Training videos are a great way to get your important training messages instantly understood by your new starters, current staff and contractors.
However, most training videos miss the mark when it comes to aligning new staff with their core values and vision, as well as engaging new starters.
New employees are at their most teachable when they first start a job. This is an opportune time to explain the culture of the company, the type of work and outcomes that are expected and the company attitude towards safety.
Jim Collins, the author of Good to Great, claims that what stood great companies apart from good companies was how deeply and consistently staff at the company lived, breathed and expressed the core values. At their best, core values give workers a framework for making the right decision that benefits the company. Safety excellent companies lead by their values than by rules. Rather than forced compliance, they lead by shared ownership of values whereby staff are empowered to make decisions.
In addition, senior leadership play an important role in establishing the culture of the company, including the safety culture. Safety excellent companies let new staff know from day one the importance of safety as they know that poor inductions undervalue the importance of safety.
Based on the information that makes good companies great, here are some key concepts that you need to include in your workplace training videos:
- Demonstrate your core values – Talk about each of your core values and discuss what they mean and how they work. Why are they important? Give examples of how staff use the core values to make decisions that are right for the company.
- Get senior leaders to introduce the video – Senior leaders are crucial in aligning staff with the goals, vision and core values. Film your senior leader welcoming new starters, explaining the need for the video, what they will learn, what the company is about, what’s important etc. Senior leaders are often travelling and out of the office, but having them chat in a friendly way to camera, makes them seem more approachable (and real).
- Tell stories – Stories provide an emotional connection to information and provide a framework for staff to understand what is acceptable company behaviour and what is not. They are ideal to use when giving examples of staff doing the right thing, working hard to reach a goal and working together as a team. Work out which stories to use in your company in the article How to find the right stories for your Company.
- Use animations – Animations can go where trainees can’t go. They are perfect for showing how the body works and how it can get affected poor lifting techniques and stress.
- Credible spokespeople – Customers, clients and patients are surprisingly more effective in motivating people to work harder, smarter and more productively. Getting your end users to talk about how your products and services have helped them is a proven way to motivate staff.
- Use quizzes – Quiz your learners after (or during) the video training. This makes sure they have absorbed the information. Use a quiz as a review tool. This is a great way to refresh staff. Even if they only watch a small segment of an induction training video (for example: warm up exercises, by undertaking a small quiz on this topic, you know that they have learnt the information). Interestingly, research studies point to high levels of recall and understanding of video, provided that viewers were told they were going to be tested before watching the video.
- Include face to face time – Often, companies think because they have a training video they do not need a trainer to go through the information. This is a mistake. It’s still important to include face to face time so that the trainee can ask questions and get feedback on any tasks they are practising. Mind you, the face to face time will be sufficiently reduced, but it needs to be enough so that the trainee can engage more with the material. One good training methodology is to use the video as the main form of training (as opposed to a PowerPoint presentation) while a trainer moves progressively through the information, stopping to talk about the different topics. Done well, this can ensure consistent training across the company.
Spending the time developing the right content strategy for your training video will ensure it has longevity and that it is a highly effective training tool for your company.
Research shows that companies that have a learning culture are more profitable and productive than those that don’t have one.
As a training video production house, we often get calls asking if we have a training DVD that people can buy right there and then.
When it comes to training staff on safety or procedures, one of the biggest problems many of our clients talk about is the difficulty of training staff consistently across numerous sites.
It’s smart for companies to be worried about staff training videos and how to tackle them correctly. There are so many choices. Quite frequently, training videos are produced that just don’t get used. Now, working out what components to include in your training video just got easier. 
The main objective of any safety communication is to change behaviour.
Induction training is absolutely vital for new employees. It is also the time when new starters are thirsty to know more about their new workplace and want to quickly integrate into their new team. However, it can be difficult to know how well a new starter or contractor has absorbed training information.