5 Examples of Employee Onboarding Videos (+Best Practices)
- Published: August 5, 2021
- Updated: January 30, 2024
Onboarding plays an important role to improve the overall experience of an employee with a new organization. It helps them adjust to the social and performance aspects of their new job to become key contributing members of an organization quickly.
Research shows that a strong employee onboarding process improves both retention and productivity for your new hires.
Investing in good employee onboarding is critical to the success of new employees. And many companies are now using video onboarding methods to polish their traditional onboarding processes and efficiently onboard new hires.
According to a study, video is a powerful onboarding tool that can provide a convenient and familiar experience for new hires.
Think about it – if you are getting the same information by a) reading a text-only instruction manual with 20-pages and b) watching a quick video that takes you through all the key points, what would you choose? Most people would prefer watching the videos because the audio-visual explanations and demonstrations make learning much more interesting and fun.
What is Video Onboarding for Employees?
Video onboarding is an engaging and effective way for you to welcome new employees, introduce them to your company culture, and help integrate them into the team quickly and efficiently.
Well-crafted onboarding videos have the power to transform complex information into engaging, easy-to-understand formats. This allows your new hires to absorb all the information quickly, and on their own time.
5 Benefits of Video Onboarding for New Employees
- Flexibility – The flexibility of video allows you to cover a wide range of topics in a more engaging way.
- More enthusiasm – The creative video onboarding content increases employees’ enthusiasm about the new job.
- Efficient delivery – Whether you’re uploading a video to a social media platform or an LMS, it is easy to deliver and store quality videos for your new hires.
- Knowledge Retention – Engaging video content makes your employees retain knowledge for a longer period than traditional onboarding and learning materials
- Efficiency – Employees can watch videos to get required information at any time. This saves the HR team from repeating onboarding meetings and conversations over and over again.
5 Types of Employee Onboarding Videos to Create
Here are five examples of employee onboarding videos you can create for your organization today to get started with video onboarding.
1. The “Welcome” Onboarding Video
Sending onboarding videos to welcome your new hires before their joining day sets the stage for employee engagement and alleviates first-day nerves. A welcome video featuring your CEO is an effective strategy for your onboarding process that has a high impact on retention. Consider adding all the company-related information you want to showcase to your new hires, including company history, goals, culture, values – and how employees play a vital role in it.
These videos provide an opportunity to demonstrate your organization’s inclusive, engaging, open corporate culture that many employees seek in a company they envision staying with long-term.
2. Company Policies Video
An important part of your onboarding process is to give new hires an overview of the company policies. However, it can be overwhelming for them to comb through every detail in the extensive guides and documents on these policies.
Video content allows you to outline complex company policies in layman’s terms and in an engaging format. Furthermore, employees can watch these videos in their own time and replay them to refresh their memory.
3. Department Overview
The department overview videos introduce the new hires to department goals and provide overviews on how each team supports the organization as a whole. Describing how each department contributes to the overall success of the company is a valuable way to get new hires better invested in their roles.
4. Key Skills Training
Every organization has its unique combination of processes, tools, and technologies to get the work done. Training your new hires on organizational tools is a crucial component of the employee onboarding process to help them get up to speed quickly.
It’s easy for new employees to feel overwhelmed or confused with so many tools and applications to learn about, values to adopt, and processes to memorize. Video onboarding training sessions mitigate the risk of information overload and help new hires effectively assimilate a large amount of learning in a short period.
Video training software empowers L&D teams to create instructional training videos efficiently for their employees.
An effective video onboarding process gives new employees all the information in bite-sized, digestible bits to help them learn faster and perform better in the long run.
A Digital Adoption Platform is an employee training solution that assigns learners a contextual task list containing relevant walk-throughs based on the learner’s user segment. These interactive walkthroughs show users how to complete a specific process by guiding them through each step, showing them relevant training videos, or providing informative articles.
Software clicks better with Whatfix's digital adoption platform
Enable your employees with in-app guidance, self-help support, process changes alerts, pop-ups for department announcements, and field validations to improve data accuracy.
5. Transfer of Knowledge
New hires don’t always get a chance to meet the people whose positions they are filling in. This creates a continuity problem and impacts the amount of time taken by them to pick up key skills and understand the intricacies of various processes.
Transfer of knowledge videos are an important aspect of the employee onboarding process that makes the adjustment period shorter for the new hires. Outgoing members can record videos using video tutorial creation tools explaining the essential job details for the new hires to watch and quickly catch up and also keep with them for future reference.
5 Employee Onboarding Video Best Practices
Here are five best practices for using video onboarding to train your new hires.
1. Break up long videos into smaller chunks
People are less likely to stay attentive for long videos. Sticking to just one topic for each video, and breaking up longer presentations into smaller 15-20 minute video clips is a better approach to keep them engaged throughout.
2. Make videos engaging and interesting
Find ways to create engaging content that employees are more likely to enjoy and retain for a longer time. Injecting some humor, incorporating existing staff into the videos, adding creative visuals, creating quizzes or polls are some of the ways to make your video onboarding content engaging.
3. Keep it online
Rather than gathering all new hires in a room and making them watch the onboarding videos, keep everything online so they can watch at their own pace. This would make them process the information easily and retain it for a longer time – as well as have videos accessible anywhere, anytime.
4. Add your company’s personality
Make your video onboarding personalized by recording short clips from your current staff talking about why they love working in the company. This would help new hires build an instant connection with the team – as well as lighten the mood for the onboarding process overall.
5. Get Feedback And Improve Your Onboarding Process
Consider seeking feedback about your video onboarding programs from new and current employees. New employees can give you a unique perspective as people who are coming from outside the company, while seasoned employees will have a strong grasp of the most important information to share about the company.
Collecting feedback and re-evaluating your employee onboarding process accordingly, helps improve the process over time.
TIP: Leverage employee onboarding software to collect data on your onboarding flows for continuous improvement.
5 Examples of Employee Onboarding Videos
Here are five examples of organizations implementing video onboarding to use as inspiration for building your own video training content. We also recommend exploring general examples of training videos to draw inspiration from as well.
1. Google
Google’s “Interns’ first-week” video incorporates different clips from interns sharing their perspectives on Google’s company culture. The video gives you a good look at its offices and surroundings. The interns speak to you directly about the company’s work-life balance and creativity in the workplace. This video serves as an excellent intro to what it’s like to be an employee at Google and also makes you want to be a part of its awesome culture.
The takeaway: Infusing your video with specifics about your company culture coming directly from employees (in this example, interns) makes the onboarding process more natural for new employees who feel overwhelmed by the magnitude of the company.
2. Grubhub
To help out nervous recruits, Grubhub made a training video of a fellow driver walking them through his deliveries and sharing his tips and tricks. The video is very informational and highlights a list of standard operating procedures that help ensure a smooth delivery. The video is simple, short, and discusses the insider secrets of the job – with a personal touch.
The takeaway: Incorporating a few tips and tricks for employees in the videos helps them learn more in a short time and succeed on their first day.
3. Intuit
The Intuit new onboarding video shows their CEO, Brad Smith, talking about bringing in top talent and helping them do their best work. He further adds that every employee chooses their career path, as long as they add value to the company. This encourages them to understand they will have the opportunity to move throughout the company if their performance is high.
The takeaway: The video gives new hires a chance to establish personal connections with the founders/CEOs on their very first day – as well as provides some incentive and goals for employees to work towards.
4. Hubspot
The two basic ingredients of successful storytelling are a) an interesting story and b) telling that story in a captivating way. Hubspot used both techniques while creating their new employee video. The video takes you through the complete history of the company, introduces the team, and the company’s benefits and values – all in an entertaining fashion.
The takeaway: Storytelling is the key to creating a highly engaging content asset.
5. Dunkin Donuts
This new employee video introduces a top fast food franchisee and talks about how employees make the experience of buying donuts fun for customers. The video explains what is expected of the new hires and what they need to focus on. The video is educational and provides short training for employees to start in their new position.
The takeaway: Combining the educational training videos with a nice, warm welcome and a few practical examples keeps them friendly and efficient.
End Note...
A great employee onboarding experience saves your company money and stress. Employee onboarding videos are a great investment for any organization as they help your new hires digest all key information bit by bit without becoming overwhelmed or intimidated. Video onboarding provides great value by keeping your new hires engaged from day one and creating a memorable onboarding experience for them.
Disha Gupta
Disha is a Senior Content Marketing Manager at Whatfix. Her writing focuses on HR, L&D, and technology enablement topics - from employee onboarding, training and development, employee performance support, knowledge management, workforce transformation, HCM, LMS, and emerging trends in enterprise L&D.
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