If you’re hoping to find, secure, train, develop, and keep a top-tier workforce, you should be utilizing the best available organizational learning tools and techniques. If you’re still relying on old-fashioned learning practices, your prospective and current employees will not only lose interest—they may start jumping ship.

In today’s competitive business landscape, there’s an all-out war for the best available talent. And high performers know that they have myriad opportunities at their fingertips. In fact, many desirable employees see no reason to join or stick with an organization that isn’t going out of its way to engage them. To put it simply: Company loyalty is becoming a thing of the past.

To fight this battle, some of the most innovative human resources and internal communications executives are turning to interactivity. Specifically, they’re inviting candidates and employees to actively participate in, and contribute to, their learning and communications materials (as opposed to solely relying on static, one-way mediums for sharing information). This can be accomplished through a variety of channels—from gamified apps to crowdsourcing to interactive video.

An April 2016 McKinsey Quarterly article lauds the adoption of fresh thinking: “Digital advances can turbocharge efforts to foster understanding and conviction, thereby helping employees to feel more involved in change efforts and better able to play a role in shaping them.”

Interactive tools and materials draw employees in, providing an alluring opportunity for them to feel included and truly valued as an important part of your company’s story. Just think about it: The experience of sitting in front of a static, linear video (even an interesting one) simply can’t match the appeal of a two-way dynamic. 

In addition to enhanced engagement, interactive video content is also more likely to sink in. In fact, we’ve found that users retain data more readily (and remember it for longer) when it’s relayed through interactive video versus traditional video. They’re paying more attention to the content because it’s more engaging and relevant. It’s as simple as that.

Companies that choose interactive video to share critical information—whether it’s the CEO’s vision for the future or a new set of compliance standards—are prioritizing absorption of content instead of focusing solely on distribution. And in the end, absorption is all that really matters. After all, don’t we all want our candidates and employees to walk away from our learning tools feeling informed, inspired, and energized?

A good example of interactivity in action is this gamified recruitment video produced for Deloitte, which was powered by Rapt Media technology. The video allows users to envision themselves in real-life workplace scenarios, and it injects humor into the recruitment process.

Interactivity has been proven to work and can be applied at every employee touchpoint—from recruitment to training new hires to developing and informing current employees. It can even be leveraged to harness the knowledge of retirees. 

Beyond improved engagement and message retention, interactivity offers another significant benefit: It provides your senior leadership and departmental leaders with measurable, qualitative feedback and quantitative behavioral data from your employees. As they click through the material, their choices are logged and tracked—and this data can be invaluable to informing your future strategy.

In the coming years, I predict we’ll see more and more of the highest-rated and most desirable workplaces finding novel ways to incorporate interactive guided experiences into their training and communications processes. Will you be among them?

References

Basford, Tessa, and Bill Schaninger. “Winning hearts and minds in the 21st century.” McKinsey Quarterly. April 2016.
http://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/organization/our-insights/winning-hearts-and-minds-in-the-21st-century