We all know it’s good to have friends at work. But how important is it?

According to a recent Gallup study, employees with strong social connections in the workplace are more productive and more passionate about their jobs. Therefore, providing opportunities for co-workers to form social bonds is a critical element in fostering a productive work culture.

However, the problem of getting to know new colleagues can be difficult when there are multiple office locations across the country — or even the world. Technologies like video conferencing and online chat have made it much easier for geographically diverse employees to work together, but often those interactions are limited to completing the task at hand, leaving little time for getting to know each other on a more personal level.

New Hire “About Me” Videos: An easy way to support socialization during onboarding

While you might consider flying all your new hires to each of your corporate offices to help them get acquainted with all the people they’ll interact with in their new position, there’s a more efficient and economical way: video.

Here at Panopto, with offices in Seattle, Pittsburgh, London, Hong Kong, and Beijing, our colleagues are spread worldwide. We’ve put our video platform to work in our employee onboarding process by asking all our new hires to create short videos that introduce themselves to the company using their laptop or smartphone. The videos are then uploaded to our internal video library, which serves as a searchable directory of coworkers that the entire company can access.

Here are two examples from Panopto’s employee introduction video library:

We love watching employee introduction videos because they give us glimpses into our new coworkers’ lives that we may not have learned just from our day-to-day office interactions. These videos are a great way to get to know your colleagues beyond just “Jenn from Engineering” to “Jenn in Engineering, who’s into mountaineering and is also a big Sounders fan.”

These unique “About Me” videos aren’t just for incumbent employees to get to know office newbies. It’s just as helpful on the flipside. Allowing new hires to access employee videos before their first day helps your newest team members familiarize themselves with the faces they’ll meet and get a feel for your company’s culture.

Record your own About Me video!

Panopto Express, our free screen recorder, makes it easy to record and share an “about me” video or any other video presentation. Capture multi-stream videos from your browser – you don’t even need to sign up. Give it a try!