Your culture video might be making things worse
Most organizations already know their culture video isn't having an impact. They just keep making the same one.
Upbeat music. Smiling employees. A values statement delivered by someone reading off a teleprompter. It looks fine.
It feels hollow. And employees can tell.
The problem isn't production quality. It's that the video is trying to declare culture rather than demonstrate it. And when there's a gap between what the video claims and what employees actually experience, the video doesn't just miss. It makes things worse.
Ann Melinger, CEO of bink., put it plainly in a recent conversation on Lights, Camera, Communicate: culture is not what leaders say it is. It's what employees experience. That distinction matters enormously when you're deciding what to put on camera.
Start with alignment, not a camera
Before you film anything, you need to answer a harder question: does your senior leadership team actually agree on what the culture is today versus what they want it to be?
Ann's research suggests most don't. They might have a values document. They might have a people pillar. But real alignment, where the executive team has honestly looked in the mirror and reconciled where they are with where they want to go, is rare.
If that alignment doesn't exist, a video won't create it. It'll just broadcast the gap to everyone watching. Ann talked about this in depth in a piece for the ICology blog that's worth checking out before you watch the episode.
Your video strategy is already signaling your culture
Every video decision you make sends a message. Whether you use real employees or hired actors. Whether leaders are scripted or loose. Whether employees are subjects of a video or creators of one.
Ann shared an example of a client going the actor route to eliminate risk. It's a defensible call in regulated industries. But it raises a question worth sitting with: what does it say to employees when a company wants to showcase culture but doesn't want to feature the people who actually live it every day?
Most employees will notice. Even if they can't articulate why it feels off.
The gap between leadership and reality is what makes great video
One of the most powerful uses of video in this space isn't a polished culture piece at all. It's using video as a listening tool.
Amer Tadayon of Lucihub shared a use case where leadership sent employees a question about company values, collected recorded responses, stitched them together, and shared the result with the executive team. What leaders thought employees believed about the culture and what employees actually said were two very different things. That video became evidence that changed a conversation.
That's a fundamentally different way to think about video. Not a broadcast - a mirror.
Employee-generated content scales what polished productions can't
The organizations doing this best aren't producing culture videos. They're creating conditions where culture stories emerge from employees themselves.
Amer described a client that went department by department asking one simple question: how are you saving the company money? Employees recorded their answers on phones. The best ones got stitched together and shared across the organization. Departments started competing, production quality improved organically, and the content became some of the most-watched video on their internal network.
It started with permission. That's usually what's missing. Not equipment, not budget. Just a clear signal that employees are allowed to contribute, that their stories are worth telling, and that the company genuinely wants to hear them.
Authenticity isn't a goal. Credibility is.
Here's a nuance worth holding onto: authenticity alone isn't enough. Two different leaders can both be authentic on camera and land completely differently with employees.
The more useful question is whether the video is credible. Does it reflect reality? Is it 80% grounded in where the organization actually is today, with just enough aspiration to point somewhere worth going?
As Ann put it, if you're trying to inspire an emotional response and it's not grounded in what employees are already experiencing, the ick factor goes way up. And you're better off doing nothing at all.
Aesthetic force is the goal
Ann introduced a term during the conversation worth borrowing: aesthetic force. The idea, which she came across in Brené Brown's work, is that great storytelling makes you feel something regardless of whether you already care about the subject. A Ken Burns documentary does this. The best internal videos do it too.
That's the bar. Not a video that checks a box. A video that makes employees feel something real about where they work.
Getting there requires some bravery. It means being willing to show the work, feature real people, and resist the urge to sand off every rough edge until the result feels like it came from nowhere.
One question to ask before your next video
Amer framed it well: show your organization for what it really is, not what you think people are going to perceive it to be.
A simpler version: after someone watches this video, what will they know, feel, or do differently?
If the answer is nothing, you're filming the wrong thing.
Watch the full conversation
Ann Melinger, Amer Tadayon, and I went deep on all of this in Episode 7 of Lights, Camera, Communicate. It's available to watch on demand now.
Written by Chuck Gose, founder of ICology.