Ready to learn some benefits of using video in the onboarding process? In the current job market, it is becoming clearer now more than ever that the training method just isn’t as effective as it once was, and retention is more difficult than ever as well. Employees that aren’t staying with their jobs have cited three major reasons as room for improvement in the training process for onboarding: The lack of structured training, adoption of culture issues and consistency.

 

What is “Onboarding”?

First, let’s take a quick look at what onboarding actually refers to. Also called “organizational socialization,” onboarding describes the mechanism through which new employees acquire the necessary knowledge, skills and behaviors to become effective organizational members and insiders. From the initial welcome and human resources paperwork to understanding the job, expectations, ramp up and more, the onboarding process can become really frustrating – and, if handled improperly, it can increase turnover rate.

 

GSTN Quick Stats:

• Monster.com reports 30-percent of external new hires turn over within the first two years of employment.

• Retention statistics from organizations including the Society for Human Resources Management (SHRM) show that turnover can be as much as 50-percent in the first 18 months of employment.

• Two decades ago, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average number of jobs held in one person’s career was six – today, the average number is 11.

• According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the cost for replacing an employee is over 25-percent of their annual salary – some even cite 50-percent – proving it’s very costly when you don’t get it right.

Clearly, these are great reasons for examining the success of your onboarding processes.

 

1. Using Video for Structured Training

Can someone say “order”? One of the biggest failures in the corporate training process has been the reported lack of structured training. New employees who recall their onboarding experience were cited as saying they were most likely not willing to stay with a company if they still didn’t know how to perform job duties after the training period. There are a number of methods that can help provide a structured training environment to help retention and prevent turnaround, and it all revolves around video…

Video is so effective because it combines text, images and sounds to create an immersive learning environment, and adding video to learning courses is a sure way of increasing engagement. Here are some ideas:

• Short Interviews – Two-minute interviews with industry experts, SMEs and famous speakers to communicate key information is a great way for engaging – or re-engaging – your learners, and is best used for conveying best practices and expert advice.
• Share Bite-Sized Tips – Film experienced employees sharing their advice and experience, because words leave emotions to the imagination of the read whereas in the video they are structured.
• Testimonial Blurbs – At times, written testimonials seem fake and overbearing; let your learners hear firsthand – from actual people – how the content your course is teaching is helpful and can be applied on-the-job. All it takes is a few 15 to 20-second short testimonials caught on video.
• Motivational Videos with CTAs – Storytelling is a powerful way to introduce a course; you can, for example, use animated videos to introduce lovable/respectable characters that guide the audience and asks them to take an action.

 

GSTN Quick Tip: Some tools you can use to add interactivity to videos include:

• Viddler
• RaptMedia
• HapYak

 

2. Video to Unify the Organization and its Culture

If your company boasts a “culture,” spread the word – one of the biggest areas of improvement for corporate entities has been the adoption of culture that is relatable to employees and that unifies the organization as a whole.

First, ask yourself: What makes your company unique? Whether your organization employs three or 300 people within one office or five, every leader should constantly be working towards a singular company culture wherein employees feel aligned with the mission. The last thing you want is for your satellite employees to feel unaligned with the company’s mission, and to lose sight of company goals. What’s worse, you don’t want your employees to begin to feel like outcasts.

Small video updates can make all the difference when you have a growing team; it is much easier to feel connected when you get to hear and see all colleagues talk about their work. Many top companies have been enhancing their corporate culture with internal video series, including Nextiva, a cloud-based communications entity with 300 employees and over 100,000 customers. This company uses an ongoing video series called NexTV to help connect its large team and promote transparency.

Likewise, for your own team, you don’t want to do the standard newsletter email and we get that…you want something that matches your fun and engaging company culture, and this should be addressed with a video format.

 

3. Video and its Role in Consistency

Consistency between the initial training and the onboarding is vital for training and retention success. Why? Ask any human resources team and they’ll tell you – consistency is the key to cultivating great workplace cultures and developing the employee skills needed to help an organization achieve its own greatness. So what’s the secret to simple, scalable, consistent new employee onboarding? Video.

Through video, your learning and development team can record everything new recruits need to know – and share that information in a standardized, consistent manner. Human resource teams can even make use of the organization’s central video library to build playlists of videos or new hires to access and play anytime, anywhere. Thus, even new employees coming in to offices across the country or around the world will begin with the same exact foundation as their peers at corporate headquarters.

Best of all, video for new employee onboarding can be downright simple: Just record the onboarding training already available! Just by recording those sessions, you make the information sharable…in turn, you help the whole onboarding process become more consistent.