


“During the pandemic, everyone's using video and what happens is you start to get a little bit of ‘shiny object syndrome,’” she says, “because everything looks like a good opportunity.” That means we need to ask our employees to participate, whether it's live Q&A, ‘click here,’ or ‘choose your own adventure.’ If you don’t engage people as part of a conversation, they're not going to sit there and watch something and listen to it and just pay attention.”Īs for Vimeo’s future, Sud says she has learned some important lessons, too. We have to move from this idea of a lean-back broadcast and create more of a lean-forward engagement. Even if they don't agree with your decision, or it's a hard decision- and I've made my share of them in the last year-people will respect it a lot more if you take the time to explain the why.”Įveryone Participates: “My last lesson speaks to interactive video. “I think people today want to feel like you are being transparent. That's kind of like a Comms 101 No-No: Traditional comms was like just ‘tell them what you know you need to tell them.’” Explaining to people that, not just ‘oh we made this difficult decision or we're going to do X instead of Y, but giving them the respect to share the context, hear the trade-offs: here's how we made the decision, here's who was involved. Start With The Why: “The other thing I see a lot, particularly from the newer generation, is they don't want to be told about a decision-or the what-without starting with the why. I'm betting that the leaders of tomorrow will get far more out of their teams if they can be comfortable being unscripted.” “We have to teach ourselves to take the mask off and be comfortable being direct in a video-not just the words we say but our body language, the context. But when I just record a message from me to our employees, telling them about important news, the more unscripted I can be, the more real and trusted it comes across as.” The power of communicating in video instead of an email is that the email got edited and your comms team wrote it and then somebody like changed this word. For that, Sud says that she’s learned some lessons:ĭitch The Script: “The first is that you have to be comfortable-and in some ways it's like an act of real vulnerability-to be real and unscripted.
