9 Ways to Improve Your Employee Training Videos

For any business, orienting new employees is important. Even if they’re entering a job position for which they’ve received specialized education or training, they need to be briefed on how to do their job and what to expect. Many enterprises handle this with employee training videos. Creating videos frees up staff who might otherwise have to step away from work to train new people. Video can also be disseminated easily, making it useful for global or national retailers and food service franchises. With helpful platforms like Qumu, it’s easier than ever to create and disseminate high quality internal videos.

Why use videos for training, instead of hands-on instruction or textual resources? Video training has grown in popularity among enterprises in recent years. Twenty years ago, we relied on VHS and DVD, and cameras were still rare and expensive. But today, digital video cameras are quite ubiquitous and inexpensive, and digital recording allows videos to be copied and shared on any device. Creating and disseminating internal video has never been easier or more affordable.

Video also has some distinct benefits as a mode of transmitting information to new employees. Some of the benefits of video training over other training materials include:

• Reducing cost. When a staff member has to take time away from their job to train a new team member, productivity is lost, and revenue with it. Simply creating reusable training videos can remove the need to rely on other employees for training. Plus, video is cheaper today than it’s ever been in the past.
• It can be accessed from anywhere. Thanks to the internet, employees can access your training materials anywhere, from any device. There’s no need to have a TV, a VCR, and a physical tape on hand.
• It’s accessible for different learning styles. Combining visuals with audio, video can accommodate a variety of learning styles. For those who learn better from text, a simple transcript can provide the same information in a textual format.
• Employees can view the videos on their own time. Because your videos can be accessed from anywhere, your employees can view training materials on their own time prior to their first day at work. That way, they can start being productive as soon as they enter the office.

If you already have employee training videos, are they really working? Do they do a good job of briefing new employees about their job, or do they leave people confused by the end? If your training videos need something more, try using these tips to improve them.

1) Ignite Your Managers’ Passion for Coaching Employees

Ideally, managers pass on knowledge, skills, and insights to their employees. However, the role of today’s managers has largely eroded. With so many day to day responsibilities for managers, mentorship falls by the wayside. Even if you have a robust training video program, you should still incentivize and nurture this activity in your managers. Hands-on teaching is preferable to video whenever it’s possible.

2) Avoid information overload.

Learned information is easily forgotten. Even if the information makes it into a person’s long term memory, it can still be forgotten years later. In today’s world, where skills and knowledge can become obsolete in a matter of months or years, constant rapid learning is essential. But being swamped with too much information can make it much harder to learn what’s important. Your training videos need to strike a balance between conveying the right information, and avoiding information overload. A video that’s to information-dense can be hard to keep up with.

3) Encourage employees to be self-directed.

Training videos can help teach new employees the basics, but to learn and grow in their new role, they need a self-directed, autodidactic attitude. It’s important to emphasize the value of ongoing professional development.

4) Don’t Neglect Your Virtual Teams

An employee on the other side of the planet is still an employee. It’s easy to overlook remote workers, but they benefit just as much from internal videos as your in-house staff.

5) Provide multiple learning options for different learning styles.

Everyone has their own unique learning style. While some people learn best from video, others retain information more thoroughly by reading text. Still others get more out of hands-on experience than any kind of instruction. Providing more than one option for employee training materials can help you tailor the information to different learning styles.

6) Demolish your organizational silos.

Your business, as a whole, has its own unified goals. Each department is working toward these organizational goals, but all too often, they end up sequestered away from one another. All of your teams — web development, marketing, sales, accounting, and anything else you have — are all working toward your organization’s goals of productivity, profitability, and success. When teams don’t cross paths often, they don’t get a good idea of what other departments are doing. It’s far more efficient for departments to work together when it’s possible to do so. One approach to this is providing cross-departmental training. Video is a great platform for educating a department about what the other department upstairs actually does.

7) Provide coaching and training materials for new management personnel.

Coaching, mentorship, and internal video can go a long way toward helping new managers adjust to a leadership role. Management is its own unique skill set, and when people are promoted into these positions, they may not have had training in it. Internal videos can help provide support for managers, with training courses they can watch at flexible times that work for their schedules.

8) Capture the knowledge shared in meetings and reviews.

Why not videotape your meetings for future reference? There’s a lot of valuable information that comes out in meetings, from details about specific projects, to discussions of wider organizational goals and values. When you record it on video, that information can be accessed anywhere, on any device. For new hires, some of that information might prove valuable.

9) Try these five essential internal video types.

These five types of internal training videos are must-haves for a robust, comprehensive video employee training program. If you don’t have some of these, consider adding them to your library.

This type of video welcomes a new staff member onto your team. Whether they just set up their desk in the office, or they’re a remote worker in another country, a welcoming video gets them off to a great start. The video can feature the company’s CEO personally welcoming them, or it could feature a lower level executive with whom they have closer contact. This kind of outreach can foster a warm, open, and engaging corporate culture that encourages teamwork.

It’s not always possible for someone to personally coach a new hire into how to do their old job. When people are laid off, fired, or simply retire, they may be unavailable to train their replacement. Video is one option for bridging this gap. They embody necessary information, which can be passed on to new workers easily.

Company policies are another thing you can cover in a video, saving other staff from having to fill in a new hire. You don’t necessarily need face to face instruction to brief someone on policies regarding time off, sick days, dress codes, and other routine things. These videos are also a good way for longtime staff members to refresh their memory.

One of the most important uses of internal video is for training employees in the day to day tasks involved in their new job. Video training can help new hires avoid information overload, while still getting the information they need. Videos can be paused and rewatched if the person didn’t catch something the first time, making it more convenient than face to face instruction from another employee.

What about the little details, like where you keep the stapler, or how to use the hotocopier? These, too, can be covered in training videos.

Qumu is a robust, versatile enterprise video platform that’s great for creating and disseminating internal training videos. Sensitive videos can be equipped with secure protection, ensuring that only authorized personnel can see them. Employees can access your videos on any device, making it easy for them to stay informed and pull videos backup for future reference. Plus, all Qumu videos are fully searchable, thanks to their Speech Search feature.

At Pulatech, we help businesses successfully set up and implement Qumu as an internal video creation and publishing solution. Detailed, comprehensive training videos can make a big difference in the productivity of new staff members during their first few days on the job. We help businesses make these training materials a reality, saving time and money on employee training while keeping their staff fully equipped to handle their new roles.