Recently I've been experimenting with recording videos to asynchronously relay information to my team, instead of waiting for a meeting.
The videos I've made have been really well received by my team, and I've also appreciated when other coworkers have done this for my benefit. We tend to use it when we have been investigating problems by ourselves, and need to present information back to the rest of the team. Anything that can be presented in a real time meeting or video call can be recorded as a video instead.
Async video vs live meetings
The main disadvantage of async video is you can't respond to feedback right away and adapt the content to the audience on the fly. So for it to be useful you need a good understanding of what your audience need to know.
That said, async provides a lot of flexibility:
- when you are working part time, it's a way to check in with your team when you're not working
- when you have leave coming up, it can function as a handover
- if the team have different schedules, it can be quicker than finding a time when everyone can meet
- team members know up front how long it will take to watch and can watch at a time that suits them
If you have a lot of information to present, you can chunk up the content into smaller videos. If not all of the information is relevant to the whole team, then you can target videos to different audiences and tell the team to skip any they don't need to watch.
Video vs text
Another alternative to video is preparing written documentation. Sometimes this is more appropriate, but I think video has a number of advantages:
- it's likely to be less formal and easier for people to consume
- it's multi-sensory: you can show things at the same time as talking about them
- it's sometimes quicker to produce or just fits the content better, e.g. when demoing a product feature
You can always combine the two by providing slides or written notes alongside the video. I recently prepared a quick presentation in markdown, presented it via the Obsidian slides plugin and then shared the raw markdown alongside the video recording.
How to record video
Loom is a tool that is built for this, but they limit the number of recordings and video length unless you pay for a license.
Another option is to join a video call with just yourself, and record it. This gives you much of the same functionality as loom, but it's a bit fiddly if you want to restart the recording. I've done this with Zoom, but I think Google Hangouts or other tools would work equally well.
I like this solution because it comes with automatically generated subtitles. This doesn't work perfectly, but it makes the content more accessible for anyone who is hard of hearing or doesn't speak english as a native language. When I post one of these recordings into slack, it also generates a transcript, allowing people to skim the talk or jump ahead.
If you are using a mac you can also record your screen in quicktime.
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