Hiring new employees isn’t cheap. If a worker leaves, finding a replacement—and getting that replacement up to speed—requires recruiting, training, processing, and other onboarding procedures. All this takes time and money, directly by spending it on the new employee or indirectly by the tasks other employees must do to make the worker productive. So when hires who companies devote so many resources to during onboarding leave—and statistics show that 20 percent are gone within the first 45 days—the bottom line is inevitably affected.
New employees subjected to a long, boring onboarding process may feel dissatisfaction with their jobs before they really even get going. Therefore, anything that streamlines or improves the process will increase the chances of hires engaging and becoming productive sooner, while decreasing turnover in the first few months of employment. Corporate training videos can be a big part of making onboarding more effective and, frankly, less boring. Here are some reasons why:
Seeing Is Better than Reading
Study after study has shown that video produces a much bigger impact on memory, retention, and understanding than the printed word. Yet, many companies still rely on training manuals—often, 2-inch binders or thick, picture-less volumes—to “teach” hires the skills they should know before setting foot on the floor or in the field. This approach relies on employees to be extra studious, but the result is just the opposite: They don’t learn the skills they need. This makes hires’ first weeks frustrating, thus resulting in a situation in which they won’t engage and be more apt to walk away. Corporate training videos not only reduce new employees’ need to learn skills, but also improve the quality of learning. Hires are engaged faster and more productive at the outset.
Anytime, Anywhere Learning
Consider this scenario: An enthusiastic hire arrives for work on his first day at a retail store, comes through the front door to see the gleaming showroom beckoning him to fruitfully work, and, then, … is shuffled through the store, into the back warehouse, and to a windowless training room for onboarding. This worker’s first impression is that of a dungeon. Corporate training videos coupled with tablet-based training solutions minimize, if not eliminate, the negative effects of this scenario. Hires can train and go through onboarding in break rooms, on the floor, or even before the employee arrives for his first day. Furthermore, corporate training on an iPad or Surface requires much less commitment from managers and other employees—the videos can achieve much of the same teaching in a fraction of the manpower.
Flexible Content
On first glance, corporate training videos may seem too rigid: If something must be updated or revised, doing so might require complex editing or a whole new video. This might have been the case with the onboarding videos of yesteryear—the overly produced, embarrassingly acted creations that contributed to hires wondering what they had gotten themselves into—but not anymore. For starters, the digital capabilities of tablets make creating videos a far simpler process, possible by managers a d employees on the local level. And because of this ease, revisions can be made faster and be updated to devices in a snap. The onboarding process improves because hires will always have access to the latest corporate training videos to learn from.
How do new employees at your company respond to corporate training videos?
