7 Types of Videos for Employee Training and Onboarding

Onboarding new employees and integrating them into the company culture and workflow is a shared challenge of HR personnel and managers. Beyond, retention, companies want employees to perform better and faster. From an operational standpoint, this means saving time and resources getting employees to feel confident in their new roles and taking ownership within the first 90 days.

Video is at the center of a new age of employee productivity and innovation. Video training is the first crucial step.

Benefits of Onboarding Employees through Video

Onboarding aims to communicate important information about the company’s values and culture. But it often subjects new hires to classroom-style lectures and sends them home with documentation to read. So, what does that say about the company? It’s boring? Unimaginative? We can’t imagine you’d ever settle for your company being described with these attributes. Consider the benefits of using video for employee onboarding and training.

• Fosters an emotional connection, welcoming new hires
• Introduces the culture of the company
• Builds trust and rapport with executives
• Maintains consistent company messaging
• Communicates product features or service benefits clearly
• Enables self-paced learning
• Creates reusable and repurposable video resources
• Lowers on-site training costs

Effective Video Types for Corporate Training

Video as a key component of the onboarding process adds personality to communication and associates a visual connection to information sharing. To improve engagement with new employees, consider creating the following types of video.

• 1. Company overview/leadership welcome. The CEO presents a summary of the company’s mission and business objectives.
• 2. Company about us. Why does the company matter? Create a video about the company’s history, beliefs, culture, activities in the community and overall purpose to inspire employees.
• 3. Job description. Detail the core responsibilities of the position, organizational support they’ll receive, and how their goals will be measured and performance ranked.
• 4. Department overview by management. Summarize the roles and goals of a team or department. Align the team with a common vision through video.
• 5. Video employee directory. Introduce yourself. Each new hire should create a video introduction. Insert these videos into org charts. Add searchable meta tags, so new employees can easily connect through common interests.
• 6. IT policies and procedures. Record standard training and educational content for an IT resource center. Simple how-to videos can show new employees how to conduct video conference calls, add email signatures or order business cards.
• 7. Employee-generated content. “Day in the life” segments featuring employees provide a meaningful way to educate new employees on roles, responsibilities, and dynamics. Consider creating a montage featuring a series of these types of segments into one video that shows how teams operate and inter-connect. This kind of information can, otherwise, take months for a new employee to learn.

To get started, determine which points of the onboarding process employees seem to require more guidance. Even better, survey current employees to determine at which stages they felt lost. From there, look to your onboarding documentation to guide the process of chaptering your video content, as well as a source of video scripts.

While a video onboarding program may seem unwieldy, your teams already have all the information to make you (and your workforce) successful.