Wednesday 7th January 2009
Malmaison and Hotel Du Vin, the boutique hotels group, has seen a 60% increase in benefits engagement since the introduction of new web videos which explain their online benefits system in English and Polish.
The three videos, produced by Malmaison’s consultants at Asperity Employee Benefits showcase the MalHDV Rewards website to employees using a special web video technique known as screencasting. Screencasting combines a video of a website, showing mouse movements and keyboard strokes, with a specially recorded audio track. Asperity produced audio tracks in English and Polish as a pilot covering Malmaison’s two largest natural language.
Around 35% of Malmaison’s 2000 UK based staff are from Eastern Europe and the majority of those are Polish. Employee research suggested that this group was under-performing in it’s engagement with the employee benefits offered at Malmaison and this made a Polish language version of the video an important requirement in the project.
Malmaison’s Group Director of People Development Sean Wheeler said ‘Almost half of our staff have English as a second language and as a group of almost 900 they are a key part of our workforce. It’s critical that we engage with all of our people and this made the Polish language implementations of
The project began in Autumn of 2008 and management information data was tracked through a pilot to the end of December. Initial data has shown an increase in registrations of 60% over the previous quarter which Malmaison and Asperity attribute to the new videos and the promotional work across the group estate. Importantly, the benefits registration process has shown that over 80% of employees who saw the new screencast videos went on to register with the benefits programme.
Glenn Elliott, Asperity’s MD said “Screencasting is a really useful technique which provides many of the benefits of video with a much lower cost than full video production. It’s great for demonstrating online systems and with the success of this pilot we’ll be developing further modules to help clients cost-effectively communicate all parts of their benefits to employees.”
Malmaison and Asperity now plan to build on the success of the pilot by rolling out additional multi language screencasts on other parts of the benefits programme including Childcare Vouchers.