Why Video Is Crucial to Onboarding E-Learning
Are you looking to improve the onboarding process in your business whether that is to improve results, lower costs, or both? E-learning is one of the best tools you have available to ensure new recruits get the information, help, and support they need. Including video in your onboarding e-learning will make it even better.
After all, onboarding processes in modern, forward-thinking companies in Dubai and elsewhere need to do more than explain company policies and procedures.
Instead, onboarding should be about making sure the employee is happy and comfortable while also ensuring they have the knowledge and skills they need to get up to speed as quickly as possible.Of course, it’s also important to minimise the numbers of people who leave the business soon after starting. An effective onboarding process is essential to achieving this objective too.
So, to make your onboarding process effective, you need to use e-learning and to maximise the benefits you get from e-learning, you should include video elements in your courses.
The Benefits of Video in Onboarding E-Learning
It is beneficial to include video in e-learning courses regardless of the topic or objective. What about the benefits that specifically relate to onboarding e-learning? Here are the main advantages.
Personalises the Onboarding Process
E-learning offers significant advantages to onboarding but one of the potential downsides is that it can be perceived as being impersonal. This is because the new recruit interacts with the e-learning content rather than with a trainer, manager, or supervisor.
Video helps to overcome this perception, particularly if the video content in the course includes individuals in the business welcoming the new recruit and explaining key things they should know.
Videos in onboarding e-learning also help speed up the process often referred to as “putting a face to a name”. This is because the new recruit can see and hear the person rather than just reading their name on a page of text.
Engages the Learner with the Content
One of the challenges HR departments face with the onboarding process is making the content engaging. Simply using e-learning helps with this challenge. Including video in the e-learning module improves engagement rates even further.
Effective Communication Tools
There are some onboarding topics and concepts which are difficult to explain and/or make interesting using just text. Video, however, can transform these topics and concepts making them relevant to the new recruit and much easier to understand.
Improves Knowledge Retention
This point applies to videos generally in e-learning courses, i.e. they improve knowledge retention in learners.
This has particular importance in the onboarding process, however, as new recruits are typically presented with substantial amounts of information to digest, understand, and retain.
Of course, to existing employees, this information is easily recalled as it’s part of their day to day experience.
However, it’s the crash course nature of onboarding e-learning that presents the knowledge retention challenge to new recruits. It’s important, therefore, to do everything you can to help learners and facilitate knowledge retention.
One of the best tools you have to do this is video.
Ideal for Microlearning
Microlearning is a specific strategy that involves presenting a course in small bite-size chunks that learners can complete in short spaces of time. It is an e-learning delivery method that is suitable for a range of onboarding topics, and video can be a central component.
Reduces Costs
E-learning itself reduces the costs of onboarding training. This applies whether you are comparing costs to onboarding training in a live classroom environment or a situation where onboarding training is minimal and unstructured. In both cases, your business will save money by developing and implementing an onboarding e-learning strategy.
As video enhances onboarding e-learning courses, you can save even more by including video content.
Ensures Training Consistency
One of the major benefits of using e-learning for onboarding training is it ensures consistent standards for all new recruits across the whole company.
Including video in your e-learning maximises this benefit as you can ensure all new recruits either watch the same videos or videos made to the same standards.
This is particularly important if you have more than one physical location.
Examples of Videos You Can Include in Onboarding E-Learning
So, what are the various types of onboarding videos you can include in your e-learning modules? Here are some of the most common:
- Welcome videos – videos where the CEO, senior managers, and other key members of staff directly address the new recruit to welcome them to the company and introduce the company’s values, objectives, USPs, and culture.
- How to guides – videos are also excellent tools for demonstrating procedures or as a how-to guide. For example, instead of explaining in text the steps involved to complete a task on a software application, you can create a video where the new recruit is shown how to do it.
- To make compliance topics more interesting – compliance-related topics are often a key part of onboarding training for new recruits. They can be particularly challenging to make interesting, however. A video or animated video could be the solution.
- Skills training – you can also use video for skills training that is specific to your business. This can be on tools, processes, technologies, applications etc that a new recruit might not be familiar with or where the new recruit won’t know your internal procedures.
The Power of Video in Onboarding E-Learning
In summary, you will get a return on investment from creating videos for onboarding e-learning both in terms of costs and results achieved. As the priority for many companies today is to retain staff because of recruiting challenges and cost of recruitment, including video in onboarding e-learning makes sense.
