7 Onboarding Video Tips that Boost Engagement

Read Time: 5 minutes

Creating company onboarding videos can be an effective way to welcome new employees and help them feel more comfortable in their roles. Not only do company onboarding videos provide a basic introduction to company culture and expectations, but they also give a face and voice to the company, making the experience less intimidating for newcomers.

You just need to be certain your onboarding videos are engaging enough to serve their purpose! This guide will help you achieve that important goal.

What Are Onboarding Videos?

Onboarding videos consist of various types of video content you might use during the new employee onboarding process. Examples of videos you may create for employee onboarding include (but aren’t necessarily limited to):

A general onboarding welcome video to make new hires feel at home
Training videos
Videos about company policies
Videos introducing new hires to specific team members with whom they’ll be working

This isn’t an exhaustive list. Further down, this blog will touch on the way studying onboarding video examples can help you better determine what types of videos you might wish to create.

Why Make Employee Onboarding Videos

Just as company onboarding videos can come in several forms, there are also many reasons to create them. These are just a few:

Generating employee motivation and enthusiasm on day one.
Providing new workers with a consistent training experience that doesn’t vary from one onboarding session to another.
Posting onboarding video content on social media and other platforms to attract new applicants.
Giving new hires a sense of your company’s brand.
Improving the onboarding experience for remote workers.

There are several tips employers should consider when creating company onboarding videos:

1. Make Onboarding Videos Concise and Engaging

It’s important that all key points are covered during the onboarding process. That said, it’s also essential to not overextend your welcome message with too much information at once – this could become overwhelming or tedious for someone just starting out.

Striking the delicate balance between sharing all necessary information in a new employee onboarding video without overwhelming a new hire on their first day may take some practice. If you can justify creating several versions of the same video and testing them during different employee onboarding sessions to determine which yields the best results, consider doing so. This is a great way to develop your overall internal video production strengths.

2. Study Onboarding Video Examples

Improving the onboarding experience for new team members doesn’t need to be as complex a process as you might assume. You can easily study examples of strong onboarding processes and materials from other companies to determine how to optimize yours.

This is particularly helpful when planning onboarding videos for new hires. The following are just a few onboarding video examples that may inspire your own:

Google welcomes new interns with a video featuring testimonials from those who’ve already had this experience, perhaps helping to calm new team members who might be anxious.
Adobe boasts an onboarding video that accomplishes two goals in under two minutes: sharing information about the company’s values and mission while also showing off its diverse workforce.
Zynga’s onboarding video is another one that accomplishes multiple goals in a short span of time. It begins with the manager candidly admitting his mother makes fun of him for being a grown man working at a gaming company. This minor embarrassing detail makes the video feel more real and authentic than a generic welcome video might feel. The video also goes into certain specific details about precisely how the company pursues its mission to give new employees a sense of what working at the company may involve on a day-to-day basis. For example, the video showcases employees talking about how they emphasize quickly developing new features for their products, which tells new hires they may regularly focus on completing technical work in a fast-paced environment.

These are just a few examples. It’s best to conduct thorough research on your own to find onboarding video examples that can serve as effective inspiration for you and your team.

3. Involve Existing Employees in the Employee Onboarding Video Creation Process

Allowing current team members to participate in the development of an onboarding video for new hires will ensure that all company expectations and policies are accurately represented. It also gives current employees an opportunity to be involved in onboarding and make new hires feel welcome.

Depending on the specifics of your process and the various roles your employees may play, the way in which they might help you create an onboarding video can and likely will vary. Examples of how your team members could assist you to include:

Making a list of points a video should include preparing a new employee for their first day with the company.
Describing the company culture in their own words, which might influence how you describe it in your video.
Appearing in the video.
Contributing joke ideas if you decide to incorporate humor into the onboarding experience.

It’s worth noting that letting your team members help you develop onboarding videos won’t just ensure these videos engage new employees. This process can also boost engagement among your current workers by giving them a chance to reflect on what they enjoy most about working for your company.

4. Focus on Company Values

Research consistently indicates that when employees have a sense of purpose or feel their work is meaningful, engagement and retention rates benefit.

One way to provide new hires with a sense of purpose from the start is to create a welcome video that focuses not only on the company culture but also on overall core values. This will let new workers know they’re joining a team with a mission.

That said, providing employees with a reasonable work-life balance is also important. While you can and should demonstrate to employees that the work they’re doing has real value, you should also make it clear you won’t require them to sacrifice all their free time in service of the company.

5. Make it Interactive

This is a simple but effective way to make an employee onboarding video more engaging than it might otherwise be. An onboarding video could naturally involve or even require a degree of interactivity to keep a viewer interested.

For example, maybe your company onboarding videos include tutorials introducing new users to software or other tools they’ll be using in their work. If so, your videos might ask audience members to perform certain tasks while following along. This makes an onboarding welcome video more engaging while also giving new employees opportunities to practice their work duties.

6. Use an Onboarding Welcome Video to Highlight Opportunities for Employee Growth

Today’s ambitious employees want to know they’ll have the chance to develop their skills and “climb the ladder” at a company when they start out. Providing employees with growth opportunities is one of the most effective ways to engage them.

Consider this when developing employee onboarding video content. It’s wise to let our new workers know that you value them and want them to have the chance to thrive.

7. Consider Making Role-Specific Videos

Don’t limit yourself by only creating one general onboarding welcome video. It may be smarter to create multiple videos for different roles new hires will take on.

This allows a video to be more personalized. It also gives you the opportunity to share practical information during onboarding instead of focusing on vague details that can apply to virtually anyone joining your team.

Create Company Onboarding Videos Easily With Powtoon

Think you need a large video production budget or a dedicated video production team to create a quality employee onboarding video? Not so! Powtoon offers templates and a range of other tools and resources to ensure creating videos is easy even if you have a limited budget and experience. Learn more about what Powtoon can do for you by signing up today!

Bio
Latest Posts

Hanna Abitbul

Hanna is Powtoon's Content Marketing Strategist. She joined Powtoon as a copywriter in 2019, after graduating from university with a specialized degree in marketing and business. She continues to inspire people to create incredible video content with blog posts, videos, guides, and more. Hanna's passions include reading, singing, and caring for animals (#proudvegan). Nothing makes her happier than waking up to her two black kitties who, contrary to popular belief, are good luck!