.
Essential components in sharing a compelling story are to convey the most important aspect of your company culture: Its core values, mission, and vision. More so, how people are an essential part.
Create a sense of purpose
This point goes hand-in-hand with the third point that features the importance of being able to tell a story. When telling a story, it doesn’t entirely have to be employee-oriented.
It could also be about why the company was formed and all that the founders went through to put it into its current successful position. The point of telling a story is to appeal to the emotions of whoever is watching it and create a sense of purpose.
Creating meaning in the workplace is as important today as it’s ever been. People look for the reason to do anything that they do. It acts as a compass to what they are going to be doing at their job. Without one, productivity and job satisfaction take a major hit.
The most common way of highlighting this is by stating the company’s missions and goals. Give employees examples of how their position creates a meaningful change within the company. If your company involves itself in such endeavours, consider focusing on the charity work you do.
Life beyond work
For most people, being exposed to a new job environment is an apprehensive experience. People have yet to discover how things work in the office space and are still in the stage of evaluating whether or not your company is the right fit.
One way to make a powerful impression on prospective hires is to highlight a friendly welcoming team that supports each other right from the start. Once people can identify with it and visualize themselves being part of the team, you’ve sent your message across.
One of the most important aspects of company culture regardless of the organization is employee wellness. An employee should be at their best physical, mental and emotional state in order to perform in the workplace.
Employee wellness is considered to be the foundation of positive company culture. If you’re able to show that the leaders do everything to make employees comfortable, your video will be a success.
Focus on culture, not perks
The point of any recruitment video is to appeal to potential employees who would make a good fit for your team.
We don’t have to all stick to the same tried and tired method of showing off our foosball and the giant snack room. In fact, research suggests that companies with perks and poor corporate culture are the most infamous for having poor job satisfaction.
It’s usually suggested that companies that spend too much time focusing on the perks of working at their organization have something to hide. It is important to understand that good workplace culture is created thanks employees finding pleasure in their jobs.
A company’s culture is built thanks to the people and how they relate with each other. No amount of dancing around that fact can fully get rid of it. Perks can be part of a culture, but should never be used as a substitute.
Focusing on work-life balance
Modern entrepreneurs and startups have us all believing that the only way to make it to a successful life is working 80-hour weeks and getting barely 4 hours of sleep a day.
The average person can’t handle such stress and will quickly burn out and move on to the next endeavor.
Being in an environment that emphasizes the importance of a balance between work and home is an attractive prospect for many employees.
Companies that manage to portray their culture in this light usually do so by making the work environment seem as close to a home environment as possible. Working hard is both encouraged and incentivized, but there’s also a need to take time off and do something you love, to live a fulfilling life.
As a company, there are several ways work-life balance can be emphasized. These include highlighting the availability of childcare services, allowing for a more flexible schedule, unpaid time-off to focus on important life events, eg. childbirth, and company outings. Depending on the company, the implementation of one or the other one of these might be a little different.
A little humor goes a long way
Humor is great – everyone loves a good laugh once in a while. While we might all think we are funny, creating a funny video is not the easiest thing in the world to do, especially when trying to appeal to a diverse crowd.
Humor is an excellent way for companies to convey their humanity and serve to help ease prospects’ anxiety when thinking of starting a new job.
One of the most effective ways of getting people to lower this guard is to either get them to do something silly, as is the purpose of most team-building exercises, or get them to laugh. As always, the point is to appeal to the viewer’s emotions.
