Maintaining Internal Communication Amid the Coronavirus Lockdown

Netflix has encouraged its employees to work from home. Twitter has started mandating it. With the sudden spread COVID-19 pandemic, offices around the world are either temporarily shutting down, or heavily downscaling physical involvement in their business operations. Experts are asking people to practice social distancing and almost 20% of the world’s population is under lockdown as they attempt to 'flatten the curve' to reduce the rate of infections. 

A wise decision generally… but a challenging one for a business. With offices going under lockdown, how are you going to carry out your everyday operations? You'll need to find a way to make sure your internal communications are going smoothly to keep collaboration active and employee morale up.

With the coronavirus going around, it's natural for you to be concerned about how things are going to work now that everyone is going to be working from home. You'll need to make a strategy now that the office is going virtual.

The Need for Internal Communication

Each company has its own distinct challenges. To find a befitting solution, we need to understand the importance of internal communication for a company and what they need to continue to do to keep the business running.

People communicate in a company for multiple reasons. A CEO or manager may need to address a team or make an announcement to everyone in the company.  Employees need to meet regularly to conduct their business. They may have to take part in formal meetings with a planned agenda or grab a conference room for an impromptu, informal meeting. Senior employees and management need to communicate business strategy and updates to the rest of the employees.

So, how can a company carry out these internal communications if you're going to close the office and everyone is going to be working from home?

Facilitating Communication among a Remotely Operating Workforce

The coronavirus pandemic has led to a surge in the use of video, be it live streaming or on-demand video (VOD), for internal communication among companies. With offices going virtual, enterprise video communication has gained substantial popularity among every level of an organizational hierarchy, whether it's a CEO, a manager, or any other employee.

In order to communicate with a remote workforce, organizations use two-way video communication systems such as ZOOM, WebEx, Microsoft Teams, and others, which on top of being a collaboration platform, also allows recording of video meetings to share with others such as meeting absentees. However, video communication platforms come with a limitation of managing and streaming recorded video meetings. To complement video communication systems such as ZOOM, VIDIZMO offers a YouTube-like video management system for auto-ingestion, management, streaming, and sharing of recorded video meetings with value-added features-set to enhance search, quick retrieval, and much more. While two-way video communication systems are pivotal in most cases, they can be unnecessary in some cases, such as when one person addresses a large audience. For such cases, VIDIZMO also offers live streaming to conduct a webinar to communicate with a large number of people while also allowing the audience to interact with live chat. 

Below, you can take a look at some of the ways organizations are using EnterpriseTube to maintain their internal communications.

Making an Announcement from the CEO

It's vital for employees to stay connected to their company's senior management to remain well informed on how the company is progressing towards its goals and missions and periodic updates on the company, so they feel connected and engaged with goals and objectives of the company.

VIDIZMO's live streaming allows CEOs and senior employees to conduct strongly engaging live streams to address the rest of the company in real-time. Employees can tune in to the stream from their desktop, mobile, or tablet from home. Some enterprises are also leveraging VIDIZMO's interactive features, such as inserting surveys and handouts in recorded video messages to replace the mass of words and paragraphs in an email and improve on the efficiency and receptiveness of their bulk messaging by resonating more with the employees.

Providing Updates on Policies and Change Management 

Corporate communication departments frequently need to make announcements to the entire company regarding changes in the company's internal policies and regulations. With a remotely operating workforce, it can be difficult to communicate these changes or announcements in an effective or dependable manner. If an employee fails to carry out or implement the changes or updates required of them, the company might face some serious consequences. Some changes might even cause employees to get confused about their job role or even worry about their job security.

To this purpose, enterprises leverage VIDIZMO's interactive live streaming to clearly communicate these changes and announcements to their employees while allowing them to ask questions or share concerns through live chat and Q&A. Organizations also often record these streams to share as VOD across the company in case someone misses the session. VIDIZMO allows them to create and insert surveys into VOD's for feedback or attach relevant documents for downloading. Furthermore, managers can monitor and make sure everyone has watched the videos through video analytics on VIDIZMO.

Distribute Information on Health and Safety under the COVID-19 Pandemic

Employees are valuable assets, and a company is responsible for the health and safety of its employees. Amid the coronavirus lurking around, employees need to be kept updated and well informed on precautions and measures to take when dealing with the ongoing pandemic

Organizations are using VIDIZMO's EnterpriseTube to share this information in a more engaging and graspable manner through videos with interactive features such as inserting documents for downloading informative material, and surveys to gain insight into employee concerns regarding safety policies. Additionally, making such videos showcases the concern and importance an organization places on employee safety and wellbeing.

Share and Conduct Internal Meetings and Presentations

Meetings and presentations conducted internally with employees can be very beneficial in helping employees learn and gain new ideas and insights. With the offices going under lockdown because of the coronavirus, you'll have to find a way to conduct your internal meetings through a virtual two-way communication platforms commonly referred to as video conferencing systems such as Zoom, Microsoft Teams, WebEx, Bluejeans and etc.

Through VIDIZMO, enterprises are able to leverage their existing Zoom and other video conferencing accounts by automatically ingesting recorded Zoom meetings for sharing and management with their employees on a secure platform. Some companies are using VIDIZMO's live streaming to go virtual for sharing and disseminating these meetings to all the employees. This allows a large number of employees to view, listen, and contribute to a meeting. These streams are recorded for employees unable to attend the sessions for viewing as VOD. Furthermore, using VIDIZMO's in-video search, employees can type a keyword or topic addressed in the video so they can find out where it occurs in the session and for viewing. This also promotes a more proactive approach and allows the distribution and availability of learning material to the relevant people and resources without any additional expenses.

Transfer Knowledge to Facilitate Collaboration and Learning

Since employees are working from home, they don't get the opportunity to talk like they did in the office, such as chatting about tasks and sharing tips during lunch or coffee break. Video content is a highly beneficial and effective tool for learning and collaboration.

Subject matter experts use VIDIZMO to create video libraries for employees to learn from and distribute collaborative video content across different teams and departments through groups, portals, and categories with configurable access and permissions. This helps employees not only bridge the gap in communicating information to relevant parties, but also keep them engaged, informed, and motivated as well. Furthermore, they can use machine transcription and in-video search to easily search for relevant information and topics. At the same time, companies obtain an invaluable collection of knowledge and information to easily share, store, and manage on VIDIZMO for any existing or future employee to refer to when necessary.

Manage the Realignment of Employees with Organizational Goals

Working from home creates a challenge for employees in communicating about their objectives and progress, as well as any updates or accomplishments in development. This might lead to employees feeling alienated and disconnected and lead to a silo mentality. This can negatively affect employee morale and demotivate them.

To overcome this challenge, organizations use VIDIZMO for streaming relevant live or on-demand videos to regularly communicate and consistently realign their efforts with their plans, keep employees updated on their individual and team performance, or just to commend for doing a good job. Furthermore, videos are a highly scalable resource for communication with huge benefits. Enterprises take advantage of VIDIZMO's highly flexible and configurable platform to manage these resources for improving internal communication organization-wide, department-wise, or in a team.

With efforts to contain the coronavirus pandemic, many companies have mandated or encouraged their employees to start working from home to practice social distancing. To support these efforts, VIDIZMO's EnterpriseTube provides a secure platform to bridge the gap in communication arising from working remote.

Creating a Work Environment at Home 

The upcoming weeks will probably see you trying to adjust to your new way of operations. To make it easier, you can try to leverage your existing IT systems and applications, like CMS (e.g., SharePoint) or video conferencing tools (e.g., Zoom), through seamless integration with VIDIZMO.

Finally, here are some tips on how to adjust to working from home while under lockdown.

• You can use mobile phones or tablets to access the solution through any browser. Click here to learn more
• Make sure everyone is well informed about your plans or any steps that you're going to take to refute unnecessary concerns.
• Inform your employees on privacy and security concerns they should consider when creating or sharing videos from home.
• Try to be supportive and less stringent about formality. In such a situation, it's more important that internal communication is going smoothly, and employees are capable of operating remotely.

VIDIZMO’s EnterpriseTube can be deployed on a shared or private cloud, on-premises, or as a hybrid model and is available on the Azure Marketplace and AWS Marketplace.

To learn more about how VIDIZMO's solutions can help resolve your internal communication challenges, please visit our website or contact us.

Stay safe and vigilant!