In the second installment of a series on on executive Q&A videos, I shared Chip Cruze’s tips for making a video and posting it on the company intranet. For this post, I asked Cruze to give his perspective as communications planner on the benefits of executive Q&A videos.

When deciding if executive Q&A videos are right for your company, consider these facts:

• After a small, one-time investment (Flip UltraHD Video Camera – Black, 8 GB, 2 Hours (3rd Generation) NEWEST MODEL and Flip Video Tripod), the videos cost nothing but the time it takes to make and post them.

• The videos “cultivate a culture of communication” where “everyone feels welcome to ask” and “every question is fair game.”

• The videos can go further to creating an “open door” culture than an actual open door. Many executives and managers say they have an open door policy and they mean it. But it’s hard for many employees to walk through that door. “The majority people just aren’t going to walk into the CEO’s office and ask for a minute,” Cruze reasons. It’s much easier to submit a question for a video Q&A.

• Most videos should take only 5-10 minutes to make (you don’t want them to be too long). It would take most of us exponentially longer to type up, proof, and polish a companywide email or memo with the same amount of information.

Technology for HR: Videos aren’t the only way to use your intranet as an employee engagement tool. Research more options for getting the most out of your intranet online.

In the final post of the series on executive Q&A videos, I’ll talk to some of our company’s executives who participated in Cruze’s videos to get their perspectives.

– Celeste Blackburn

Want to start harnessing the power of your intranet to drive employee engagement, post your handbook, communicate with employees in an emergency, and more? The Technology for HR manual guides you through making the most of your company’s intranet.

In a previous post, I wrote about video Q&As with the C suite from my perspective as an employee just having watched series of said videos. I liked how they were done, giving employees to ask the hard questions anonymously and at the same time showing us that it was our department heads and president answering our questions (instead of rubber stamping an e-mail written by someone else).

For the second installment of the series into executive Q&A videos, I went to Chip Cruze, the executive producer of the series and our internal communications planner, for the inside scoop on making a video and what to do with the finished product. Here are his tips:

• It doesn’t have to be expensive or elaborate.  Cruze shoots with a flip camera on a tripod set up on the interviewee’s desk.

• No reshoots! If at all possible, you want these answers to be unrehearsed. The more polished the answers become, the less genuine they will seem. If the video will feature more than one question, do everything in one take. Don’t splice anything together. “You don’t want to look slick,” Cruze says.

• Even though you want the videos to be “intentionally unscripted,” you can let the executives see the questions beforehand. They just have to promise not to rehearse in front of the bathroom mirror. It’s important to ensure the right people get the right questions.  Send out a list of all the questions and let the executives decide which ones best suit their expertise.

• Don’t be afraid to get a little personal. In their first videos, have the executives start with a little bit of biographical information. Cover the basics like name and a description of the work they do with the company. Then, have them offer up a little bit about themselves outside of work. It will help employees see them as more than the suit in the corner office.

• Post the videos on the company’s intranet. Depending on how you set security for your intranet, this offers an employees-only access option. Also, Cruze points out, “Everybody that is going to be here hasn’t always been here, but they should still have access to these answers and the personal side of these executives.” Posting the videos on your intranet creates an online library that you can use to familiarize new employees with your management team and employees can reference and watch  again if a question comes up.

Technology for HR: Research more options for using your intranet for employee engagement online.

Tune in net week when I investigate the benefits of executive Q&A videos from a communications planer’s perspective.

– Celeste Blackburn

Want to start harnessing the power of your intranet to drive employee engagement, post your handbook, communicate with employees in an emergency, and more? The Technology for HR manual guides you through making the most of your company’s intranet.

Recently, I was talking to Michael Burchell of the Great Place to Work Institute about programs that drive engagement and trust, and he mentioned Google’s TGIF (yes, that TGIF) program. Every Friday, Google executives take part in a live Q&A, and employees all over the world can participate online.

If you would like to do something similar at your company but can’t pull together a live Q&A every week, consider taking the idea to your intranet. Our company recently started a similar program, and I think it’s been very effective. Employees send their questions to the coordinator, who then incorporates those questions into video interviews with the appropriate members of the C suite (the president answers the questions about raises while the COO addresses concerns about reorganizing in the IT department), which he then posts on our intranet.

As an employee, the two things I like most about the intranet videos are: read more…

A 2010 survey by the Conference Board found that only 45 percent of those surveyed said they’re satisfied with their jobs, down from 61.1 percent in 1987, the first year in which the survey was conducted. The youngest employees, those currently under age 25, expressed the highest level of dissatisfaction ever recorded by the survey for that age group.

“While one in 10 Americans is now unemployed, their working compatriots of all ages and incomes continue to grow increasingly unhappy,” said Lynn Franco, director of the Consumer Research Center of The Conference Board. “Through both economic boom and bust during the past two decades, our job satisfaction numbers have shown a consistent downward trend.”

Studies have shown time and time again that happy workers are more productive and less likely to abandon ship. You know that engagement and job satisfaction are essential elements of keeping turnover down and getting the most out of your employees. All that makes sense. But how do you find out if employees are really happy? If you ask them outright if they are happy or what could be improved, you are likely to get a lot of nervous smiles and vague answers like “Oh, it’s great here . . .” Hiring an outside company to come in and do an anonymous survey of your employees can be expensive. read more…

In our two-part series on hosting a blog on your company’s intranet, I mentioned that one way to use such a blog is as a project journal. Doing so offers many benefits:

• No matter what happens to the employee, the information stays with the blog. If an employee leaves in the middle of the project, you don’t have to worry about making sure he maps out his work before saying goodbye because it already lives on the blog. read more…

You’ve decided you want to make the most of a blog (or blogs) on your intranet. While there are some things you want everyone to be able to see (posts that praise employees for a job well done), there may be times when you only want specific users to see certain posts (when a blog is being used as a place to brainstorm a top-secret project). One way to do that is to have different blogs for different groups, but you can also have one large company blog with several categories with visibility determined by user permissions.

Here are some categories to consider:

read more…

You were so inspired by our first intranet post that you now have a nice, new (or newly remodeled) intranet, and you want to know what you should put on it. Or maybe your company has had an intranet for a long time and you’re looking for new ways to use the resource. A blog can be an invaluable asset to your company and a central focus of a thriving intranet.

You can use an intranet blog purely as (1) a social connector and culture builder, (2) a way to communicate with employees, (3) a project management tool, (4) a source for new ideas, or (5) all of the above. The blog can be open to everyone in the company or only for certain employees, teams, or projects.

Advantages to having an internal blog on your intranet include: read more…

About a year ago, I began planning and outlining Technology for HR: A Legal and Practical Guide for Managing E-mail, Intranets & Social Media. At the time, I considered myself fairly technologically savvy. After all, I was (and am) the master of the DVR, could build a playlist on my iPod, and even had my very own Twitter and Facebook accounts. Surely tackling the world of technology as it relates to HR would be no problem.

After some back and forth with my editor, Ralph Gaillard, we settled on the following topics for this first edition of the technology manual: e-mail, intranets, mobile technology, blogs, microblogs, social networks, wikis, online video and podcasts, and RSS. No problem . . . yeah, right.

As I dove in, my head began to swim, and I must admit I started to panic. There was just so much to learn. How could I possibly get a grip on all this information, much less distill it down into easy-to-digest nuggets? Over the next six months, I tackled each topic by reading about its history and development, looking for ways companies big and small were using the functions to improve the HR experience (for both the HR professional and employee), and, finally, wading into the deep end by actually using and building each of the items on the list.

A year later, my fear has all but evaporated because I feel like I can tackle almost any technology hurdle with enough time and effort (for those of you who don’t have the time, you can get a jump start with the Technology for HR manual). There are three rules that served me well on this technology odyssey: read more…

Whether you are sitting down with IT to design your company’s first intranet or redesigning an intranet that has become unwieldy as sections and links have been added randomly over the years, you should pay careful attention to your homepage. After all, this is the page users will see first, and its usability could determine if your employees use your intranet to the fullest extent or give up on it after a couple of tries.

According to  founder and Managing Director of Step Two Designs James Robertson, there are seven key elements you should consider when designing your intranet homepage. They are:

read more…