Onboarding Video 101: A Practical Guide for 2023
Employee onboarding is an incredibly important part of the hiring process.
With a solid onboarding process, you can retain more of your workforce, reduce employee turnover, and make for a more comfortable transition into a new role.
Onboarding isn't just limited to employees, however. Using videos on your website or e-commerce store is also a great idea to help customers better understand how to use your products, how they can interact with your company, and more.
We strongly encourage the use of onboarding videos and videos in general for employees and customers; keep reading to discover why.
What is an onboarding video?
An onboarding video is generally used for employee orientation to give new employees insight into the company they are joining, the kind of work the company does, their core values, and more valuable information.
It helps to free up resources from managers and supervisors by allowing new employees to learn about much of the company and their processes through these pre-made videos.
While they cannot replace training and orientation with a real person, they are certainly a fantastic tool to use alongside in-person training and orientation. They may include photos, screen and webcam recordings, text, graphs, video clips, photos, and more. There are many benefits of a great onboarding video, which we'll get into below.
Onboarding videos are also great tools to use for your customers, particularly for new products and/or services, and to introduce your company to them.
Why make an onboarding video?
Onboarding videos are a great addition to any employee or customer orientation experience. Here are a few reasons why you should create and utilize onboarding videos.
Educate your customers
For products that are new to the market, have unique features, or have multiple uses, videos are a great way to educate your customers.
Rather than having walls of text or a convoluted description of your product (descriptions are still important for SEO, though!), rely more heavily on videos to teach your customers about your products.
Not only will they be more engaged and spend more time on the page (also good for Google ranking), but it will give them more of an opportunity to connect with your brand on a personal level, specifically if you have a brand ambassador who can be found in numerous videos or areas of your website.
Onboarding motivates new employees
Starting a new job is often both exciting and intimidating. There are a lot of already established processes and relationships within the company that can feel difficult to integrate into.
Employee onboarding is the perfect way to ease those nerves.
When a company takes the time to onboard new employees–from teaching them about the company's values to introducing them to their team members and making sure they are comfortable as they settle into their new role–it can make a world of difference.
According to SHRM, 69% of employees are more likely to stay with a company if they experienced great onboarding.
When you consider the cost of turnover, you'd be doing both your company and your new employee a disservice by not offering a strong onboarding process.
Videos speed up the onboarding process
Humans naturally go off script and describe things differently each time they talk about a topic.
When you use a pre-recorded video, you can provide a consistent experience to ensure that information is conveyed in the same manner to everybody. Any discrepancies in applying that knowledge would be isolated to the individual. This can help with future support and discipline if needed.
Additionally, videos mean that a distinct amount of time can be allotted to onboarding and you can keep new hires on a schedule. It can be difficult to make a schedule with live speakers due to supervisors and managers having very busy days.
Videos are flexible and easily accessible
Videos are fantastic for conveying tone and expressions–something that's quite important when it comes to human interaction. Conveying tone through text is much more difficult, and people can connect better with people when they can see them, like through webcam recordings.
Not only can videos cover a range of topics, but they can save your company money in productivity.
Plus, viewers retain 95% of a message after watching it in video form (as compared to 10% of a message when reading it!)
4 types of onboarding videos for businesses
Meet the team employee onboarding video
This type of onboarding video is a good introduction for employees, particularly if they are remote or will be busy with onboarding for some time.
For small businesses, meet-the-team videos are great for introducing the new employee to all members of the business. They allow them to get a quick glimpse into the people who work in certain departments and with who they may be interacting regularly.
For larger businesses with over 50 employees, a meet-the-team-type video might be consolidated into only supervisors and managers, or perhaps team members that the new employee will be working with in a certain department.
Knowledge handoff/videos for employees
Knowledge handoff is an incredibly important aspect when important roles are being filled. The more wisdom and on-the-job expertise that can be imparted to a new employee stepping into the role, the better.
Many times, high-level positions are held for long periods (5+ years) by senior employees, and when it comes time to replace that role, a lot of technical knowledge leaves with them.
Consider creating a knowledge handoff video to reduce this gap between your former employee and the new one. This might include:
- Recent and current projects being worked on
- Start dates, goals, intent, outcome, employees involved, cost
- Major tasks that are part of the role and the processes that accompany them
- Names and positions of employees and their chain of command
- Detailed insider information including opportunities and partnerships
Company policy information on health, safety, and compliance
Rather than having your new (and existing) employees sit through a presentation or having to hire an external presenter for health and safety, create a training video for your company's policies, health and safety, and compliance procedures.
This way, you can have employees take some time out of their day when it works best for them, rather than losing productivity from your entire workforce at the same time.
Videos are also more engaging, meaning your employees are more likely to get the proper message out of them and can sign an agreement after the fact, rather than reading through multiple pages.
Virtual tours of the workplace
Especially in the current day and age where remote work is becoming a dominant setup, having virtual tours can help connect an employee to their workplace–even if they won't be working on location.
Meeting people in the office and seeing how they're set up for work and collaboration can help a new employee feel connected to the space and the company, whether they'll be joining the office at a later date or not.
How to make an onboarding video with Animoto in 5 simple steps
Animoto is an online video editor that makes video creation easy.
Using the Animoto video maker, you can make onboarding videos that are perfect for onboarding new employees or explaining processes to team members.
In just 4 steps, you can easily create your company's onboarding video series with Animoto:
1. Choose a template
Make the video creation process as easy as possible by using the step-by-step video tutorial template or searching through our templates library.
If you're feeling extra creative, you can always start from scratch.
2. Upload your media
From branded assets to pre-recorded videos, upload your existing content into the video editor. From there, you can add any missing pieces from our premium stock library.
3. Record your screen and/or webcam
Training your team on a new digital product or software? Show it off with a screen recording! This shows your team exactly what they need to do to succeed.
If you aren’t presenting in person, you can still make a personal connection with webcam recordings! Create a webcam record of yourself ahead of time to add a face to your training video. It will make your video more engaging and memorable, thus helping to boost retention and completion rates.
Learn how to start your recordings and add them to your Animoto videos on this blog.
4. Customize the project
Get creative, but keep it focused! Personalize your onboarding videos by cropping video clips, including text styles, and adding voice-overs. With Saved Brands, you can save your colors, logo, and font once, and bring every video on-brand with just one click.
Your videos should be branded, consistent, and engaging, but not take away from what you're talking about.
5. Export your video
Animoto allows you to preview your onboarding video in seconds. When you’re happy with the final product, export it from Animoto and distribute it to your network or publish it onto your company platform. Be sure to get feedback from your new employees as they go through the onboarding process with your new videos; improving your onboarding process is very important.
Looking to get more in-depth with your video content? Check out our 'getting started' guide for tips, inspiration, and a list of features that you can use with Animoto.
6 video onboarding best practices
- Keep it short and cut out unnecessary information
- Make it engaging to hold your customers' and employees' attention
- Build excitement and be personable (think: human, not robotic)
- Include webcam recordings to make a connection with your audience
- Personalize videos as much as you can (branding, role-specific information, etc.)
- Bring others on board (where possible, add in other team members)
Onboarding video examples to inspire you
Metropolitan Airports Commission (MAC)
MAC's employee welcome video showcases different faces and departments. It adds an element of personability by having existing employees share their first impressions and nerves, which a new employee might also be experiencing.
This introductory video reminds us that showcasing the campus and the benefits of working is a great way to get employees excited about working at your company.
Tailwind
In this video (and template), Tailwind introduces new customers to their new features. This is a wonderful video to include in your onboarding materials so that new customers can watch at their own pace. With this on hand, they’ll be able to get more use out of your product and troubleshoot common issues when getting started.
Make an onboarding video in Animoto
Now that you know what goes into a great onboarding video, it's time to put that to practice. Start creating your new employee (or customer) onboarding video series for free with Animoto.