Ever thought your workplace was so awesome and funny that you just had to make a video about it? Well, you can. They’re called “company culture videos” and, essentially, they are short films that display everything that is great about working for your company.
They are supposed to be aimed at potential hires, acting as a way to entice them into working for you. And that’s not all: they can even work as PR for your company should you ever be struck by Deliveroo-type worker unrest.
But really we know that they come with a built in secondary audience: the people who already work at your company who want to see how great they look on screen and send the video to all their friends to show off about their jobs.
Put this secondary audience out of your mind for now momentarily. We are going to talk about what you need to do to make a company culture video that truly displays what a wonderful place your office is, and how lucky anyone else would be to work there.
Structure
No matter how entertaining you think it would be, you can’t just film ten minutes of office activity and put that online. That is not enough. There has to be some structure to it.
And don’t go thinking that you can just film an entire eight hour day at your office and edit it into a montage of all the classic shenanigans you and your colleagues get up to. What you need is some way of giving order to the events of the video in a way that will keeping viewers viewing.
A production company (like, say, TellyJuice) can help you with this. For an example of what we mean, take a look at this company culture video from everyone’s favourite Seattle-based mermaid coffee chain Starbucks.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xnHeu0aK3Eg
This video is structured around the experiences of new Starbucks recruits, each of them telling their stories in tandem until they finally meet up in the film’s final frames. This is the Love Actually of company culture videos, in other words.
Big yourself up
Do not be afraid to brag about your company being the best. You’re trying to get people to work there after all.
Bigging yourself up can involve anything from bragging about a specific company achievement to having the stars of the video make bold claims about just how amazing they are. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Apple chose both of these options.
The latter half of this video explains the detailed process behind one of Apple’s signature achievements: the flappy iPad cover. These covers are real technological miracles, and it is a wonder that Apple pulled them off. The video shows just how much talent that took, and the kind of teamwork you could be a part of if you worked there.
But none of this comes before the Apple employees on screen make some of the most ridiculously grandiose statements ever committed to film without one trace of irony. At around 1:03, a not so humble engineer says the following: “Thinking outside the box… It’s funny: we don’t even really think about the box.”
Another Apple worker later says that she and her colleagues are “changing the world.” It is not clear if each interviewee here is competing to be the most hyperbolic in order to be the next Steve Jobs or if Jobs-esque grandiosity is a minimum requirement to work at Apple. Either way, this seems to be an accurate representation of the brand.
Have fun with it
I know we have been pretty sardonic so far in this article, so it might be hard for you to believe us when we say that Twitter’s company culture video is genuinely funny. Watch it for yourself:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vccZkELgEsU
See? We (unlike Twitter) were not kidding. A sense of humour is very important to a company culture video. Any potential employees have to spend a large chunk of their time in your offices after all, so make sure your company comes across as a fun one to work for.
So if you’ve got comedy chops like a martial arts master doing stand-up, there is no better time to test them out than during the production of your company culture video.
Muppets
Okay, it’s been done, but Dropbox used muppets for their company culture video and we thought that deserved its own entry.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ZuxQcp84o0
To sum up, company culture videos can perfectly encapsulate all that is good about working for your business and these are just some of the ways they can do it.
For more information on company culture videos and corporate videos of all kinds, get in touch with TellyJuice today.
