Making a great first impression: Using videos in your onboarding training

However, don’t simply view this as a challenge, it’s the perfect opportunity to take a look at your onboarding process, shake it up and do things a little differently. If you’re not already, then using videos, and incorporating them in e-learning, is a great way to make an engaging first impression – something important with millennials! With e-learning authoring tools, like Easygenerator, it is very easy to add videos and other multimedia to your onboarding training.

To help, we’ve set out five tips for using videos in your onboarding to improve the experience for all your new starters, millennials or otherwise.

Have a look at our employee onboarding program.

Tip #1 – Keep it short & sweet

We all know the cliché that millennials have a short attention span, but in truth, we’re all increasingly guilty of this as well. We spend more and more time on our electronic devices and expect ‘instant gratification’. It’s really important that you reflect this shifting dynamic when using videos and e-learning in your onboarding training.

A great way to do this is to use several shorter videos to draw out your points. This type of microlearning approach allows you to use clips to create concise and targeted modules. Not only will this hold your learners’ attention, but also ensure they take away the key learning from the module or course.

Our research into e-learning best practices indicated that you should keep videos under 6-minutes in length.

Tip #2 – Thinking long-term

Personal growth and long-term career prospects have become part of how we’re encouraged to think about ourselves and our careers, and we’ve all heard the phrase, ‘There’s no such thing as a job for life anymore.’ With this in mind, your new staff are unlikely to see themselves staying with your company in the long-term.

But why not use videos in your onboarding training to challenge this perception?

Letting new starters understand exactly how they fit into the bigger picture and where there’s scope for them to have a personal impact is a great way to make them want to stay and grow with your company. By setting out the real opportunities for growth at the outset, you can bring people on-board for the long-term. Using personal stories and testimonials from your own long-serving staff is a brilliant and easy way to present this information through videos.

Tip #3 – Accessibility

Not only is it important to think about the content of your videos, but you need to consider how your new starters are going to access them. Simply cramming people into a classroom and sitting them down in front of the TV won’t cut it anymore.

Instead, look at how we all access information in our day to day lives. We do this on-demand, in our own time and on our own devices. If your new starters can access and watch short onboarding videos during their morning commute, or squeeze one in at home when they have a spare 15 minutes, they’re much more likely to engage with the process and take away the learning objectives.

Think about using a learning management system (LMS) to organize all your onboarding materials, videos and everything else. The more information is laid out with ease and available in one location, the greater the impact it’s going to have.

Get start with our free onboarding template

Tip #4 – Use your own staff

One of the best resources you’ve got, and one that you’re probably not utilizing, is the people already in the organization. They’re the subject matter experts and can be used to help you set the scene and paint the bigger picture in your onboarding training.

Asking key managers to work with you and create short introductory videos about their department is a perfect way to break down otherwise complex information. Focusing on key corporate areas such as finance, HR and communications is a great place to start. Like all your onboarding and training content, this should be subject to regular review and feedback to make sure the information is up to date and achieving your learning objectives.

Tip #5 – Make it individualized

Remember that all your staff is individuals and nearly everyone likes to be treated as such – this is especially true of millennials. Adding a personal touch to the onboarding process is a great way to increase engagement with your new starters, and some companies even go as far as giving their staff individual gift bags on their first day!

Whilst you don’t have to go to this extent, there’s definitely scope to use a personalized approach through your videos and offer small rewards and incentives (such as discount vouchers or corporate branded ‘merch’) for completing sections or modules. Furthermore, setting out clear goals and making this trackable and rewardable is a fun approach to get some gentle competition into the onboarding process.

Incorporating e-learning into your onboarding training can enable you to create personalized learning paths. Your new hire only needs to learn what is relevant to them and their role within your organization.

In Closing

Don’t just view your changing workforce as another challenge to overcome; instead, become involved with what the new generation has to offer through their new ways of doing things. Get them engaged and excited from the word ‘go’, using videos and e-learning in your onboarding process, and by making things short and creative you will keep them enthusiastic about their new place of work.

To kick-start your onboarding program, why not download Easygenerator’s Onboarding Starter Pack.