Earlier this year, I received some tough feedback via our bi-annual workplace survey: My thousand or so employees said I wasn’t accessible enough on a day-to-day basis. As CEO of a social media company—which prides itself on open communication—this was a pretty big concern for me. I wanted to remedy it quickly.
My priorities were pretty straightforward. I needed a way to frequently share breaking company news, solicit and respond to feedback and provide transparency into the business. I needed to do this for every member of my staff, around the world. But my time commitment also needed to be minimal: I couldn’t afford to spend hours prepping updates. Finally, this had to be something I could do from anywhere, since my schedule often requires travel.
This sounds like it should be relatively easy, but it’s actually not. I already hold quarterly ‘town halls’—company-wide meetings where I share updates on the state of the business. But these are challenging to plan and too infrequent. And with so many people in attendance, not everyone can participate. So I also started an anonymous email suggestion box. But as my company grew to nearly 1,000 employees, suggestions and questions came in faster and faster. I simply couldn’t close the loop in time, and important issues went unaddressed.
Something needed to change. I considered a weekly CEO newsletter, but the format felt too impersonal. Then I thought about holding a weekly video meeting or webinar with the entire company. But live video-conferencing tools like Google Hangouts or GoToMeeting aren’t always equipped to handle hundreds of users in an interactive setting. I was just about to give the old-school conference line a shot when Amelia, one of my employees, mentioned that an ex-boss of hers used to send around video updates to keep his team in the loop. Since we’re all carrying a great video camera in our mobile devices, I decided to give it a shot.
The last hurdle, though, was distribution: The obvious choice would have been to email the video as an attachment or share it on Google Drive or a similar service. But I wanted something interactive. We’ve been trying out Facebook at Work (like Facebook but for internal company use), so I decided to try posting there to see what kind of engagement I’d get. Ideally, employees would watch, comment and share. Alternately, it might just flop completely and get lost in the Facebook news feed.
Fast forward to the present, and I’ve been doing weekly video selfies on Facebook at Work for four months now. Here’s what I’ve learned and some ideas on how this approach could be adapted to companies of any size:
Don’t make it a work of art: Minimal prep and zero production value are key.
Let me get one thing straight from the start: These videos aren’t works of art … and that’s by design. Professional video is extraordinarily time consuming and expensive: You have to think about sound, lighting and scripts. There are multiple takes and then endless rounds of editing. A 30-second spot can take a week to produce.
So, I just did away with all that. I shoot my videos—selfie-style—on my iPhone. I give myself one take to get them right, no cuts or edits. If I fumble, I generally just regroup and keep going. In the end, I think the low-production value actually adds an element of transparency and authenticity—I’m not hiding behind edits.
Having said that, I’m not just rambling on, stream-of-consciousness style. After some trial and error, I’ve settled on a pretty standard format for each video:
a brief hello and intro
a quick rundown of major company wins across different departments
a short section sharing what’s top-of-mind for me this week
and then a final segment where I respond to a few user-submitted questions
Behind the scenes, a little bit of prep makes it easy to pull together these scripts in just a few minutes. Department heads dump major updates into a spreadsheet each week. Employees share questions anonymously via an email suggestion box. I have a teleprompter app on my phone that scrolls through all this as I record. All told, the entire prep and production process now takes me about one hour.
The payoff? Employees actually like the video/social media format. I do, too.
Sounds great, but did it actually work? Just hours after I posted my initial video, it had been seen nearly 1,000 times. Not only were employees watching, they were also engaging with the content. I got feedback on everything from our plans to launch a company podcast to new sales initiatives … and these comments themselves generated their own discussions. Interestingly, lots of people who wouldn’t normally chime in at an all-company meeting were leaving notes.
In the months ahead, I kept up a regular routine of one, roughly 10-minute-long video per week. I’ve shot videos from hotel rooms, the front seat of a car, a park bench, my office and other places—really wherever I can squeeze in a few minutes of uninterrupted time.
Viewership has remained steady and comments continue to flow in each week.
Most importantly, it feels like people are more connected than before. The video serves as a kind of real-time window into the challenges and triumphs of everyone from the customer success team to the sales squad and the engineers working behind-the-scenes. Again, this is nothing that an in-person meeting couldn’t accomplish: But with Facebook video I can do this each and every week with one hour of prep.
Be aware of the risks. It’s not for everyone.
But I’ve also learned that this kind of approach isn’t for everyone. If you’re the kind of leader who prefers each and every remark be vetted by your legal team, or if you insist on projecting a perfect, polished image, then selfie-style iPhone vids probably aren’t the way to go. Plus, it helps if you can put ego aside, because the lighting and camera angles aren’t going to be flattering. Employees are getting the real you—double chins and all.
Then there’s the accountability factor. When you poll employees on what issues you need to address and post the results publically, you’re going to face some challenging questions. I’ve been asked about everything from employee satisfaction to whether we’re meeting growth targets and why we had to let people go. But, it’s better to get these issues out in the open—and start working toward solutions—than to pretend they don’t exist.
Of course, these exact same limitations—vulnerability, transparency, accountability—can represent huge virtues. Millennial employees have grown up in a culture of living out loud on social media. Sharing real, unfiltered experiences is normal and expected. It’s the ‘sanitized,’ super edited corporate stuff, by contrast, that is more likely to generate suspicion and alienate. Nor do I think that these are just Millennial qualities. Ultimately, we’d all prefer straight talk over spin, especially when it concerns something as personal as our jobs.
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