Your Employees Are an Audience, Too
Marketing teams plan content for buyers who may never call, while their own employees get leadership’s message secondhand through memos and manager meetings. A recurring, candid CEO video update ends the telephone game, even at companies small enough to believe everyone is already aligned.
One 800-person company recently brought in a new CEO, and employees felt the distance immediately. They didn’t know this person. They had no particular reason to trust them, and no idea whether the new leader could take the company somewhere better.
The company’s answer was CEO video updates, recorded monthly. Most Marcom teams may not recognize that situation as a job for video. Content planning usually starts and ends with external audiences, and the one audience every company has, its own people, gets left to memos and manager meetings.
This is for marketing and business leaders who’ve never considered internal communication part of their video content plan. If you already run regular leadership video, you’ve solved this.
Learn more by watching “The 6 Pillars of B2B Content” on the Content Wars Podcast.
What Gets Lost Between the Executive Team and Everyone Else
When people don’t hear directly from leadership, they fill in the blanks. A decision gets explained to managers, who then explain it to their teams, and every handoff changes the message a little.
One publicly traded company fixed this with video. Instead of leadership trying to reach every employee in person, they record the message once: here’s the policy change, here’s the new approach. Managers then meet with their teams to work through questions in more detail. The message from the top is delivered one time, the same way, to everyone, and the telephone game loses most of its power.
Internal Communication Is Not a Big-Company Problem
The usual objection is that internal comms belongs to HR or to companies far larger than yours.
Smaller companies make the size argument constantly. We only have 30 or 40 people, the thinking goes, so everyone already knows what’s happening. Poll those 30 or 40 people and you’ll get a surprising range of opinions about what’s going on with the company. Unless they’re hearing from executives regularly, they’re guessing.
The need grows as an organization adds departments and layers, but it starts early. Who owns it matters less than whether it happens. Your employees are an audience, and they need the company’s message in a form they’ll actually consume.
Why CEO Video Updates Work Better Than the Memo
At the 800-person company, the plan is simple. Once a month, the CEO sits down on camera and lays out what’s going on, the good news and the bad. Then the CEO explains what leadership is doing about it and what’s expected of employees as a result.
That format does something a memo can’t. Employees see and hear the person asking for their trust, every month, including the months when the news isn’t good. And they leave each update knowing what leadership is doing on their behalf and what’s being asked of them in return.
What should a CEO video update include? An honest account of what’s happening in the company, including the bad news, and what leadership is doing about it. It should end with a specific ask, so employees know what’s expected of them as a result.
How to Make CEO Video Updates Stick
Pick a cadence and protect it. Monthly works, and the value comes from repetition. A single video from a new CEO is an introduction. Twelve of them is a relationship.
Keep the structure the same every time, so employees know what they’re getting and the CEO knows what to prepare. Let managers own the follow-up conversations, the way the public company does, so the video carries the message and managers carry the questions.
The strongest objection is that executives won’t be candid on camera, and the whole thing turns into polished PR. That risk is real. It’s also why the bad news is the most important part of the format. Employees can tell the difference between a leader explaining a hard quarter and a leader performing optimism. If the updates only ever share good news, people stop watching, and the company is back to the telephone game with a production budget attached.
Your Employees Are Already Telling Themselves a Story
Every company has an internal narrative about where it’s heading and whether leadership knows what it’s doing. Leadership either shapes that narrative or leaves it to the water cooler talk.
Marketing teams spend months planning how to reach buyers who might never call. The people already on your payroll deserve at least a monthly video from the brass at the top.
