Empowering Colleagues to Share Knowledge Companywide

• 
• 
• 

Formed in 2006, Virgin Media serves millions of customers in the United Kingdom with television, broadband internet, and telephony services. Virgin Media employees continuously push themselves to “change the game,” a phrase that describes their dedication to doing things better, smarter, and faster than anyone else.

The company was formed through several mergers throughout the years, bringing people with different backgrounds and experiences together to form what is known as Virgin Media today. As one of the largest media companies in the world, Virgin Media has thousands of colleagues to train and support every day.

The Virgin Media workforce collectively holds years of company history and specialized knowledge. However, this ‘tacit’ knowledge is notoriously difficult to capture and share. When Casson McRae, a learning technologies business partner on the training and development team at Virgin Media, tasked himself with changing the game of training at the company, he turned to TechSmith for help.

The challenge

Casson and the training and development team at Virgin Media knew that years of personal experience and knowledge was locked away in the minds of peers across the company. More importantly, a number of those peers were getting close to retirement. Casson and his team needed to find a way that would allow everyone to share their personal knowledge quickly and easily.

“We have an internal social network at Virgin Media on which colleagues share information every day,” said Casson. “We wanted a more effective approach to sharing information across this network, which is why we decided to focus on video as an engaging way to capture and share knowledge from colleagues.”

While video recording and editing programs are more affordable and powerful than ever, Casson didn’t want to make the video process difficult or intimidating with the complex features found in many video programs. He needed a simple interface with the ability to record sound and the screen in front of the employee.

The solution

The training team turned to TechSmith Snagit for simple video recording and sharing. Snagit allows users to make quick and simple screen recordings that can be shared on nearly any platform, making it the perfect tool for the job. However, instead of simply rolling Snagit out to 150 colleagues, Casson and his team decided to roll it out to 15,000 employees company wide instead.

“Snagit makes it easy for all of our colleagues to quickly record their knowledge as simple videos for peers to use to do their jobs.” said Casson. “Colleagues are able walk through a routine process or respond to questions with videos and share them through our internal social network for all to see.”

With the simplicity of video recording in Snagit, the training and development team was able to focus on sharing knowledge between colleagues, instead of training peers on best practices for video effects or advanced video editing functions. All colleagues had to do was gather their thoughts and press the record button to make short, informative videos for their peers.

The results

As more colleagues watch videos created by their colleagues, they are able to see just how easy it is to share knowledge with video. By installing Snagit on computers across the company, Virgin Media colleagues already have everything they need to make informative videos and images of their own.

“Training departments today can’t know everything,” said Casson. “We have to rely on the expertise of our colleagues and show them the most efficient and effective ways to share their personal knowledge with others. Snagit makes it easy for us to empower colleagues across the company to do just that.”

As retiring colleagues share the videos they have created, Casson and the training and development team encourage others to share their expertise by creating their own videos. By offering a simple and quick way to share information, the training and development team at Virgin Media has ensured that the personal experience and knowledge of one becomes readily available to all.