A short-form video strategy for earning employee attention
Merck used humor to get buy in.
By Sean Devlin, editor, Ragan Communications
Before Merck’s communications team released a single lesson in its new employee training series, it posted a run of TikTok-style sketches starring a senior communications leader. And the employee audience responded to them — the sketches pulled in nearly 1,000 subscribers to the series.
At Ragan’s Employee Experience Conference in Nashville, Craig Thomason, director of global employee and executive communications at Communications Council member Merck, said that employee-facing executive videos work best when leaders get on board at the outset.
“When you arrive early to change, you have time to think,” Thomason said. “You have time to prepare. You have time to experiment. You have time to adjust, and you can help people to understand what is happening before the uncertainty fills the silence.”
Thomason said the harder part is getting employees to spend two minutes watching.
“When we begin with content, we often create messages to answer questions no one is asking,” he said. “So when we begin with the audience, we can create something that they can use.”
Merck’s version of that is Communicate to Connect. In the video series, employees at all levels can learn to communicate better. Its instructors include scientists, marketers and salespeople. Entertaining sketches are also a part of the equation. In one of them, Thomason and his boss’ boss play coworkers who can’t stand each other. Using familiar faces as cast members resonated with Merck’s audience, Thomason said.
“People were like, ‘This is the content I didn’t know that I needed,’” he said. “And people would tune in every week to see if there was another video between the two of us.”
By the time the instructional videos launched on Merck’s internal platform, 2,000 subscribers were waiting for them.
“It lowered barriers,” Thomason told the audience. “It created familiarity, and it gave employees an opportunity to see leaders as people instead of positions. And once that sense of community began to form, important messages can travel further and further.”
Thomason tracks reach, engagement, watch completions and business impact. But he said the sketches paid off in a way no single metric captures.
“If employees only hear from leaders during a reorganization, a crisis, or a strategy launch, or a request to do something difficult, every message begins with a trust deficit,” he said. “Humor helps us to be able to begin with credit because people are already invested.”
Council members have full access to Thomason's presentation at Ragan Training.