As more and more companies shift to hybrid environments, visual communication plays a central role in conveying your cultural narrative of D&I.
by Powtoon
In 2021, if your company doesn’t already have a plan to address diversity and inclusion, you are lagging behind reality. Key changes in the workforce have made this issue more urgent than ever. But there is a way to address diversity and inclusion in the way your company communicates.
What Employees Expect: The Generational Reality
By 2025, Millennials will account for as much as 75% of the workforce. While Baby Boomer and Gen X employees generally view D&I as a representation of fairness and a diversity of demographics, Millennials view D&I as the blending of different backgrounds, experiences, and perspectives within a team, also known as cognitive diversity.
In other words, Millennials are more interested in the willingness of a company to embrace a diversity of ideas and perspectives while recognizing that such diversity yields a more engaged and productive culture. Unlike previous generations, for Millennials, the subjective factors of an “open and inclusive culture” is more important than the hardcore stats.
The Gen Z perspective on D&I is much broader, spanning diversity of experiences, identities, ideas, and opinions. They also refuse to turn ethnicity and race into a checkbox on a survey form. For the Gen Z employees, a company culture that lacks diversity and inclusion values and initiatives will sharply stick out more.
How to ensure HR Communication is Visually Inclusive?
Inclusivity is not always felt by hard numbers on a paper. Sometimes it’s what you can see and visualize. As more and more companies shift to hybrid environments, visual communication plays a central role in conveying your cultural narrative of D&I.
Through the visual materials that your HR team creates, you can do a lot to help foster a more inclusive culture and address representation gaps. While Clipart and PowerPoint can be convenient tools, if you want to reflect your company’s diversity, then your HR team should be creating videos.
Video will have a more significant emotional impact on your employees, providing additional room to express and visualize your culture. In doing so, they help tackle stereotypes and address unconscious biases.
How do you build Diversity in your branding?
You can do so by creating Custom characters are animated characters whose features can be set to match… well, whatever you’d like them to! That means fine tuning skin tone, face shape, hairstyle, clothes, height, accessories, and more.
With Powtoon’s Visual Communication Platform, your HR team can very easily create characters and include them in videos and presentations without the hefty price tag of a creative agency. They can make as many characters as they like, in the way that reflects their people and brand.
Let’s say you need to prepare a complete training presentation, an onboarding program, a company update, a recruitment video, or a meeting recap, creating custom characters offers a great way to show off company culture as well as the colorfulness of your team.
Not only will custom characters help build a more inclusive workplace, but they can also spice up your videos and add personality to a somewhat dry or uncomfortable topic like in this example on breast screening created by Anthem Insurance: https://powtoon.wistia.com/medias/pvpf3lllia
Diverse characters and videos are not just about picking great designs. It’s about making sure your HR communication makes employees feel comfortable, welcome, and more engaged.
These visual cues and nuances can have an immense, positive impact on your employees. The characters look like them, dress like them, and act like them. Suddenly, employees feel that your message is addressing them directly and is more likely to be consumed and applied in their day-to-day work.
To learn more about how your HR team can build a more inclusive and engaged company culture with Powtoon, visit this page.
You can find Powtoon on the hrtech Marketplace under the Talent Development category.
About the Author:
Used by over 30M people worldwide, Powtoon’s all-in-one visual communication platform empowers individuals, teams, and enterprises to transform complex and scattered information into powerful videos and visual content with a professional look and feel.
Powtoon’s collaborative platform makes visual communication easy to create, simple to manage, and quick to distribute. With hundreds of inspirational templates, branded characters, and millions of royalty-free footage and images, easily create videos in every style and format — animated explainers, whiteboard tutorials, promotional videos, screen recordings, video infographics, face-to-camera videos, and beyond!
About hrtech:
Founded in 2018, hrtech is a Singapore-based HRTech Analyst firm dedicated to facilitating Workplace and Workforce Transformations that drive impactful Business and HR outcomes. Our ultimate vision is to empower HR professionals to transform their organizations by seamlessly integrating technology and human-centric approaches.
From our very beginning, we have been committed to building a TECH-DRIVEN and DATA-CENTRIC HR ECOSYSTEM that empowers organizations to achieve successful Workplace and Talent Transformations, while enabling HR teams to evolve into Strategic Business Partners.