How Video Enhances the Employee Onboarding Experience

While 72% of employees say video training improves onboarding, only 23% say their organization uses video during the hiring process. Without video, delivering a consistent onboarding experience to new hires can be difficult.

Inconsistencies in employee onboarding often stem from time constraints, resource limitations, and human error. Traditional methods, like in-person sessions laden with paperwork, manuals, or endless slide decks, are dense to work through and can introduce discrepancies. This leads to confusion and delays in acclimating staff.

By using video, you can save time and ensure training is consistent. You can also demonstrate a commitment to learning and development to new hires, reinforce confidence in both employees and leadership, and foster engagement.

Video Streamlines Onboarding

Video can get across complex information quickly and clearly, making it easy to understand and remember. This is why employees are more receptive to video than other forms of communication. Our research found 73% of employees would rather watch a one-minute video than read an email. Furthermore, 83% want their organization to use more video content to improve the overall employee experience.

Video’s ability to convey information quickly and clearly is especially important for onboarding. New hires must get their heads around a lot of information coming from all angles. Having key information presented in the best format helps with this difficult process.

Interactive elements in video content can be excellent learning aids. They let employees and leaders assess their learning by seeing their misunderstandings immediately and reinforcing the things they understand. This makes for a more engaging training experience.

By providing comprehensive training materials in interactive video formats, you can ensure employees have the knowledge and skills they need when starting in their new roles. This boosts productivity, instills confidence in employees, and positions them to contribute to your company’s goals quickly.

Video also reduces the need for in-person sessions. This optimizes resource allocation for both training and learning as HR/training staff don’t have to repeat the same messages to different groups multiple times.

Tips to Speed Up Onboarding

To maximize the value of your enterprise video platform, there are several interactive elements you can introduce.

• Embed quizzes and/or decision-making scenarios.
• Record guided software training and product demos with interactive video chapters and knowledge checks.
• Incorporate call-to-action overlays to direct people to additional resources at opportune moments in the video content.
• Include polls within videos to gauge employee progress and aid data collection.

Video Increases Discoverability

New hires shouldn’t have difficulty finding direction about their role, responsibilities, and compliance requirements. Video platforms make discovering crucial information as easy as a digital asset management platform or well-organized intranet.

You can categorize important content and create a “video destination” that new team members can search through based on their needs. Training videos, leadership introductions, culture-related videos, employee handbooks, and IT instructions can all be housed in your new employee information repository. New hires can consume this content at their convenience—learning independently at their own pace and revisiting important topics as needed.

With proper video content management processes, you can create a content library that facilitates intuitive navigation for new team members. This makes it easy to find the information they need, saving time and reducing information gaps.

Tips to Get the Most Out of Your Content Library

There are three things you can do to increase the usefulness of your onboarding video library.

• Extend the life and impact of previously live training videos by converting them into on-demand content.
• Add meta descriptions and keyword tags to make content more discoverable.
• Prerecord in-depth explainers from SMEs that provide answers to common questions.

Video Improves Accessibility

Video makes it easier to align dispersed teams. You can quickly replicate material for new hires, ensuring the information and messaging are consistent. This makes onboarding processes highly scalable. Enterprise video platforms have localization capabilities that allow new employees with different needs—such as location, language, or ability—to access the same information.

With an enterprise video platform, you can be confident that every new hire receives high-quality training. This is not only important to HR/training staff, it’s valuable to new employees who need support as they begin their roles.

Video platforms also facilitate live streams, which make onboarding training both more consistent and more personal. This is important in all organizations, but it is especially important for large global businesses where personal interaction can be challenging. Live streams overcome this challenge and sustain high engagement levels among new starters.

Using features like live chat, polls, and comments that allow employees to interact with the presenter and each other boosts engagement further.

Live streams can subsequently be made available on demand with more interactive elements and localization functionalities added.

Tips to Optimize Accessibility with a Video Platform

To ensure consistent experiences for all new hires, there are four things you can do.

• Include transcripts
• Provide language translations
• Make audio descriptions available
• Enable auto-captioning

Brightcove has exceptional localization functionality through our partnership with 3Play Media.

Video Helps Refine Processes

An enterprise video platform offers valuable insights that can be used to enhance future onboarding efforts.

Engagement metrics help you understand how new employees interact with your videos. For example, with tools like our Engagement Score (also called view-through rate or retention rate), you can see which parts of a video cause viewers to drop off or rewatch. Interactive data can be used to assess if engagement rates correspond with information retention.

By looking at engagement data, you can identify patterns and trends, meaning you can improve and refine your onboarding programs over time. This data-driven approach ensures that onboarding content remains relevant, effective, and structured and formatted in the ways that deliver the best results. Doing this optimizes experiences and investment in onboarding.

Exporting viewer engagement data to a learning management system (LMS) or other HRIS systems further improves insights across your tech stack. This takes the difficulty out of gathering information on how new employees interact with videos, allowing you to produce more targeted onboarding materials.

Interactive elements allow you to get a more granular look at viewer engagement data. You can use branching to understand what different video content employees gravitate toward.

Tips to Get the Most Out of Onboarding Engagement Data

There are a couple things you can do to produce onboarding materials optimized for learning.

• Adopt a systematic approach to analysis by identifying key metrics that align with your overall objectives.
• Create different versions of your videos by varying the intro, call to action, or content style to see which performs best.

Leverage Video Across the Employee Lifecycle

An enterprise video platform serves as a cornerstone for enhancing the employee onboarding experience. It offers a more efficient, engaging, and scalable alternative to traditional methods. By harnessing the power of video technology and implementing best practices, your organization can save time, accelerate integration, reduce churn, and continually optimize.

You can also use video to improve experiences across the whole employee lifecycle. With the right video platform and strategy in place, you’ll set the stage for long-term employee success and organizational growth.

Learn more in our solution guide, Video Strengthens the Employee Lifecycle.