The Engagement Lever Nobody Talks About (Nick Morolda)

Full transcript

Welcome back to the podcast, guys. Today we are joined by Nick Moralda, a VP of solution and service delivery at Hive Streaming. Nick, welcome to the podcast. >> Thanks for having me. It's great to be here. >> So, Nick, could you tell me something about your background and what are you guys doing at Hive Streaming? >> Sure. So my background is I started on the production side of enterprise video operations where I would run uh a lot of the front of house components of some of the largest every time the CEO or a big executive would come and want to speak to the entire company and you'd have a very sophisticated multi- camera setup and lighting and live sound reinforcement. I would be in charge of managing all of that and essentially producing the show. And from that and how I got into my current role at Hive and Streaming, I moved into the more infrastructural aspects of video delivery and video experiences. So what we do at Hive is we ensure successful background backends delivery and provide analytics to some of the biggest companies in the world on their live streams and internal video communications and work in conjunction with those production teams. So essentially I went from working on the front end to managing service and delivery solution engineering and participating in product development on for the backend part of the delivery.

So I've been involved in endtoend parts of it. >> And when you sort of look at the employee engagement across the distributed teams is there any big shift that you've seen in the last two to three years? >> Sure. So the big shift was unsurprisingly the COVID pandemic when video communication went from being a nice to have to an essential tool for business alignment and engagement. And with that and continuing to evolve since then were the higher expectations and requirements for effective communication. And there's been a ton of research on this where engagement and even alignment and agreement with the message increases significantly in correlation with the quality of that delivery. Research has shown that if you're getting a full 1080p live video stream at, you know, 5 megabits per second in comparison to something, you know, what we used to have at 360p at like 250K, the outcomes that were trying to be delivered and driven by that stream in the first place are more likely to play out. And you get more people behind the message more when you can see the subtleties and micro expressions and the kind of aspects of communication that are nonverbal. So what we try and do and what we've seen and what the industry is trying to do is is really deliver on those expectations.

Not just quality for the sake of just seeing more pixels and seeing more frames per second, but really with the understanding that along with that quality comes better business outcomes. And that's why Hive and and a lot of these partner platforms have become so ubiquitous in these huge enterprises that really need to drive organizational change at a pretty rapid clip. >> And have you seen anything that still companies get wrong? >> Sure. Yeah. I think that what we contend with most often is we have to evangelize the fact that quality is not just about like I said more pixels and more frames per second for the sake of itself and that there is a tangible and monetary return on investment for investing in high quality video platforms and high quality video experiences because they're of the real business outcomes that accompany that. And sometimes what we encounter is from IT departments is we just want to protect our network. We won't want anything to crash. So we would send the least amount of viable video quality if it's to ensure that stability.

However, we make the argument and what many of the companies are finally coming around to and what some of the challenges have been have been convincing them that it is worth allocating additional bandwidth and even budget to making sure that these tools are operating at the highest possible quality. So Nick, another question that I have for you is when it comes to these highquality videos and communicating them, why is it such an important lever for engagement and what happens inside of these organizations when video is reliable versus when it's inconsistent? >> Sure. So I would extend that question to include real life inter inperson interactions where how important is seeing somebody's facial expressions? How important is seeing body language and the subtlety of how people communicate non-verbally? Now, there's I think most of it and the question off of that is how much of that is lost in lowquality video streaming when you're just seeing a pixelated person and lower quality, less tonal inflection, less modulation in the voice. So there's a school of uh research called media richchness theory that goes back to the mid 20th century where the quality and effectiveness of the medium directly correlates to the outcome and retention and alignment and agreement with the message that's being communicated.

So lever and the reason it's so important is we have to put as much of that nonverbal communication back into this digital communication medium. our clients and the organizations we work with are getting the alignment and agreement and engagement that are going to drive the business outcomes that they're trying to achieve by having these live streams in the first place. Having these video conferences, they're clearly for a purpose. There's clearly something you want to communicate to your workforce and we feel that the lever of the most effective communication is going to be the quality with which we're able to deliver it. So what are the most common technical or organizational blockers that you see via video and how do you remove them without breaking the network? >> Sure. So the most common blockers we see is fear on the part of the IT administrators and concern around what will streaming at this high quality that's more bandwidth intensive what is the effect on other business critical applications and what is the possible liability for people screens freezing and buffering and then because it is going to be the ones who get the angry phone calls when the wheel is spinning right so What the biggest blocker is we have production teams and communications teams that are very ambitious, want to send the highest quality, but it is going to be typically the ones that are going to push back against that.

So a big part of what Hive does is give it the reassurance the through our analytics, through our optimization services and our testing capabilities the confidence to drive up that quality knowing that it won't break their network. That is always the challenge for us is really reassurance and making people feel comfortable that not only is this high quality video streaming going to be safe but also it's going to be critical for helping them drive the business forward. And ultimately my argument to it is this always makes you look very good because for IT teams nobody notices the stuff when it works. They only notice it when it doesn't work. But video streaming is a real opportunity for it to showcase itself as being a medium for really effective communication. So I say this is the best advertisement for the stability of your network because it's the one way that people really engage with it the most frequently.

>> So what are the two to three practices that prevent a lowquality event from damaging trust internally? So the most important thing I think without getting into really deep technical best practices which include effective you know firewall whitelisting and bandwidth allocation and things like that just you know best practices from an implementation standpoint. From a strategic standpoint what I can say is the biggest liabilities are going to be misalignment between the people hosting the events and it uh the ones responsible for delivering the video and the ones for responsible for transmitting it. And when it can get aligned behind the goals of why the stream is happening, it's always going to be lead to the best outcome. The other is simply production practices, coaching your presenters on how to present, framing the camera properly, you know, knowing, hey, maybe don't be on your mobile hotspot when you're talking to a 100,000 people in the organization. Learning how to speak a little bit, you know, it's it's really soft skills on the part of the presenters and making them camera ready.

And the other is making sure that the presentations are really tight. You know, at the end of the day, it's kind of like showbiz. And you want to make sure you structure your message in a way that's going to be the most engaging and and you want to keep your calls lively and have different engagement tools even within the interface of the experience. Chat, uh, emoji responses, you know, polling, anything you can do to keep your viewers on the hook. So, there's a lot of really good practices you can do. And the point of what we do is to make sure that any of those practices that are put in place are not throttled or inhibited by limitations in network infrastructure. >> And when it comes to measuring the impact of video communication, what metrics do you actually trust and what metrics are mostly noise in your opinion? >> Sure. No, that's it's a great question. I'll start with the one that is the most noisy. I think that is postevent polling. because a it's very subjective and people are not always honest because they're afraid that their polls are actually not always anonymous.

So, it's very difficult to get an accurate read on how it went. Hive has a lot of proprietary engage things that we can do with our plug-in that we can use to measure engagement. We're not turning on anybody's webcams and seeing if they're walking away. Nothing intrusive, but different playerbased data that we can use to aggregate and make some certain assertions about how engaged the employees were, whether the screen was in the background, whether the audio was muted, whether it was on a secondary browser. So there's some tangible metrics that we can use to draw some conclusions. We can also look at engagement in chat. And then ultimately this is the most important one is over time seeing if whatever was being discussed and whatever processes or whatever message is manifested in the work output of the people who watched it. So if you are trying to for example drive a new logging practice or some sort of system change and that's the purpose of a virtual training, how was that adopted over time after the stream was watched? And I think unfortunately it's it's the slowest one to come back because those types of changes take time, but over time that is where you're going to see the most reliable feedback on how effective the message is being delivered.

>> Nick, you've talked also about achieving full video delivery coverage without actually compromising the network. >> What does good look like in practice for global organizations? >> Sure. So there is again if the outcome that's being communicated is actually being manifested in the behavior and the practices of the people in the business. But in terms of what good looks like, there are a lot of really good technical standards and quality standards we can adhere to. At Hive, we feel and and my opinion is that any internal communication that you watch from your company should look as good as anything you watch on your home screen. Anything that would not be acceptable for Netflix, I think should not be considered acceptable for internal video communication because at the end of the day, you're doing the same thing. You're communicating ideas. Again, it's show biz a little bit. So, we really try and hold and encourage our customers to hold themselves to the same standards that the big streamers would use. And looking ahead, how do you see AI changing internal video communication over the next few years? >> Sure.

So, there's a couple of different parts of of the communication. I think that what we're seeing is definitely some pressure on content creators themselves for AI generated content, which the assertion is that it will replace people having to talk into webcams and actually having to have real human delivery. I have my own feelings about that. They're they're they're pretty strong feelings. My position is basically that nothing will ever effectively replace the human element, especially in communicating very complex and very important ideas. There are certain things that it can do really well for accompanying media as parts of the presentation. I don't think we're ever going to see that fully replaced. I don't know how effective those automated generated Tik Tok videos are about doing any of those advertisements. It's definitely going to be a part of it, but I don't think it's going to replace anything, at least if for anybody who is really taking it seriously.

Now, what I worry about and what can happen is that people will over time as this technology becomes more ubiquitous in terms of AI generated content creation is that people will lower their standards and will become desensitized to what lowquality video communication actually is. it will just pass right through them and it becomes very ineffective in actually driving organizational change. Now that is a very abstract conversation that is very objective and from a thought leadership perspective something that Hive thinks about a lot and we try and share with our customers but in terms of how we use AI it's very a lot of potential a lot of our analytics are based on some of these predictive algorithms we have a very sophisticated rag model that we use to train our data and our analytics to ensure that the customer is not only getting data back but also really usable data that is intelligent and suggestive.

And that's where I really get excited because it is about articulating the best and most useful information in an aggregated way that makes sense based on all of the training data that we have. >> Thanks, Nick. For people listening who want to check you out, where should they go? >> Sure. Uh, they should go to hiverstreaming.com. Also follow uh us on LinkedIn. But we post content on a pretty regular clip that really goes quite deep into not only our strategy but also the technical value that we provide. And anybody who's interested in really stepping up their video communication game should really talk to us. >> Okay, great. You heard it guys. Thank you guys for watching. We'll see you in the next one. Thank you.