If you ask any employee about their first few days at a new job, they will probably respond with something like this: “It was really overwhelming, fast-paced, and stressful.”

Reducing onboarding time and making it more engaging are just some of the challenges that almost every organization faces when hiring new employees.

Whether your company is small or big, the onboarding process is challenging for everyone. According to research, the average time to complete all onboarding activities is 42 days. To make things even trickier, 46% of all new hires fail after 18 months.

This means that out of every three new hires who left within their first 90 days, two of them failed because they weren’t adequately trained or oriented on the job.

That’s where employee onboarding videos come in handy. The engaging format can simplify the complex and daunting onboarding process, helping the company and new hires save a lot of time and energy.

Why Do You need to Simplify Employee Onboarding?

Employee onboarding is basically the process of introducing new hires to the company culture, their role and responsibilities, career development opportunities, etc. That means the more simplified it is, the better.

The first reason why you need to simplify employee onboarding is that it can reduce new hire turnover. After all, organizations that invest in employee onboarding have a lower turnover rate. Onboarding is not just about welcoming new hires – it’s also about retaining them.

Well-designed onboarding processes can maximize employee engagement and help employees to feel more connected to the organization and more satisfied with their job.

Why Is Video the Best Onboarding Tool?

Video is the best and most efficient tool that you can use to enhance employee onboarding. It combines visuals, sounds, and motion, which is the most effective way to deliver information.

When you read a book, you use your imagination to create a mental picture. And the same thing happens when you listen to someone speak; you create a mental image of what the person is saying. It all makes sense since the majority of the population (65%) are visual learners.

By combining both visual and audio elements, video can help you achieve better employee engagement, reduce training time and costs, improve productivity, and increase employee retention.

5 Ways Video Can Enhance Employee Onboarding

Now that we know why videos can play such a big role in effective employee onboarding, let’s see how the engaging format actually works to help employers and new hires achieve all those benefits.

1) Visual storytelling

Visual storytelling can help you connect with your audience as it engages both sides of the brain – the visual and the logical side of the brain. And this is very important in the onboarding process.

Visual storytelling can help you to convey your company’s values, vision, and mission in the most effective way.

2) Reduce training time and costs

Onboarding or training videos can help you reduce training time and costs because a video doesn’t just provide information. It also makes the new hires interact with it.

This means videos make it easier for them to take some more time to think with a more easy-to-follow step-by-step lecture style. This will help them retain more information.

Videos are also versatile. New hires can pause, rewind, and rewatch the videos to learn at their own pace.

3) Improve productivity

Since onboarding videos reduce the time spent on training, communication, and collaboration, they are effective in improving new hires’ productivity. They can start putting all the points they’ve learned through videos into actual practice much faster.

4) Create a strong connection between the company and new hires

Video can bring your company values to life by creating a strong connection with new hires. It can help show your audience who you are, what you do, and why they should choose to work for your company.

5) Improve employee retention rates

Video can help you improve employee motivation and retention rates by building a positive company culture, which is crucial for retaining new hires.

Combining visual and audio elements makes the learning process much more effective and faster.

Bottom line

Video can help you to eliminate the stress and anxiety of onboarding new hires. It can significantly reduce training time, improve productivity, and increase employee retention rates. Using video for onboarding is not a new concept; it has been proven to be effective in the past. The most important part here is to craft digestible employee onboarding that can make new hires learn things faster– not make them even more overwhelmed.

About the Author:

Andre Oentoro is the founder of Breadnbeyond, an award-winning explainer video production company. He helps businesses increase conversion rates, close more sales, and get positive ROI from explainer videos (in that order).

Twitter: @breadnbeyond

Email: [email protected]

LinkedIn: Andre Oentoro