How our employee communications lead creates video messages in 4 steps

“Once an employee message reaches a certain length, I’m like, ‘Nope, cut it in half and turn it into a video.’ Because when a message gets too long, you’re gonna lose the viewer,” shares Dominique Scott, the Employee Communications Lead at Vimeo. 

Her day-to-day involves working with leadership to craft messages that: 

• Get the attention they deserve
• Show executives’ human side
• Answer the “what’s in it for me” question that employees have

And nothing helps her convey these messages better than video, admits Dom. Here’s why she prefers videos and how she creates them in four easy steps: 

Why Dom loves video for executive messages

“If we didn’t have video, folks wouldn’t know these executives. They wouldn’t understand their personalities. They wouldn’t understand their little quips and jokes,” Dom notes as she pins building trust in leadership as one of the reasons why video is essential for employee communication. 

She also applauds the format’s efficiency in delivering messages from leadership. 

For one, video combats the common challenge of scattered attention spans by giving employees the liberty to view messages at their convenience. 

“You can meet employees where they’re at. They can view a video on their own time, they can speed it up, they can slow it down.” 

What’s more, employees can use clickable video chapters to jump to sections most relevant to them. 

“Plus, if an employee doesn’t want to watch the video, they can read the transcript and it’s accurate,” adds Dom. 

And two: Video captures executives’ tone unlike any other async communication format. “With video, you can deliver something in a tone that employees will resonate with.”

Recording executive video messages in 4 super simple steps

Dom loves using video to build meaningful connections between executives and employees. Here’s how she creates them with the leadership team: 

Step 1: Draft a video script

Employee communication involves extensive writing and editing to craft messages that are easy to understand and digest for the average employee. 

So to speed up this part of her workflow, Dom often uses Vimeo’s AI script generator for writing the first draft. 

“I just put the facts of the communication into the script generator, tell it how long it needs to be, the tone, the vibe, and it spits back a first draft.” 

“The AI script generator won’t solve all the problems,” Dom admits. “You still need a human editor. But for folks not as far along in their writing journey, the AI Script generator can be really helpful to get them to be more conversational while still being short, sweet, and to the point.” 

In fact, the AI script generator is perfect for writing short Slack update messages — ones that don’t require leadership buy-in. 

For longer messages, Dom runs the draft by the respective executive to make sure the script covers everything they want to talk about. 

Simultaneously, she holds executives in check — alerting them when a message gets too technical, identifying where they can be even more candid, or flagging where they deviate from addressing what employees need to know. 

“The average employee doesn’t look at [the message] nearly as long as the executives do. The average employee doesn’t know the acronyms. So I remind leadership to address the who, what, where, when, why, and how for employees and what’s in it for them.” 

Once the executive and Dom settle on an easily understandable message, Dom proofreads the script one last time before moving to the next step. 

Step 2: Record the message

Since Vimeo’s team works remotely, this task falls under the executives’ domain. But Dom aims to make recording easy for her bosses. 

To this end, she encourages them to copy and paste the script into the teleprompter as they record. 

Dom commends this feature for helping executives stay on script. 

Without it, the person filming the video often ends up focusing on manually scrolling the script, moving to the next page, making sure the font is the right size, etc. The result? Executives can’t maintain eye contact with the camera (and by default the employees) and have divided focus on the content and their tone.

This increases their odds of making mistakes, which bumps up their filming time — making recording a time-consuming experience for busy executives. 

With a teleprompter though: 

“The words sit right at the top of the screen, and they scroll automatically so executives are able to keep eye contact with employees without getting distracted or without worrying about scrolling. They just have to focus on saying the words.” 

“Our CEO decides how fast or slow the teleprompter scrolls,” Dom adds. “So if it’s a pretty technical update, I’ll usually advise them to go a little slower.”

Step 3: Edit and add chapters to recorded executive message

Next, Dom goes on to refine recorded videos — editing out long pauses and fluff. 

“I’ll zero in on any exceptionally long pauses. If it’s over one second, and definitely if it’s over two seconds, I’ll remove it.” 

The best part? Video editing is as simple as text editing with Vimeo. Dom explains it as, “When I find stuff to cut, I just highlight and delete, and then boom, it’s gone.” 

“Even if executives do have flubs and ‘ums’ and ‘ahs’ and pauses — even if they go off script, text-based editing really helps resolve those problems and clean up the message so it’s short and sweet.” 

Once the message is tight, Dom adds clickable chapters — dividing the video into parts that employees can navigate to. 
 
Then, Dom reviews the auto-generated transcript for accuracy, and the video’s all set 🎉 

Step 4: Make the content easy to find

In the end, Dom makes sure all video content is easily accessible so “employees can easily and quickly find the content that’s most important to them.” 

To do so, she “usually chooses a still of the person’s face just to keep it feeling human and easy to find.” 

Then she titles it, adds a short description, and more often than not, disables downloads since executive messages are confidential company messages. 

Last stop: Dom moves the content to the right folder in the Video Library. 

Ready to use video to bridge the gap between executives and employees? Vimeo has the right tools for you →