Enterprise Live Streaming: Should You Do It?

The enquiries I usually get are from companies who want to better understand what’s involved in live streaming. It’s not too hard for me to quickly find that there’s an even bigger question they have that they haven’t voiced yet: “Why do companies live stream meetings?”.

Employee Engagement and Corporate Transparency

We now work in a world where employees, customers and fans expect corporate transparency. In this era of heightened corporate transparency, greater workforce mobility, and severe skills shortages, the top issues for business leaders are culture, engagement, and retention [1].  Worldwide, only 13% of employees are engaged at work and the lack of engagement has a very real effect on the bottom line of companies. Companies with engaged employees are 2X-4X more likely to succeed and outperform on predictors of organisational performance [2]. The companies I work with are deeply committed to keeping their employees engaged and improving workplace culture across all their offices by:

• Enabling executive leadership to directly connect with all employees, respond timely to company concerns and foster greater alignment with company vision and strategy.
• Allowing teams (Eg. marketing teams, product teams) across geographies, platforms and devices to unobtrusively connect to department meetings or catch-up on meetings at a convenient time.

Whether these are companies of a few hundred, few thousand or fifty thousand+ employees, they all experience a common challenge. We now live in a digital world competing to capture attention. Live video now gets more attention and priority over other means of communication. Moreover, being able to watch a company meeting live or on catch-up as well as participate in the live streamed events by asking questions and making comments is much more interesting for employees at HQ or dispersed nationally and globally, working onsite, offsite, remotely or on-the-go.

Live Streaming Townhalls and All Hands Meetings

A great way to approach live streaming is to first focus on key events that are relevant to the whole company such as CEO Townhalls and All Hands meetings. Once you’ve successfully held a few of these, you can live stream meetings for targeted groups within the company such as Tech Review meetings and Product All Hands Meetings. The larger the size of your company, the more critical it is to be able to regularly and rapidly communicate with employees wherever they might be.

Take Facebook for example. At Facebook, the most important driver of engagement is pride in the company [3]. Weekly Q&A with Facebook CEO, Mark Zuckerberg is reliably live streamed to all employees across the company worldwide. The regular and transparent communication between Facebook employees, their CEO and other executive leadership at Facebook builds optimism in the company’s future, alignment with its vision and goals, and belief among the employees it is doing social good. These three factors combine to form the feeling of pride that Facebook employees experience.

So if your company wants to build a culture with greater transparency and increased open communication, consider live streaming as a tool that you can leverage.

Selecting a Live Streaming Provider for Internal Communications

The first step is to plan your live streaming strategy such as the events you want to live stream over the calendar year and how you wish to make these interactive and engaging. Then, as you search for a live streaming platform, keep in mind that not all live streaming platforms are created equal. Make sure you look for a provider that can offer your company a great workflow for live streaming your events, security and reliability in video delivery as well as meaningful audience insights.

If you have any questions or would like more information on any of the points discussed above, feel free reach out at any time!

[1] Brown et al., ‘Culture and engagement’, Deloitte University Press (link)

[2] Gallup, Inc. ‘State of the Global Workplace Report 2013’ (link)

[3] Goler et al.,’The power of pride at Facebook’, Fast Company, April 2017 (link)