By Richard Tilland, President, New Evolution Video & dk3studios
You’ve made a big step in hiring the right team for the job. Your Video team is extremely critical to the success of your digital marketing strategy, as they will be helping you with pumping out all the necessary content.
You will need a lot and it may seem like a daunting task but you spent a lot of time getting this A-team together to get all your video marketing content needs doing. Of course, you want to be a motivational leader and always get the best content creation out of your team. There are numerous ways to keep them inspired and motivated.
This will help keep your video team in top condition…
Rotate and Mix up the Content Creation
This is a big deal to consider. Not all jobs are considered inspiring or fun to do, and there’s a lot of work out there that simply needs to be done. Do your best to keep your team inspired by mixing different types of work for them.
Don’t have the same team members doing repetitive videos day in and day out, without any sort of change. This isn’t working at a factory, and you want your in-house video team to be as sharp as possible.
By splitting up the work that needs to be done between the day-to-day and something truly creative, you help to keep things fresh and basically help keep your team from getting bored through repetition. There are fewer things worse for a videographer or video editor, editing the same advertisement content video for a list of related products over and over again.
Enable Creativity
You have an entire video team. They know how to be creative as it’s actually part of their job description. Use that to your advantage. Make them become a part of the creative process. In fact, your video team should actually manage and run the creative process.
This will make them feel more engaged. There’s already a global problem with teams of all types feeling a lack of engagement with only 15% of all employees globally feeling engaged. To be fair that’s covering all different types of jobs across the world, but it’s still important to note.
Your video team knows its main role is content creation at such a rapid pace that creativity may not be something that they can afford timewise. You should help to find the right balance to ensure that they are able to handle both and produce content that is worthwhile to distribute to your target audience.
Without this, you will either have a huge amount of cookie-cutter videos that are all saying the same thing in 30-second snippets, or you will produce beautiful content that’s awe-inspiring and engaging to your target audience, once a year.
Enable employee engagement
This goes beyond giving them creative direction to be able to decide how to make a video. Actively engage with them and ask what are the types of clients they want to see in the future.
Or, better yet, ask what type of industry or even content they want to be able to produce. This will help your team become a highly specialized team that can produce excellent quality in a niche market. That doesn’t mean giving up the consistent video creation work that keeps the company running. It does however allow you to understand what type of business your team is looking for, and what to keep an eye out for.
As your video team continues to be inspired by their specialization, you’ll be able to grow the company portfolio and start charging a premium for this specialized video content. You may also be pleasantly surprised because you may discover that it is the quicker and shorter videos they want to do, versus feature-length educational videos that are Oscar-worthy.
Keep this figure in your brain the next time you consider whether you should keep your employees engaged. Disengaged employees cost US businesses $350 billion dollars a year in lost productivity.
The math is about $3400 in costs per $10,000 of how much someone makes a year. Just do a quick calculation and see if you or your business can actually afford that, and whether it’s worthwhile in general to have people that don’t seem as if they’re part of the company.
Guide true and Navigate your team
This is all about having some top-notch operational and project management skills. Your in-house video team is a finely tuned piece of content creation. You need to keep them running efficiently, motivated, and not overloaded. That means you need to ensure that the flow of projects is always manageable.
It’s always better to give a little breathing room with your team and have them produce less content or have fewer clients than start to overload them with video content requests that keep them glued to their jobs.
You will inspire by showing your video team that you can handle the workload that is necessary without them feeling that they’re always on a pressure crunch.
After you manage the workflows, another major aspect to consider is that you need to make sure that you give clear directions. Video content creation is a complex role, where even experienced experts still need time to produce quality content.
Constantly needing to change the tone, make revisions, or handle reshoots adds a lot of layers of complexity, as well as being a huge demotivator to your video team. They will either think they are not competent and their quality of work is poor, or they will feel as if you’re not able to give a clear picture of what is needed.
Either way, tension, and anxiety can start to build up. All of this can be avoided by taking that step back and looking at the overall requirements and direction to go with the video content marketing strategy.
Get your team to go on a break
Sometimes the best way to inspire your in-house video team is to simply take them out of the workplace. Go see the latest blockbuster, or have a team dinner with the team. Make it something unique like an analog-only night, so no videos, no phones, or anything with a digital screen. This helps to work wonders on them through this disconnect and helps the team bond a lot better.
Use it as an open forum for any sort of disagreements or issues with the current setup. This open discussion helps to inspire your video team by giving them a channel to discuss what’s on their mind, without feeling there will be repercussions.
It’s always a good idea to give your team a place to vent and a space to relax. Without all of these different strategies to inspire and motivate, you’ll end up with a team that will start to hit burnout. That’s worse than them being demotivated and disgruntled at their job.
It means you have a quality and loyal video content creation team, but they have hit such a work overload or repetitive fatigue that their quality will start to significantly drop.
That’s the last thing you want from your video team, so always do your best to keep a good inspirational strategy active.