Scientific Games knows fun.
As one of the biggest suppliers of gaming and lottery products for the world’s best casinos, the 114-year old company specializes in having a good time. It’s not always so easy, however, to bring that same sense of fun to typically boring topics.
HR professionals around the world perpetually struggle to make dense and complex topics engaging for employees, and few subjects are as complicated as employee benefits. To make these important policies more accessible, Susie Fotheringham and her team at Scientific Games reached for video.
Read our interview with Susie to hear how enterprises like Scientific Games make employee benefits enrollment fun with effective videos created in Vyond Studio.
Q&A with Susie Fotheringham, Director of Employee Benefits at Scientific Games
How did the pandemic impact the work you and your team were doing?
A lot of the ways we communicate benefits are visual – whether it’s signage in offices, in-person conversation or onsite presentations. With the majority of our employees working from home, we lost that connection and visibility. We had to get creative. Our employees’ needs to get care and learn about care relied on virtual options. We had to adapt quickly.
Why did you choose to use video?
Let’s face it. How many Zoom meetings have you attended last year? PowerPoint animation isn’t as engaging as we’d like it to be, either.
We wanted to illustrate our message in a fun way that would capture the attention of our audience. We ourselves as a team found animation and video as a much easier way to digest complex benefits information.
Open Enrollment is our Superbowl; our main event each year. We wanted to explain our benefits and provide resources that you didn’t just have to read or listen to. Videos and animation provided a way to illustrate what we were trying to communicate. It was painting a picture with real paint, not just the audience’s imagination. We told a memorable story that resonated with people more than a flyer or bullet point on a slide ever could.
Why did you choose to create these videos yourself?
Truthfully, the cost to outsource it didn’t fit our budget. We had a vision of what we wanted to do and once we realized that it wasn’t very hard to do (i.e., I cannot draw a stick figure) the choice was made for us. It also helped that it was incredibly fun.
Did you find it challenging to make these videos yourself?
The initial challenge was believing we could create videos with absolutely no experience in this space. We honestly were surprised at how easy Vyond made the process.
We kept improving our output because we learned new techniques or because of a recent product release.
The art of doing a voiceover was and still is the biggest challenge. We learned it’s very common to be hypercritical of your own voice and it’s something that you have to get over. We gained so much appreciation and respect we have for people that create videos and animation. We learned so much about the process and started noticing the production value in commercials we saw on TV, videos other members of the Vyond Maker Community shared, and the template videos put out by Vyond.
How do you make content that’s typically boring more engaging?
Humor and human connection. Particularly in the last year, we all needed a laugh. It has more of an impact when it’s not expected, and trust me, getting someone to laugh about the importance of life insurance is a badge I’ll wear all decade.
We also made a human connection by introducing our benefits team with characters that looked like us.
How does making a human connection help HR professionals in this kind of work?
It is Human Resources, after all! Personal or human connection is literally embedded in every function of Human Resources – particularly benefits.
Benefits affect you, your family, wellbeing and more often than not, people don’t invest the time to learn about it until either they are sick or someone they love is sick. As HR/Benefits professionals we have an opportunity to advise people on the value of being proactive. Taking the time to invest in a multi-channel approach ensures that you engage more people and Vyond gave us the opportunity to do that and do it well.
Create engaging HR videos.
With Vyond, anybody can create compelling content that gets their message across. By giving yourself the power of video, you can communicate in a more dynamic, engaging, and fun way. Vyond Studio is designed to empower all kinds of businesses to make media that moves, even if they don’t have any video experts on the team. All you need is a little imagination. Give it a try with a 14-day free trial of Vyond.
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