It’s no surprise that video has become more prevalent and critical in how we communicate, not only in our social lives but also at work. We know that video is 10x more memorable than text and delivers a more human, personalized touch — making it the preferred medium for employees to consume content. It brings teams closer together and makes collaborating easier and more fun.

But despite all of the video tools we’re using to connect a distributed and often global workforce, these tools don’t holistically solve the needs of today’s workplace. Teams are using numerous video conferencing platforms and screen recording tools in a very disjointed way. While video has become ubiquitous, it hasn’t become strategic.

The fragmentation of video content across all our tools has made it more difficult for employees to find and parse what they actually need while preventing leaders from having control and visibility over their content. As a result, the workforce and, ultimately, business performance continue to be impacted by low productivity as well as poor employee engagement and collaboration.

We know there's a better way to get things done. We can make knowledge more available and more engaging, all while keeping content secure and compliant in an organized, intuitive system.

In this guide, we're introducing a new approach to the video-first workplace. We'll pinpoint the most common collaboration, productivity, and engagement hurdles employees face in their day-to-day life as well as how to use a secure, centralized, and AI-powered video hub to solve them. At the end of this guide, every organization and employee should feel empowered to use video in more effective ways and unlock its full potential.

1. Centralize knowledge in a secure, embeddable hub

Picture this: You're in back-to-back meetings all day while trying to field questions coming in from employees asking for info you know can be found in a recent meeting recording.

The inaccessibility and fragmentation of company knowledge in your video archives can leave workers frustrated and unproductive, ultimately affecting your bottom line.

Employees need a centralized place to find information fast. Whether they're looking for new product demos, training materials, executive comms, marketing videos, customer stories, or meeting recordings — a centralized and secure video hub can make all the difference between a three-minute search and a three-hour marathon to finish a single task.

3 steps to build a centralized, searchable video hub

Finding and sharing knowledge — a company’s most valuable asset — shouldn’t be a dreaded experience that requires employees to sift through a Frankenstein of disjointed tools and leads to poor productivity. Organizations can centralize all of their content into a single source of truth with greater control, visibility, and compliance while making it easier for everyone to find what they need.

Here are three painless steps to centralize your video content into a searchable video hub:

A video producer's guide to organizing your video library

Not sure how to get started? Patrick Robinson, Digital Production Manager at Vimeo, shares his tips on how to organize a sprawling video library for Vimeo's creative team.

Learn more about video library →

2. Drive workplace productivity and engagement with Vimeo AI

Another looming challenge is the palpable fear about how AI will change the workplace. While there's a lot to learn, many industries are embracing AI to help speed up their workflows and get more out of their content.

AI is revolutionizing the future of work in a way we’ve never seen before, and one of the areas that will have the biggest gains in productivity and value is around sharing knowledge across an organization.

At Vimeo, we've been working to push the boundary of what's possible with video at work. While AI is already immensely valuable on its own, businesses can get even more benefit when it’s applied to a broader set of end-to-end capabilities that help extract insights and reuse existing content in new ways.

3 ways video-first companies can use AI at work

The ubiquity of video at work comes at a real human cost. Employees spend hours editing and summarizing recordings and having to sift through hours of content to find the answers they need. While video is a valuable medium for communication, the reality is that employees are struggling to maximize its full potential.

Below are three ways we're using AI-powered features in Vimeo Central to speed up your workflow and help you get more out of your content.

1. Recap videos in an instant

Once all of your content is centralized in one place, our new AI capabilities can help drive productivity across your organization by putting your video content to work.

Say you had to miss a company town hall or training session or simply wanted a refresher on the key themes from the recording. Our highlight reels and text summaries are an effective way to recap long video content into shorter segments that enable employees to get up to speed on key takeaways without having to sit through the entire recording.

Rob GilchristDirector of Video Production & Strategy

2. Speed up your workflow with auto-generated video details

Significant time is spent on redundant or complex tasks that are much easier to tackle with smart suggestions. Automatically generate editable titles, tags, and chapters that help make content more useful and searchable for your team.

3. Supercharge employee engagement by asking the video any question

Video today is still a passive viewing experience. At Vimeo, we enhanced our best-in-class player with the ability to ask videos any open-ended question or select from pre-generated Q&A. Then you can watch the moment in the video that answers the question. This transforms videos into a two-way dialogue and drives a superior employee experience by quickly helping people find exactly what they need.

The ability to ask videos a question is beneficial for both video editors and employees viewing the content. "Editors can share pre-generated Q&A" about key takeaways in a follow-up email without having to come up with them themselves, and viewers can instantly get the answer they need by watching the part in the video that answers the question.

Learn more about Vimeo AI →

A marketer's tips for unlocking information with AI

Vimeo’s AI tools make getting the info you need a breeze. Hilary Kay, Senior Director of Integrated Marketing at Vimeo, shares how AI is saving her a ton of time and helping her team get up to speed.

3. Empower employees to collaborate async

How many times have you sat through a meeting and thought, "Could this have been a video recording?" We can definitely think of a few.

The truth is more meetings don't necessarily correlate to more productivity. In fact, according to HBR, new research suggests that 70% of all meetings prevent employees from completing their tasks, which negatively impacts their efficiency and work satisfaction.

There's no question that meetings are a critical form of cross-collaboration and decision-making, but an overload can lead to diminished productivity and employee burnout. To prevent meeting fatigue, teams need to shift their attention to asynchronous methods of collaboration and communication.

To start, let's draw a line in the sand and figure out when to meet IRL for a live meeting versus when to save time with an async meet:

When to meet live

Complex decision-making and urgent issues
For decisions that require multiple stakeholders and real-time feedback or have a time-sensitive element, a live meeting may be your best bet.
Brainstorming sessions
Creative play and spontaneous idea generation are best done live with a group. If some people feel uncomfortable bringing up ideas on the spot, try offering pre-work and instructions before the meeting.
Building relationships and resolving conflicts`
Any team-building and team-bonding activities, introducing new hires, or addressing misunderstandings and conflict are best done live.

When to meet async

Status updates and follow-ups
For regular updates on projects and post-meeting follow-ups, tools like video recordings, working documents, and project management tools can bring visibility to all the moving parts.
Time-zone specific communication
With teams distributed across the globe, it's important to be mindful of different working hours. Weaving in async communication makes it easier for global teams to contribute.
Just-in-time training
For targeted how-to training and department-specific knowledge, readily available training can be an effective way to address knowledge gaps and help team members do their jobs.

Assuming it makes sense to meet async, let’s dive into how cross-functional teams can use a suite of tools to drive better async collaboration across the organization.

1. Capture your message, either by recording yourself, your screen, or both, using a simple browser extension tool. If you have a script prepared, use our smart teleprompter that automatically scrolls as you read through your notes, just like you’re a TV producer. But best of all, if you’re already working in a tool like Figma or Asana, you can record your message directly within these platforms to streamline how you work.

2. Before you share your recording with a wider audience, make sure it’s polished and professional to make a good impression. Use our text-based editor to remove unwanted gaps or audio errors or trim entire sections of the recording if you don’t need them. You can also add AI-generated text summaries and chapters (either manually or through our AI-powered video tools) and add interactive hotspots to make the video more engaging and highlight relevant sections for your audience.

3. Finally, share the recording or specific chapters with your team and have them collaborate through @mentions, comments, and more. Once this video gets uploaded into your shared library, employees can stay on top of new comments or video uploads through Slack or email notifications.

Get started with Vimeo’s screen recorder →

Or explore our video collaboration features →

How a marketer leads cross-functional teams with video

Hilary Kay, Senior Director of Integrated Marketing at Vimeo, shares her best practices on keeping cross-functional teams in lockstep during multi-step product launches and marketing campaigns with video.

4. Transform company events into memorable experiences

Lately, corporate town halls and training sessions have gotten a bit of a bad rap.

The one-to-many broadcast style and default powerpoints are contributing to a trend of employees tuning out and scrolling on their phones — if they even put in the effort to attend at all.

For businesses, the lack of employee engagement comes at a steep cost: Gallup reports actively disengaged employees collectively cost $8.8 trillion in lost productivity, and given that only 23% of the workforce is actually engaged, this is a huge problem.

The best town hall experiences provide a sense of company culture and collective purpose, aligning teams on priorities, making space to celebrate contributions, and inspiring confidence in leadership decision-making.

Reimagining the town hall experience starts with meeting employees where they are. Ask how employees prefer to get information: Do they want to watch live or on demand? What messages or communication styles resonate? And, most importantly, what tools and technology can make for more interactive and less passive experiences?

State of the Vimeo

Dom Scott, Communications Lead at Vimeo, is the mastermind behind Vimeo's internal town hall series called State of the Vimeo.

While Vimeo's internal broadcasts are managed by the production team, Dom works post-event to edit and upload on-demand recordings that are accessible to all employees. Check out her tips below on the post-production process.

The anatomy of a can't-miss company event

What makes a great town hall isn't just the live moment: It's the entire pre-production, live, and post-production process that makes for an engaging experience for employees. To really captivate a global audience and create a more streamlined workflow, organizations should re-evaluate their process to see where improvements can be made.

Pre-production

Before going live with a town hall event, internal communications teams pour time and energy into preparing a cohesive agenda, videos, visuals, speakers, and slide decks to present. This is often a time- and resource-intensive part of the production process.

Pre-record segments: Feeling a little camera shy or can't make the live town hall? Pre-record and edit segments beforehand. Then, play back recorded footage through a “simulive” experience during the live event.
Capture Q&A: Collect key questions from employees in advance through async video recordings or by letting them ask any question using our AI-powered tools

During the event

Create engaging viewing experiences: Leverage Venues, our dynamic and highly interactive viewing experience, to foster deeper connections between employees through personalized GIFs, customizable agendas, embeddable widgets that connect to third-party tools, hand raises, and more.
Sort employees into breakout rooms: Drive deeper retention of knowledge by flexibly sorting employees into predetermined rooms based on any registration field criteria, such as team or region.
Produce professional events with ease: Host with confidence using our browser-based production studio, or stream with RTMP for more advanced users. Leverage our Enterprise-grade live production services and quality like eCDN, fail-safe streaming, and backup streams.
Weave in intro and outro cards, interstitials, and music: Break up your event content with branded intro and outro cards, interstitial content, and music for a richer, more dynamic live experience. A buttoned-up presentation also adds an element of professionalism and shows that you’ve put a lot of thought into the event.

Post-production

The value of a town hall should extend beyond the live event. To make content stick, it's important that on-demand recordings are digestible and easy to navigate. They should also allow employees the flexibility to jump through content to get answers they need or reinforce key messages.

Edit recordings for brevity: Trim your footage to only include relevant sections, or use our text based editor to polish your recording.
Repurpose content with AI: Let AI do the heavy lifting of generating titles, chapters, highlight reels, and text summaries to enable employees to quickly find what they need and get more out of existing content.
Make it accessible: Add transcripts, closed captions, or multiple language tracks to make sure your global team can search and find what they're looking for.

5. Measure employee engagement to drive ROI

We know that leaders spend 3–10 hours per week preparing essential communications for employees — but what’s the point if no one is actually absorbing that content? Ineffective communications costs US organizations $2 trillion per year in time and productivity.

The difference between putting something out there, and knowing exactly how it lands with employees, is key.

3 ways for businesses to use video analytics

Measure the impact of your internal communications by tracking employee engagement in our comprehensive analytics dashboard.
Our team and viewer-level analytics enable admins and owners to track which employees have viewed a video and for how long, identifying those who may still need to complete a training.
Organizations can also leverage our new Analytics API to generate a holistic picture of how your employees are engaging alongside existing data and systems such as Tableau, Looker, or PowerBI.

A product manager shows us how to track video engagement

Kathy Li, Senior Product Manager at Vimeo, walks us through how to tell who’s watched your video and how to pull team reports on viewing stats.

Learn more about video analytics →

Reimagining the way we work with video

Tackling today's workplace challenges isn't just about finding a single tactical fix — it's about rethinking how we work, evaluating the tools we use, and refining our workflows to better suit individual organization, team, and contributor preferences.

A centralized video solution powered by AI can free up time by making it easier to find information fast and unlock insights buried within videos. When used strategically, video can also give us a much-needed break from back-to-back meetings, keep teams connected, and help humanize internal communications.

Yael Burla
Yael Burla has a decade of GTM and Product Strategy experience at AI-driven software companies across early-stage, late-stage, and public organizations. She is a Principal Product Marketer at Vimeo, where she leads the GTM Strategy for AI and several other product areas, focusing on redefining the future of work through video. She has a background in Neuroscience, which she leverages to develop AI in a human-centered way and solve customer pain points through long-term differentiation.