Building a Better Video Training Portal for Employees

If there’s one thing that most business owners and managers realize, it’s that happy, engaged employees provide higher quality work. They’re also less likely to quit and, perhaps most importantly, they actively contribute to an overall positive company and workplace experience.

It’s also clear that employees want to work for companies that offer both personal and professional fulfillment. Office perks still play an important role, but more and more employees expect companies to offer a robust learning culture.

Training Enhances the Employee Experience

Learning and development (L&D) has proven to be a key driver of employee engagement. By providing tools and resources to strengthen employee skills and knowledge, companies can build a more capable workforce while showing investment in their employees. Furthermore, addressing skill gaps not only allows the business to grow, it lets employees grow, which improves the employer brand.

From an employee perspective, they want to feel like their current job is helping them build their career by preparing for their next role. Many are eager to continue building skills and staying competitive within their fields. In fact, they’re much more likely to stay with companies who they feel are supporting this.

From a company perspective, learning opportunities offer a competitive advantage and help them stay ahead in a constantly changing landscape. It helps the organization retain top talent, attract new talent, and maximize the potential of their existing talent.

And while there are various learning methods such as instructor-led training, on-the-job training, simulators, job shadowing, and case studies, training videos remain a top choice for employees.

Video Enhances Employee Training

According to our “Using Video to Improve the Employee Experience” study, employees prefer video for policy training (76%), product demos (75%), and product training (68%). Also, 45% say training videos for systems and tools would increase their confidence in their employment decision.

There are numerous benefits for companies to deliver their learning and development programs through video.

For starters, it can be much more cost-efficient, especially for companies with multiple offices in different cities. In addition to reduced expenses like travel and materials, video also has a longer lifespan. Once produced, it can be reused and viewed by employees around the world in the comfort of their own homes or offices. Finally, video can also help you significantly reduce the amount of overall employee training time and even provide microlearning experiences.

There’s also the fact that video is more engaging than other forms of delivery. Multiple surveys have shown that employees prefer video to text, and the visual stimulation helps employees retain the information much longer. For HR teams who have strong learning initiatives, it’s not a matter of if they use video, but rather, what’s the best experience.

A Better Portal Enhances Employee Video

It’s important to remember that the videos themselves are but one part of a comprehensive, corporate training experience.

As you develop, update, or optimize your learning initiatives, you’ll want to consider all aspects of the user experience. This ranges from how easily they can find, access, and navigate the online training to implementing active learning within the videos. The branding, layout, and functionality will also play an important role.

Similarly, you’ll want to make sure your program is as efficient and easily manageable as possible for content managers. A holistic and successful training program must consider the experiences of both the end user and the person responsible for maintaining it.

Where will your video training programs live?

One of the first steps in creating a video training program is to determine where the videos will live and how employees will access them. There are several common ways that businesses house them.

• Internal servers or cloud storage. This approach often aligns with a broader internal content management structure, particularly for working files and documents. However, internal drives or collaborative cloud platforms can be less intuitive and lack the branding that adds to the overall experience. Further, navigating folders to find the different videos and video courses is designed for digital librarians, not diverse employees with different learning styles.
• Digital Asset Management platforms (DAMs). DAMs excel at managing high volumes of internal digital content, offering meta-tagging and versioning capabilities that allow for advanced search functions. But they’re not meant for content consumption. Not only do their interfaces lack branding, most can’t support high volumes of concurrent high-quality video streams.
• Unlisted YouTube channels. YouTube is used by some companies who want to organize training videos by playlists. In theory, the videos can only be accessed by users through an unlisted link. However, most companies want better security, robust video content management, or hosting destinations they own and fully control. For them, YouTube doesn’t quite meet their needs.
• Company intranet. Company intranets are perhaps the most common destination for training videos. They often combine one or more of the preceding approaches and act as a navigation overlay that users are already familiar with. So users get a much better, branded experience, and content managers get a waking nightmare. They not only have to manage all the places the content lives, they also have to manage the interface—ensuring every link is up to date and in the right place.

Creating an effective experience for the user

While each of the above systems have pros and cons, let’s look at some of the key features and benefits of today’s most effective learning experiences. With tools like Brightcove Gallery’s Immersion template, you can combine the best of the above approaches and create an all-in-one training portal that both the users and content managers will love.

The first consideration is the ease with which users can access it. An often overlooked but important part of the experience is a branded, customized URL that takes them directly to the training portal.

Once they arrive at the training portal, the layout should be a completely branded, intuitive gallery that features all of the videos in any particular series. With a layout similar to the streaming services they’re already used to, users can easily see, navigate, and watch all of the videos in a given series. Additionally, related series will be easily accessible with a single click—or, if needed, quickly found through a powerful internal search engine.

Keep in mind that training content doesn’t have to be a one-way experience. To be truly effective, you’ll need to keep your viewers engaged. Through Brightcove Gallery, you’re able to add an interactive experience to any video. For example, quizzes will help to ensure they retain the information. You could also have different paths within each video to give the user a “choose your own adventure” experience.

Creating an efficient experience for the content manager

Beyond the end user, it’s also important to ensure the content manager has the features and functionality they need to make the program a success. This includes ease of use and efficiency for ongoing use on a long-term basis. Take into consideration things like how quickly you can publish videos and how easily you can organize them. Choosing and adding videos to each collection should be a simple task.

For example, through the Brightcove Gallery you can select the videos you want by tags, existing playlists, or custom fields like keywords and search criteria. Similarly, if there are videos you want to exclude, those can be managed by tags as well. Finally, when it comes to creating the full training portal, you’ll want to be able to fully customize the look and feel of the page without the need for a designer or developer.

All of these features are easily accessible through the Brightcove Gallery template, Immersion. It’s ideal for companies with significant training and development needs and who want to provide users with the best experience possible.

In addition to having an effective and efficient way to create learning portals, it also offers insights into employee engagement that you haven’t been able to measure before. By reviewing the video analytics, you’re able to see how often the videos are being watched, the percentage of each one being watched, and which topics employees are most interested in. This information will be vital to use for future training materials to ensure their success.

Finally, like all Brightcove Gallery templates, Immersion comes equipped with critical business features like SSO and role-based access to ensure your content stays secure.

Brightcove Enhances the Employee Experience

Delivering your learning and development programs through video is a simple, yet effective way to remain competitive as a company while retaining and attracting top talent. Brightcove’s Immersion template for Communications Studio makes it easy to customize the experience and create intuitive pages that mimic many of the most popular streaming services. By combining the power of enterprise-leading streaming technology with the interactivity employees want and security organizations need, you can provide the best experience for everyone.