How to Make a Training Video Your Employees Will Watch
A well-crafted training video is a valuable tool at all stages of employee development. Training videos are habitually used in employee onboarding, retraining, and promotion processes. However, training videos often face some challenges. Namely, it is difficult to make a training video that captures the audience’s attention. If your employees don’t engage with the educational materials you’re putting in front of them, it’s unlikely that you or your employees will derive any real benefit from your training videos.
Getting Employees to Watch
Managers often ask: “how do I make a training video that my employees will actually watch?” However, the reality is that they are often asking the wrong question. It’s easy to wrangle your team into the conference room and ensure that they at least sit and watch the video. As such, it is important to identify the challenges that managers actually face. The key word is engagement. Ensuring that your employees watch the training video is not the challenge, but ensuring that they are attentive and absorbing the lessons of your training video is vital to deriving real value from your content.
Familiar Faces
One of the easiest ways to make your training video more engaging at low cost is to feature your employees themselves in the video. Many employees will be excited to get involved in the training project, and their colleagues will be excited and interested in watching their acting skills, whether they’re good or bad. It may be complemented with some praise or good-hearted ribbing, but in either case, you’re more likely to see employees engage with your training video if the talent featured is from your own company. What’s more, it eliminates the cost of hiring professional actors!
Moreover, including your own employees in the video will boost morale around the office, as the employees featured will be affirmed that their work and contributions are important to the company. Along with training videos often comes change, either with new employees or new tasks for your existing employees. With any such changes, employees will often be uncomfortable and push back on the implementation of your reforms. They may be unwelcoming to new employees. They may also refuse to buy into “the new way of things”. Boosting company morale by featuring some employees can counteract some of these negative influences from change.
Make it Funny
Humor is a time-tested tool for making learning interesting and engaging. Even simple ironies and jokes in a video make your audience far more amenable and accepting of the message that you try to convey. That being said, properly leveraging humor in your training video requires a level of discretion. For example, if your training video has to do with safety, it can undermine the importance of your message to make jokes about injuries on the job. As such, you will have to work with your scriptwriter in order to ensure that your training videos employ humor in a responsible fashion.
One easy way to employ humor in your videos is to use inside jokes that are popular around the office. Perhaps there’s one spot on the floor that’s particularly slippery when it rains outside. Playing off of the shared experiences of your employees is an easy and fun way to draw their attention and engagement to your next training video.
Make them Short
We write often about how companies make the mistake of creating videos that are too long. You may feel compelled to include nonessential details or try to make your training video a one-size-fits-all solution. The result of trying to cram too much information into one video is training content that is too long. When your training video drags on too long, your audience will lose interest and disengage from the message that you are trying to convey with your video. As such, you should work to keep your training videos as brief as possible.
In the interest of reducing the run-time of your videos, you could consider removing non-essential details. Moreover, if your company requires extensive training, it is worth considering breaking the videos into a series, which can be shared with employees over time. Instead of making it a grueling afternoon of video training, you can spread the effort over a long period of time, and make it relevant to the knowledge and experience of the employees at different intervals.
Comment below and let us know what kind of training videos would you find engaging?
