Why the future of work needs smarter communications

by Brock Horning | June 2025

Is your communication strategy ready for the future of work? With remote and hybrid teams becoming the norm, many organizations are looking for new ways to connect, communicate and convert with greater clarity, creativity and control.

Because the old ways of static content and reams of copy just aren’t working any more. There are smarter ways to communicate, and the first hurdle is for the world of work to finally embrace video.

Embracing smarter communications will impact your business for the better. It’s about delivering information clearly and efficiently, whether that’s to prospects, customers or employees.

(Jump down to find out how interactive video is improving communications for content creation teams, internal communications, and learning and training teams.)

We’ve seen learning designers still using in-person role play and text-based manuals. We’ve talked to leadership teams that hide critical business decisions within long, waffly emails. We’ve seen onboarding that includes days of lengthy in-person orientation, stacks of paperwork and death by PowerPoint presentations.

An interactive employee onboarding session

And for each one, we have seen how interactive video has transformed their communications into engaging, fun and effective experiences.

Studies show that viewers are three times more likely to complete an interactive video than a linear video or PDFs. Conversions are ten times higher on interactive journeys.

The potential for interactive video is huge – so what are the hold-ups?

Today, it’s virtually impossible to avoid using video. We all use it to find out how to complete tasks, record meetings, or deliver information.

The thing is, if you don’t have an active video communications plan, video might be actively holding your communications back. Here are a few challenges we’ve heard on the grapevine:

Technical issues and a lack of production experience can hamper any organization’s first attempts at video. Maybe these communications were overly long, overly short, or just downright dull. Video production is a skill and needs practice (or professionals) to be effective, just like any form of communication.

If you’re using video by sending an hour-long recording of a Zoom meeting and expecting everyone to find the information relevant to them, you’re missing a trick. Is anyone actually going to open that video file? What about an interactive recap that lets people skip to the moments they need to know about?

An interactive recap of our latest Stornaway School webinar

Yes, maybe in the past, video was time-consuming to create. Expensive production shoots and editing software made it a challenge. But times have moved on.

There is a world of video creation tools, from Vyond for animation to Adobe Express for editing, that make the process quick and easy. Stornaway works happily with any other software to bring video together into interactive journeys.

This is where interactive video truly shines. Like a single text document, interactive video can contain different pages – webcam and screen recordings, demos, pitches, proposals – linked up and presented so people can go straight to what they need. And they can even contain docs, spreadsheets and web content within the video. So like a text document, but so much more engaging.

When it comes to communications, here are three quick win areas to embrace the future of work:

Smarter communications create seamless cross-channel experiences that adapt to the customer or prospect. Rather than relying on AI to second-guess what customers want, allow viewers to personalize their experience directly. Invite a two-way conversation with your prospects, not a one-way broadcast.

Stornaway makes these immersive omnichannel journeys easy to create. Our research shows a 90% reduction in interactive content production time compared to web-dev-led solutions.

With full design flexibility and native Adobe integrations built in, our Voyager feature brings webpages, lead capture forms, social pages, YouTube embeds and more into your interactive video.

Here’s a fantastic example of a brand video that does just that:

Watch an ineractive brand video

Bring all your sales and marketing content together into seamless, personalised experiences that skyrocket engagement and boost conversions.

To boost team performance, internal communications need to deliver key information clearly. Replace rambling and time-consuming meetings with concise updates that let employees get straight to the info they need to know. Create engaging onboarding sessions that boost the efficiency of new employees. Communicate leadership decisions and high-level strategy clearly to improve decision-making across the business.

In fact, research suggests engagement is on average ten times higher for interactive video compared to static content.

And Stornaway’s easy-to-use templates make this process quick and easy. There’s the onboarding template to help new starters adjust to their new role. The Me Mannul template helps connect remote and hybrid teams. And there are plenty of training templates to make learning fun and engaging.

Play the Stornaway template, Manual of Me

Ultimately, bringing interactive video into your internal communications can increase efficiency and boost productivity.

Take the cringe factor out of role-play training. Engage your learners in dry, complex topics. Deliver high levels of attitudinal change. Allow learners to complete training when it suits them. Interactive video brings all these perks and more.

Enrich your e-learning and training modules with interactive, self-guiding elements. Trainers and educators can harness the power of personalization with self-guided modules that adapt to the learner’s knowledge gaps. This boosts engagement by taking out material that the learner already knows or is irrelevant to their role without having to remake or re-edit the content itself.

Stornaway’s SCORM export makes linking results and progression to your Learning Management System a breeze.

Play Stornaway’s scenario training template

Boost productivity and efficiency in your remote and hybrid teams with smarter communications.