Loom’s team—now numbering over 175—is all-remote and based in 11 countries. To boost collaboration, productivity, and connection, we’re continually optimizing and experimenting with how to use both sync and async tools. We’re also always learning from our customers.
What have we learned so far? While sync time will always play a role in our work, the use cases for async—and async video in particular—continue to grow. After talking to coworkers across functions and roles, here are the top 10 ways Loom uses Loom.
1. Daily Messaging
Video messaging is faster and more personal than written text alone. We use it during daily communication as a replacement for lengthy emails or instant chat. A video not only provides more context and expression, but it’s often easier for the creator than typing out a complex or nuanced message.
Examples include asking and answering quick questions, sending a quick update on a project, asking for a green light on a decision, etc.
2. Providing Feedback
Giving feedback—both positive and constructive—is integral to employee development, engagement, and team growth. But tone is easily misinterpreted, particularly if it’s sent via written communication. Async video helps our team provide more tactful, specific, and clear feedback to their teams. It’s also inherently more human, capturing your facial expressions and tone. Async video feedback allows everyone to be seen, heard, and understood (while skipping yet another meeting).
Examples include providing specific guidance on designed or written assets and giving teammates broad feedback on their work.
3. Meeting Reduction
When calendars don’t align or sync time isn’t required, we often send looms to align with coworkers. It’s one of the many ways we’re working to be more intentional about how we use sync vs. async to create more focus time for everyone. We also frequently send pre-meeting looms so that when we do get on a sync meeting, that time is spent more efficiently. Postclick, a global leader in digital advertising, has been able to scale their use of Loom to reduce meetings by 50 percent.
Examples of looms used to reduce meeting time include status updates, pre-meeting walkthroughs, and approval requests.
4. Announcements
Getting an entire organization on a video call at the same time can be extremely difficult—or even impossible with time zone distribution. However, consistency and equity in the way a company shares information goes a long way for ensuring everyone is on the same page and feels valued by the organization. By announcing company updates via Loom, we’re able to ensure the entire team gets the same information and can digest it when it makes the most sense for them. It also allows us to track engagement and see how teams are interacting with the message.
Examples include leadership hires, updates about a company event, big milestones, or product roadmap updates.
5. Explaining Complex Topics
Providing context and walkthroughs for complex, nuanced topics is a core use case for async video. With the combination of screen capture and a cam bubble, your audience can see the content while also benefiting from the richness of your facial expressions, tone, and body language. For the creator, it’s also often faster and easier to record a video talking through a topic instead of trying to convey all the intricacies via written word.
Examples include pitching net-new ideas, providing a detailed product demo, or contributing nuanced input on a candidate going through the hiring process.
6. Internal Documentation
Giving a team self-serve access to key company processes and materials—no matter where in the world they are based—can be a massive unlock for productivity, collaboration, and transparency. Not every video has long-term value, but Loom allows you to store, organize, and distribute the ones that do in a centralized location.
Examples include looms about core team processes and workflows, onboarding materials, FAQs, and training content.
7. Customer/Partner Outreach
Async video helps us to instantly build rapport with people outside of our own team—customers, prospects, vendors, and even candidates. Instead of impersonal emails, videos instantly create a more authentic sense of rapport, put a face to your name, and help you stand out from the crowd. We can track engagement on our messages, too, giving us valuable feedback.
Examples include sales and outbound demos, successes and support resolutions, partnership outreach, and recruiting.
8. Project Management
Using async video during key milestones—like project kickoffs, updates and reviews—helps us keep projects moving and everyone up-to-date. It also creates evergreen assets stakeholders can access self-serve at any time to ensure nothing is overlooked. Cross-functionally, async video makes it easy to share progress and updates across the organization for increased transparency, feedback, and alignment. Customers like Figma built the online collaboration white board FigJam entirely remotely. Async feedback loops played a major role in their ability to bring a brand new product to market in six months.
Examples include project kickoff, status updates, major milestones, and recaps.
9. External Marketing Content
At Loom we believe in the power of video to share ideas and engage audiences, but marketing videos are traditionally a very costly and time consuming endeavor. Loom makes it easy for us to create engaging, quality content for sales materials, product launches, social media and more.
Examples: Website videos, help section and changelog, or HR and culture pages.
10. Culture & Social Connection
Building and maintaining culture is a challenge for any distributed team. Especially in the midst of the pandemic when it’s even harder to get together consistently, async video creates new channels for socializing, building rapport, and connecting with others. During the holiday week in November, for example, we ran a "Loom & Tell" campaign in which teammates were invited to share short videos about something in their life they're grateful for. We learned the backstories of people’s tattoos, saw pictures of the places people grew up, and a few people even gave tours of their houseplants. In-person time will always be important, and we invest in that as well. But by encouraging our team to share a bit about themselves via video—work related or not—we're able to build connection and affinity across time zones and teams.
Examples include congratulating others, welcoming new teammates, sharing something new in your life, and “just for fun” creative videos.
At Loom, we’re still finding new ways to use async video every week—both via our own work and by watching our customers discover new use cases. As the way we work continues to evolve, new use cases for async will likely crop up that we haven’t even thought of yet. Ultimately, staying open, agile, and curious about the ways we collaborate and connect will help us move faster, work smarter, and build stronger teams.