Are your Employee Training Videos Gathering Digital Dust?

Employee training videos are essential for educating staff, enhancing productivity, and ensuring consistent knowledge transfer within organizations. However, not all training videos can provide these advantages.

You may have encountered educational videos that are too long, dull, or irrelevant. This fails to engage with the employees adequately. As a result, the new team members either learn by trial and error or reach out to someone else within the organization.

Even though these methods could work in certain situations, they increase the chances of mistakes while disrupting daily operations.

Businesses and enterprises can work around this challenge by creating employee training videos that get the point across effectively.

In this article, let’s identify the common areas of improvement in training videos and look at three tips that will help you overcome them.

What's Wrong with Current Employee Training Videos

The employee training videos that often get skipped usually have one or more of the following properties:

Let’s dive deeper into them to figure out the best possible solutions.

1. Overly lengthy and irrelevant

Employees are busy and have limited time to spare. When faced with a lengthy video that meanders through unnecessary details, they quickly lose interest. This results in a disengaged audience that retains little of the presented information. 

Teams may create more detailed training content for their SaaS teams by thinking it will be more thorough. However, in the IT sector, fast and accurate action is often prioritized. A better approach would be to just explain the steps and the concepts necessary while providing additional references.

2. Monotonous and dry

You might have busted yourself or a team member yawning while watching a training video. This boredom stems not only from longer content but also due to the way it is presented. 

Such types of explainer videos are commonly found when companies hire third-party subject matter experts (SMEs) to create educational content on technical or niche topics. Monotony stemming from this leads to viewer fatigue, causing employees to zone out or skip through the content.

This challenge can be dealt with by creating training videos that are more hands-on, where the trainees learn by doing.

3. Poor production quality

Subpar audio, blurry visuals, and amateur editing distract from the content’s value. Employees may perceive these videos as unprofessional or not worth their time, undermining the training’s credibility. 

It is no surprise that the solutions to the above problems are obvious. Create training videos that are short and to the point, make them more interactive for the viewer, and keep the quality top-notch.

At the same time, it is also apparent that applying these solutions can be tricky.

For instance, teams may lack the resources to edit their instructional content after they record them. Moreover, it is essential to learn about the preferences of your audience to make the content interesting enough.

Let’s look at how you can navigate around these nuances to create employee training videos that actually get viewed.

3 Tips to Create Engaging Employee Training Videos

Below are three tips that you can start putting into practice right after you finish reading this article. They will significantly improve the quality of your educational content while streamlining the overall process.

We have summarized the tips in the table below so you can go through them quickly:

1. Keep it short and focused

Short videos are more likely to be watched in their entirety, ensuring better information retention. They are also more convenient for employees to revisit as needed. Although the lengths of videos vary based on the complexity of the topic, the ideal length is under 3 minutes.

Training videos for employees can be as long as 15 minutes if needed. However, it is recommended that you break larger topics into smaller chunks. Microlearning not only keeps the content length small but also enhances understanding and retention.

Here’s how you can keep your employee training videos short and focused:

1. Focus on completing one action item rather than a whole process. You can create courses where each action item is explained in a separate training video.
2. Only explain the concepts around the steps and provide additional resources. Employees need to know how to complete the task and why.
3. Create an outline and storyboard to help keep the video concise. Rather than trimming irrelevant portions after you have recorded the content, it is better to do it in the earlier phases.

2. Polish before publish

As we briefly discussed earlier, a poor-quality employee training video may lose credibility in the eyes of its viewers. This can affect engagement and knowledge retention. There are several things you can do to quickly and effectively enhance the learning experience of your new team members:

1. Add pan and zoom effects to bring the attention of the viewer to specific sections on the screen.
2. Remove the background noise to help the learner focus on the content better.
3. Give an AI-generated voiceover based on your script to keep it lean, concise, and professional.
4. Insert branded intro and outro to establish uniformity across your training content.

Beyond the above modifications, you can also add subtitles, padding to the content (so the video has an aesthetic background), and background music. These changes, when coupled together, drastically enhance the quality of the training videos for employees.

However, making all of the above changes may cost you hours or even days. Moreover, some teams could be required to hire dedicated personnel or learn the necessary video editing skills.

Either way, this makes the whole process of polishing the training videos for employees resource-intensive.

Until now.

Clueso does all of that for you in minutes.

Just upload your raw screen-recorded employee training video onto the platform and it will do all the things we listed above. Within minutes, you will get a polished, studio-quality explainer video that successfully engages your employees.

The best part is, you can get started within 15 minutes!

3. Make them accessible and provide support

To encourage video training for employees within your organization, host all the instructional content on a dedicated knowledge base. Of course, you can complement the employee training videos with help articles to meet the preferences of your team members.

Whenever your stakeholders want to clear a doubt or learn something, they can get an immersive learning experience.

Keep in mind that the audience of those educational videos might have specific questions that you may need more explanation. It can be helpful to have a dedicated workflow that receives questions and grievances from the teams and answers them adequately and timely.

A simple way to put this into practice is by having a feedback box at the bottom of the training videos in your knowledge base.

(add feedback dialog image)

Employee Training Video Examples

Let’s look at some examples of employee training videos where the above-mentioned tips are put into practice. We have shared examples from distinct use cases of employee training where utilizing videos will be immensely helpful.

The videos are created with Clueso.

1. Communicating company policies

These videos can cover essential topics such as HR regulations, office culture, software usage, and workflow processes. When new team members join your organization, they might have a lot of routine questions related to the work culture and their position in the company.

Topics related to compensation, leave structure, and the mission and vision usually fall into this category. Addressing them personally or through recurring video conferences may get tedious.

For instance, new employees may need to know how they can apply for sick leave. A 48-second training video in this case can be more efficient compared to traditional HR documentation.

2. Educating about operational procedures

Operational procedures refer to all the action items employees carry out on a day-to-day basis in a particular order. These action items and their method of execution are different in each organization. 

This is because operational procedures depend on various factors like business objectives, position in the company, and project requirements.

Consider the example of developers in a SaaS product-based company.

Developers, when they join your team, need to know about how you write, deploy, and manage code. These practices should be explained in detail, as they are unique to how you do things.

These standardization documents, when relayed through employee training videos, can make their onboarding efficient and effective.

3. Providing tools-specific training

All of the tools in your tech stack have their own knowledge base. Their providers or vendors have created extensive content on how to use them. So you may wonder if creating tool-specific training videos for employees is worth it.

Well, the answer is, it depends.

Some tools are general-purpose software and are used almost identically across organizations. For instance, Google Docs is likely used in a similar way for most companies — creating, editing, and reviewing written documents. 

However, there are software like Notion, Google Analytics, and HubSpot that are used differently by two different departments within the same company.

Creating training videos for such scenarios will greatly streamline your workflows and boost productivity. The new joiner will only need to learn about the features and functionalities that are relevant in the context of your operations.

Wrapping up

Training videos for employees are essential for enhancing skills and knowledge, leading to greater efficiency and productivity.

To get those benefits, it's crucial to keep videos short and focused, ensure high production quality, and make the content easily accessible. Additionally, providing support and regularly updating the videos can enhance the overall effectiveness of your employee education program.

Clueso makes the creation of employee training videos efficient by transforming simple screen recordings into polished, studio-quality videos with features. The platform automatically gives AI voiceover, adds zoom effects, and inserts branded elements to elevate the content quality.

All within minutes.

Want to revolutionize your employee training video creation process?

Let’s get you started today.

FAQs

What should be included in an employee training video?

Include clear objectives, concise content focused on key processes, FAQs, real-life examples, and interactive elements. Use high-quality visuals and audio to maintain engagement.

How do you write an employee training video script?

Start with a detailed outline, focusing on one topic per video. Keep the content structured by mentioning the steps clearly. Try to write in a conversational tone to maximize engagement. During scripting, it is a good practice to mention which visuals will be used.

How to record employee training videos?

Invest in good recording equipment and software to ensure the best audio and video quality are captured. If possible, have a dedicated recording studio or space where there is minimal background noise and disturbance.

How to create employee training videos quickly?

One of the most effective ways to streamline your training video creation process is by automating repetitive tasks like removing background noise, adding zoom effects, etc. Clueso does that effectively within minutes to save you hours or days of editing.

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