Professional Partner Content

How To Develop a Video Onboarding Process That Works

Employee onboarding has evolved a great deal in recent years.

These days, onboarding best practices follow a holistic, long-term approach. Today’s most successful onboarding processes deliver information in the ways people learn best—introducing new materials in bite-sized chunks over time and repeating key concepts to ensure new hires learn and retain what they need to know.

Exactly how these components translate into an effective, easily manageable employee onboarding process will be unique to every organization. However, there are seven core steps you can use to plan and execute effective video-supported onboarding processes.

Seven Essential Steps for Designing a Video-Based Onboarding Process

1. Identify a set of core onboarding training activities for every new employee.
No matter how your organization chooses to onboard new hires, the first step in designing your onboarding process is to identify what training your new hires need.

2. Determine which of your core onboarding activities can be supplemented with on-demand video training.
There are many ways to use video to scale and support your onboarding process, from cultural insights to technical skills training.

3. Map out a weekly onboarding schedule for each new employee’s first 60 or 90 days.
Keep the timeline flexible, particularly at first, by identifying onboarding requirements as a weekly set of expectations rather than as a formal daily schedule. This allows your new hires to easily onboard alongside the demands of their new roles and gives them the ability to review your training materials at their own pace.

4. Repeat the previous steps with role-, department-, and location-specific videos.
Here’s how the best onboarding processes stand apart. Once you’ve established the essential onboarding tasks for every employee, begin tailoring specialized processes by including valuable additional resources for specific roles, departments, or locations.

5. Document the process, and share it with other departments so they can add additional content.
This straightforward step is the most essential—and often the most helpful. Sharing your onboarding map across departments enables you to add more useful cross-functional training activities to the map. Sharing your map can also help ensure your organization buys in to the new program.

6. Make the onboarding experience consistent with automated messages.
Collaborate with your corporate communications or internal email communications teams to create an automated email drip campaign to share onboarding videos with new staff as planned on schedule. Most enterprise email systems make this easy; simply write a set of emails that share links to videos, and note when they should be sent to a new employee. Once you’ve set up the process, each new employee will automatically receive your emails on schedule, ensuring everyone receives a consistent onboarding experience.

7. Use video analytics to monitor viewing activity.
Once your maps are in place and your communications are set, monitor the system to ensure it works as expected. With an enterprise video platform like Panopto, you’ll be able to see broad viewing trends across your organization and know when and how often each employee watched a particular video as well as whether that employee finished it or stopped short. While this information is valuable for evaluating the effectiveness and compliance of individual team members, it can also be used to measure the effectiveness of your training process.