ANIMATION KEY TO WORKPLACE EDUCATION IN SA

THANKS to accelerated technological change and the societal shifts that accompany them, no company can hope to survive if it doesn’t properly equip its employees to deal with the challenges of the contemporary workplace. Workplace education, in other words, is no longer a nice-tohave, but a necessity.

Organisations around the globe have realised this and have come out with any number of solutions, from webinars to online courses and training seminars. Some are more effective than others.

But in the South African context, where organisations often have big variances in educational level, and where there are 11 official languages, character-driven animated videos are hard to beat. Here’s why:

Storytelling is fundamental to the human experience. All the available evidence suggests that we’ve been telling stories for as long as we’ve been around.

While some of those stories were used to explain the world around us, they were also a survival mechanism. Sometimes these stories contained practical advice about what food to eat and how to prepare it, for example.

The best storytellers understand that they are at their most powerful when they go beyond just words.

Let’s say the organisation you work for has updated its code of ethics and wants to inform everyone about it. There are a few ways it could go about this. One would be to hold seminars with small groups of employees.

While there’s value in such an approach, it comes with issues. Not only is it expensive, but it’s almost impossible to ensure a consistent experience across the organisation. A live action video is also expensive.

Finally, the organisation could put together a short character-driven animation that explains what it wants to get across. Which one do you think most people would connect with?

This ability to inspire universal understanding makes character-driven animation is particularly important in the South African context. In a large organisation it allows you to speak to everyone from the C-suite to workers on the factory floor. And, with minimal additional expense, you can do so in the language they speak.

Character-driven animations have other benefits. Using mobile and compression technology, they can be pushed out to everyone within an organisation at once, with minimal strain on the company’s networks or employees’ phones or data packages.