
As summer descends upon us, Green Screen Talent Now is turning up our own form of heat with new ultra-informative, professionally-supervised blogs designed to take your business to the next level. As experts in everything having to do with business training videos and training video production, we are kicking off the month of June with an interesting read about why using videos to help train and educate your employees is such a successful route to take.
To begin with, let’s take a quick look at some of the applications training videos can be utilized for. These include, but are certainly not limited to:
• Retail training videos
• Sales training
• Product usage and product demo training
• “Train the Trainer” videos
• Workforce and management communication videos
• Employee orientation
• Compliance best practices
In case you haven’t heard, using video as a tool to supplement and scale corporate employee training programs is no longer considered a “new idea” – today, video training enjoys the case study endorsement of Fortune 100 blue chip brands like IBM and Microsoft while boasting the research-driven support of leading analysts at Forrester, Bersin and Gartner. It even has won the full adoption of the Learning & Development industry, with more than a few of the world’s leading L&D associations including video as a core facet of their own member training, communications, promotion and onboarding.
If massive-scale entities like these can benefit from corporate training videos, don’t you think your business can? After all, employee compliance teams around the world have already begun to implement video in numerous ways, and in today’s corporate training environment, video plays a myriad of roles…from standardizing onboarding processes and providing live product demonstrations to fostering social learning and coaching by subject matter experts. Interestingly, some of the innovative ideas in use today come courtesy of experienced trainers, while others come from the employees themselves.
So just how are modern training divisions of companies using video to support and scale their learning and development activities…and how can you learn from these and implement your own strategies? Let’s now take a look at some of the latest trends in today’s evolving workplace training space:
1. Improving the Onboarding Process
You have noticed that we’ve used this term a couple of times already. The word “onboarding” refers to the fact that no matter who they are or how much experience they boast, every new hire must have time to get “up to speed” at his or her new position. While no two positions will require the exact same onboarding process, video training can help make the learning curve much more manageable for everyone involved.
Further, a well-planned onboarding “video library” can help you share a plethora of information with your new team members than would be possible on a face-to-face basis; this could include cultural introductions, company tours and organizational overviews.
2. Making Basic Skills Training Universally Available
Every business entity has its own way of doing things, including you: This includes scheduling meetings, booking conference rooms, signing emails and making conference calls. Within a few months of their first day, these are the skills every employee should get to know as second nature. Still, we have found that these fundamentals aren’t necessarily always obvious to a new hire – in all likelihood, he or she is used to another company’s way of doing things and will often be unsure of the right steps to take at their new position with their new company. In this scenario, video can be a godsend as it helps your new hire find the information he or she needs to get the basics right.
3. Actually Showing How Your Product or Service Works
It’s an unfortunate dirty little secret most companies and business organizations don’t like to divulge…but we’ve heard and seen it time and time again: Many of the people working for a company possess, at best, only a passing understanding of how their bosses’ products actually work. Imagine that? And you know what’s worse? Even fewer can most likely describe how customers use their bosses’ offerings, or how it differs from the competition’s products/services.
This becomes a major issue for organizations with technically or mechanically complex offerings, or those targeting a market their employees aren’t a “natural” part of – including virtually every business-to-business entity out there – because it’s just too difficult for an individual to learn every aspect and last detail about what these companies do…unless they’re shown.
Recording and sharing product information and demonstration videos can provide that extra level of insight that businesses such as your own can use to develop the best, most knowledgeable team. Today, you can utilize such tools to show how your products and services work through field videos, screen recordings, end-to-end walkthroughs and more.
4. Providing Coaching for New Management
Are you aware of the utter importance found in proper management training? Every year, business organizations across the globe add new programs, mentorship opportunities and coaching processes. But in the age we find ourselves living in, where managers are more pressed for time than ever before, many organizations are turning to video to help ensure new managers get the opportunity to fully experience a company’s management training.
That’s not all – supporting management training via video allows new managers to view each training course when it fits into their schedules, helping them take time to really engage with the content and better absorb it. Through the magic of video, managers can instantly replay segments in the event they want to review a point for clarification. Even through all this, video has proven to be a valuable tool for traditional management efforts, as well.
5. Providing Anytime, Anywhere Training for Front-Line Employees
If you own a business that employs a front-line staff – such as retail employees and customer service positions – these people are the face of your organization. Yet this can create a significant challenge for you in that the front lines can often be where turnover is the greatest. To assist these often decentralized employees, you can look to video to provide a consistent training experience for all workers – and one that’s available anytime and anywhere, even on employees’ tablets and smartphones if need be.
6. Improving Your Sales Enablement Practice
What do we mean by this? Sales staff are among the busiest workers at just about any company, and trust us when we tell you that all but the most engaging information could be lost in the shuffle of client visits, new business calls and more. Complicating this scenario even further is the fact that most sales teams are spread across a certain market, some even around the world, thus hindering the company’s ability to bring the team together for a quick update or demonstration.
Taking advantage of training video production can assist with this because for many sales enablement teams, video is more than a welcoming hand – it creates a competitive advantage, boosting onboarding and training, enhancing communications and ultimately attracting and connecting with prospects.
7. Ensuring Everyone Has Engaged in Compliance Training
A most critical part of your new hire training process is educating employees on the laws, regulations and company policies that apply to their daily job responsibilities. An effective compliance training program does much more than merely reducing regulatory and legal risk…it helps foster a positive corporate culture built on a bedrock of accountability, respectful interaction and raw integrity.
As such, corporate training videos can be especially effective when covering delicate and important compliance issues, some of which encompass emergency procedures, sexual harassment laws and more. Further, not only do business training videos provide an ideal medium for these topics, the technology can also assist you with ensuring your employees are actually completing these essential courses. As experts in video protocols, Green Screen Talent Now stresses that video analytics included in many modern video platforms offer user-level detail, allowing your team to know whether an employee has viewed a video or not, and even if they’ve watched it through to its completion.
8. Expanding the Reach of Your Conferences
In our experience, there is no substitute for a live event. More and more organizations are finding that “marquee events” – whether they’re internal-only conventions or industry-focused public conferences – are extremely valuable tools for sharing information, connecting employees with each other or the industry and educating a formidable audience all at once.
Attendance of these events by your employees can boost morale and engagement in a fashion that’s nearly impossible to replicate during business-as-usual moments; of course, for often-cited factors of budget and timing, attendance is seldom possible for every event and every member of your team. This is where a video recording of the event can substitute as the next best thing, bringing the excitement and insight gleaned from all those keynotes and breakouts to anyone, anytime, anywhere.
9. Capturing and Sharing Institutional Knowledge
Virtually everyone is considered a “subject matter” in something within today’s business world; whether it’s how product architecture is drawn, how individual teams manage data, how leads are processed through CRM systems or how the supply chain is organized, someone on your team is familiar with the intricate details of how each and every part of your business actually works. The problem is – and this was an issue actually covered by the New York Times – if you yourself haven’t captured that knowledge, it literally walks out the door with your employees.
Ready for a frightening statistic? The average business loses 12-percent of its workforce annually, as those that have not documented their institutional knowledge wake up to find it’s gone to work for the competition…and no one has left the answers. Corporate training video production meets this potential crisis with a quick and easy solution: Preserving and sharing the insights of your experts with the press of a “record” button.
10. Role Playing with Video
In the end, much of an organization’s success lies simply in the way employees interact with customers and each other…it really is that simple. Many businesses we have worked with have invested lavishly in this area, actually scripting interaction dialogue, templating communications and more, hoping to standardize how the company presents itself both inwardly and outwardly. Training video role playing can run the gamut from formal to informal training, with many organizations finding that simply recording their best employees in action helps to identify behavioral traits and actions that help them succeed.