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As more and more teams are working remotely in digital workplaces, making news and content immediately accessible is more important than ever to both companies and their employees. The way we consume and communicate information has changed dramatically and the value of video has become even more apparent as a vehicle for dissemination. In fact, studies show that  67% of people understand information better when it’s communicated visually, and younger workers are twice as likely to prefer visual communications than their counterparts. 

Not only do employees prefer video for content delivery, visual content can be more easily absorbed and understood. So, when you need to convey important messages and information, video is not only preferred, it is more efficient. It should be no surprise that video has completely transformed our content consumption habits both at work and at home.  

Rise of the remote worker 

Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, the number of remote workers increased 159% over the past decade, due in part to the ongoing digital workplace transition. The pandemic has accelerated this trend and poses significant communication challenges for companies. With a highly dispersed workforce on-demand video communication delivers an incredible advantage.  

Keeping employees engaged and productive with minimal face-to-face interaction has become more challenging. “ As many as a third (36%) of employees say their motivation levels have been affected by poor company-wide communications.” Long corporate emails turn off many employees and go unread. Video provides multi-sensory engagement and also more closely replicates being in the same room with your colleague. Videos can help close the communications gap for your remote workforce. 

Get and keep your employee’s attention 

“Only 40% of employees report that they are well informed about their company’s goals, strategies, and tactics,” according to the Harvard Business review. How can we expect employees to be motivated and productive if they don’t know what’s going on? How much information is actually being consumed and understood? Forrester Research study indicates that employees are 75% more likely to watch a video than read text. Video is preferred because it provides a more human, personal touch. 

Building or shifting the company culture is another major challenge, especially when transitioning to a digital workplace. The employee intranet is a crucial component and when it comes to promoting your company culture, on-demand video should be an integral part of your strategy.  Whether delivering employee on-boarding and training, organizational announcements, tutorials, product announcements and recording live-streaming events, video ensures a consistent experience — both in terms of delivery and information. It also affords the opportunity to capture insights regarding your audience. Viewership and engagement metrics can also help guide the process and direct the company to the type of content and information employees pay attention to and value most.  

An intranet experience that employees love 

Originally an intranet portal was simply an internal homepage to share news and information, principally a corporate bulletin board. Now it’s considered an essential element of a modern digital workplace to promote genuine dialog, facilitate employee self-service, deliver eLearning, and act as a gateway to business applications. Additionally, in-video quizzes and polls can help capture employees’ attention. 

If you need to learn how to do something quickly, where do you turn? YouTube of course. Because YouTube has an unbelievable library of how-to videos to easily guide you through any problem. Employee intranet portals should adopt the same approach – utilizing video-based guides to portal services and applications. This approach will shorten the learning curve for new hires and also promote a self-service culture. 

Empowering employees and saving money 

Saving time and money is also part of the equation. eLearning videos, rather than classroom training, can help reduce trainer costs, travel dollars and travel time while also providing employees scheduling flexibility.  

Employee self-service (ESS) portals can help reduce administrative overhead, while at the same time, keeping personal information more up to date. From speeding up on-boarding of new hires, requesting time off or rolling out new employee benefits, ESS can be an effective tool to increase employee empowerment and satisfaction. Incorporating on-demand videos to explain benefit packages or provide a how-to reference guide are crucial to successful self-service portals. There is also value in enabling employees to create, upload, and edit videos to enhance employee engagement and create a stronger sense of ownership. 

Meeting the digital workplace challenge 

Your digital workplace plans should align with your business goals and provide your employees with an environment and work tools focused on productivity and collaboration. Creating a high-performing workforce should be at the core of your strategy. To support a high-performing workforce you need an employee intranet portal to streamline communication, deliver business applications and drive cultural change.  

Since nothing communicates quite like video, build a video library, accessible from your intranet portal, to help support and speed up your digital transformation. Use your internal experts to share their insight or give your executive team a forum for sharing company announcements, goals and successes. Video has gone from nice-to-have to absolutely essential for supporting your digital transformation.  

Learn more about on-demand video by joining our webinar with Kaltura on October 27th titled: “On-Demand Video and How It Can Be the Key to Improving Digital Experiences” 

The post Why Video is More Essential Now than Ever in the Digital Workplace appeared first on HCL SW Blogs.

To digitize business critical experiences, you need not only flexibility, security and power, but also the ability for your business users to create engaging content. HCL recently released exciting new capabilities to its platform, that helps empower users to create compelling experiences, improving the bottom line and customer satisfaction. We interviewed the person behind the constant development, iteration, and improvements to HCL Digital Experience to get the inside scoop on the latest updates in the latest release, as well as a window into what is coming soon. In June, we released a reinvented Content Composer and a new (free) Digital Asset Management (DAM) capability. You can learn about all of that by watching this video:

We talked to David to find out what’s been added since.

Q: What do new rendering and versioning capabilities mean for content creators? 

A: When an image is added, the tool now auto-generates multiple renderings suitable for each of the universal screen sizes and device dimensions of desktops, tablets, and smart phones — saving time and improving accuracy. Also, the version history of each image is now preserved, letting you revert back to previous versions as needed. These capabilities were added to the DAM in our July release and there’s more to come in the August and September releases too, including the addition of versioning support in Content Composer.   

Q: How is media (images and video) now managed in the DAM?  

A: Media is stored in collections (which act as folders), and these collections can be nested. Collections have assigned role-based access and permissions so access to the media can be controlled on a collection–by–collection basis. Media is usually published via content, so the workflow is handled at the content level. DX content management leverages the renditions so your content will look great on all devices. 

Q: Is it easier to search and find assets in the DAM? Is metadata stored? 

A: Yes. You can search by title, date and metadata. Basic metadata is automatically added, but you can and should add additional, more robust and descriptive metadata to boost SEO, as well as store rights information, photographer or videographer credits, and make finding assets even easier.  

Q: How is this native DAM better than others out there?  

A: Well, for one thing — it’s free to all DX customers! Also, it comes fully integrated so it’s faster to get up and running and one less thing to do before you can get started making content and digital experiences.  

Q: What changes are coming in the next few months?  

A: We’ve got a packed agenda for the coming months, when it comes to DAM and content management features. We’re going to see more features like custom renditions, image editing features and most excitingly a partnership with a video streaming platform so you can publish streaming videos directly from the DAM. For content management, we’re going to be extending Content Composer to cover more of the core WCM capability, such as site areas, presentation templates, components, and more. 

Q: Can I test drive Digital Experience, the new DAM or upcoming features?  

A: Yes! We invite current customers and those with curiosity to join us at regular release review sessions to keep up to date with our latest features. If you’d like to give it a try for yourself, your sales rep can help organize that. Contact one here.  You can also register to join us at an upcoming webinar, and you can also watch lots of great videos here.

When we talked to David, he emphasized that his team is constantly updating the DAM with big improvements as well as little usability fixes — and while some changes or fixes are small, many small changes add up to big advantages.

Stay tuned and make sure you are on the latest version of HCL Digital Experience.  

The post HOT DAM! What’s Next? A Q&A with David Strachan, Director of Engineering appeared first on HCL SW Blogs.