Diversity, equity, and inclusion is a shared responsibility within an organization. The process of challenging biases, promoting psychological safety, and confronting inequitable practices requires a massive amount of learning (and unlearning). While it makes sense that learning design would fall on Learning & Development teams, it can be somewhat of a Sisyphean task to make sure these important concepts reach everybody at the organization.
At Vyond, we’re proud to have customers like Texas State who are tackling that challenge with video through interdepartmental partnerships and collaboration. Video is, after all, one of the most powerful communication tools we have today. As many as 98% of enterprise organizations believe video is valuable for improving communication and training employees more effectively. Vyond Studio makes it easy for anybody to create videos for internal communication.
Texas State’s Office of Human Resources and Talent Acquisition teams met the DEI call with a re-commitment to enabling diverse hiring practices. To create their Diversity Hiring Toolkit, the Organizational Development and Communications team reached for Vyond to get big ideas across in an engaging and visual way.
Using Video to Promote Diversity in Hiring
1. What is your team at the Office of Human Resources responsible for, and how does it support the larger mission of Texas State University?
The Organizational Development and Communications team goal is to empower learning, nurture growth, enhance performance, and strengthen leadership skills at Texas State. The team also focuses on creating HR communications that promote awareness and employee engagement. We provide support to the other five areas within HR, including Benefits, Compensation, Employee Relations, our Master Data Center, and Work Life.
Part of the university’s mission is to “embrace a diversity of people and ideas”. Our support for the university is visible through the partnerships we have across campus and our accomplishments in rolling out multiple projects and communications to support the mission and bolster our commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion. The Staff Diversity Toolkit project specifically targets that part of the mission by providing supervisors and hiring teams with the best practices and resources to recruit and interview inclusively.
We create content with our employee audience always in mind and make sure to find a way to meet their needs through either development or communications. We strive to always make sure our content is engaging, clear, and most of all accessible for our vibrant and diverse campus community.
One of our goals – to strengthen and empower leadership skills – aligns directly with the expectation of leaders to maintain ethical standards and inclusive practices that reflect Texas State’s mission, vision and values. As we are part of the Office of Human Resources, it is within our purview to set and maintain the example for an inclusive and healthy work environment and culture, and follow through with our ability to institute change and practice inclusive excellence through our communications, training and development function.
2. Tell us more about Texas State’s recent recommitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion. What role does your team play in meeting that priority?
Texas State University values a diversity of people and ideas, a spirit of inclusiveness, a global perspective and a sense of community as essential conditions for campus life. Our role in supporting that mission is through collaboration on projects such as this one.
The Staff Diversity Hiring Toolkit project aligns with Texas State University’s shared values of embracing a diversity of people and ideas, and of building a spirit of inclusiveness across campuses. This toolkit supports the culture of inclusion at Texas State by providing a comprehensive review for recruiting, screening, and hiring for diversity.
3. How did the Staff Diversity Toolkit come into being?
The Texas State Talent Acquisition team researched universities across the country to see how others implemented diversity hiring training and found that most higher education institutions had toolkits in place for promoting diverse recruiting best practices. The Talent Acquisition team then reached out to our OD & Communications team for ideas on how to roll out a Staff Diversity Hiring Toolkit to campus. Together we came up with the idea of using the research gathered to create two videos coupled with a best practices digital handbook. The goal was to make the content easy to digest and retain so the creation of these materials was the most practical solution for our audience. The process for implementation started in early January 2020 and launched to campus in May 2020.
4. How did your team discover Vyond, and why did you choose it to develop the Staff Diversity Toolkit?
In early 2019 we assigned our communications intern the task of researching the pros and cons of a few different animation platforms. After completing a 14-day trial and playing with the tools in each, it was easy to see Vyond was going to be the best fit for our team given its features and design capabilities. We purchased Vyond that summer and the following semester our next communications intern was tasked with helping rollout the Staff Diversity Hiring Toolkit using Vyond. After learning a little more about the scope of this project and the details required to be included, we knew we wanted to make the content engaging to offset the jargon heavy policy verbiage.
5. What did you learn in the process of creating the Staff Diversity Toolkit? Any key results or insights?
Since this was our first time using a video software like this in our projects, it provided a lot of insight into the flexibility of visual communication and impact on engagement. We were excited to learn how much information we could share creatively in a short amount of time through video. We also learned a lot more about script writing for training purposes. We were very excited to try a friendlier approach to sharing information since often policies and other HR related topics are easy to overlook due to their length and jargon.
6. Describe your approach to creating these training videos.
At first, we started with a very lengthy and verbose word document which we quickly translated into a friendly training script. Once we had the script, we started storyboarding the scenes. After running all initial drafts through the project team, it was time to begin creating the templates in Vyond. We had multiple Vyond drafts until the final video was vetted and approved by all members of the team. Since this was the first project where we incorporated Vyond as the primary channel, our approach was very structured with detailed guidelines, multiple status updates, and deadlines in place.
Get big ideas across with video.
Whether you’re tackling inequity or introducing your team, video is one of the strongest tools in your internal communications toolkit. Vyond’s drag-and-drop animation studio gives everybody the power of video, no experience necessary. Create your own videos like Texas State and start making media that moves with Vyond’s 14-day free trial.
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