As companies increasingly move towards having their workforces permanently on hybrid or fully remote footing, employee training strategies have become an urgent issue. And training is far more complex than just onboarding. It’s part of every stage of the employee life cycle, and there isn’t a single, one-size-fits-all solution for every training need.
Luckily, video–in a range of different forms–has proven to be an incredibly effective tool for training and engaging employees. Your employees prefer video delivery for training more than any other medium. Studies show employees of all ages–from Gen Z to Boomer and beyond—vastly prefer video-based training to the alternatives.
Let’s take a look at some of the types of training you’re likely to plan and how each can benefit from video—especially in a hybrid or fully remote environment.
How to Use Video for Corporate Training
Onboarding
Onboarding new employees in a hybrid organization could theoretically be done in person, but it can also be done by video, both live and recorded. And video has many advantages.
Not only does video cut down on travel expenses and time, video helps to create standardization that can ensure every employee receives the same cultural knowledge, policies, and philosophical introduction to the company.
Video onboarding can also reduce “first-day-at-school” stress, helping employees relax and truly absorb information from their own remote work location. It provides employees in a video-first hybrid work environment the opportunity to learn while doing. And it creates—through prerecorded materials and recordings of live sessions—a record of the proceedings staff can refer back to any time they need it.
Compliance
Depending on your industry, location, and corporate history, compliance may be a critical issue. From company-wide training on information security to the regulatory requirements of the financial services to healthcare industries, video-based training can easily help you meet critical compliance needs in a way that demands employee engagement.
Not only that, but in-video quizzing can help you make sure that employees have absorbed key, legally mandated information; and analytics can help you prove that this information has been disseminated and is always available for review.
Diversity
Diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) efforts aren’t just nice-to-have, they’re an essential part of today’s workplace. And, too often, organizations struggle to prioritize them.
As hybrid and remote positioning further help us work globally and cross-culturally, training to support these efforts and create a harmonious work environment is also becoming essential to employee recruitment and retention efforts. Diversity-related live and pre-recorded video training can demonstrate your organization’s commitment to these issues.
It can also help ensure there’s a consistent base level of knowledge across your company and can clarify and reinforce policies aimed at stopping sexual harassment and work-place racism—all while allowing people to engage in a way that allows them privacy and time for contemplation.
New Systems
Sometimes, we all need a tech update. When your organization rolls out new technology and procedures, creating pre-recorded video training supported by live Q&A sessions can get everyone up-to-speed quickly on their own time, in a way that doesn’t interrupt workflow or deadlines.
This material then becomes part of your video knowledge archive and can be repurposed to inclusion in onboarding going forward.
Upskilling and Reskilling
You not only need to make sure your employees have all the skills they need for today’s workplace, but recruiting and retaining high potentials is often dependent on whether they perceive growth opportunities at your organization.
The availability of video-based training curricula to build skills doesn’t just help you improve the workforce you have in a cost-efficient way; it also helps you recruit the staff you want.
On-Demand Training to Prevent Productivity Interruptions
Sometimes, training needs are apparent well in advance. But often employees will discover they need more information on how to do something as the item comes up in their workflow.
Without on-demand video training, productivity may be impeded until a time can be arranged for the employee to receive in-person training. Worse, they may just try to wing it, with less than desirable results.
With a robust video training library, created by your organization over time, employees can seek out the knowledge they need, when they need it, increasing productivity and reducing frustration and errors.
Peer-to-Peer Education
Some training is formal. Other training is done on an ad hoc, peer-to-peer basis. Peer-to-peer training is an integral part of unifying hybrid and remote workforces because it prevents knowledge from being siloed and emphasizes cooperation over internal competition.
By bringing video into the training process in hybrid and remote environments, this peer-to-peer education can be elevated, recognized, and captured to become part of your institutional knowledge base.
Training Hybrid Employees with Video: 3 Solutions
So how do you implement video to pursue all these different training types? For some, the impulse may just be to use basic video conferencing and be done with it.
But while this can facilitate conversations, tools like Zoom or Teams aren’t purpose-built for training and can’t sustain the training efforts of hybrid and remote organizations long-term.
Luckily, there are a range of video-centric technologies specifically built for training and education that can help you meet the wide array of needs and possibilities in a hybrid organization.
Virtual Classrooms
Purpose-built virtual classrooms, which offer significant educational features (including breakout rooms, quizzes, shared note-taking, and virtual white boards) are a far more appropriate—and useful—choice for corporate training that requires live, face-to-face, synchronous interaction in traditional classroom-sized groups.
Virtual classrooms are a particular boon to training that benefits from participation, group activities, and problem solving, so you’ll want to look for these key features:
- Virtual white boards
- Shared note-taking
- Polling/quizzing
- Breakout rooms
- Text-based chat
- Moderation features
- Persistent rooms
- One-click access
You’ll also want to make sure your solution can support a range of multi-media classroom materials. Look for the ability to share presentations and pre-recorded videos during a live class session as well as persistent classroom spaces that can give your students access to resource libraries.
Webcasting
Large-scale and even company-wide training can be conducted in live or simulive events via webcasting. While these events put the focus on the speakers and trainers, they still allow for interactivity through moderated Q&A, breakout rooms, and quizzing and polling.
Webcasting can be a training solution all its own, or it can be used in conjunction with virtual classrooms to reach employees at different learning stages and needs while reinforcing your organization’s key values.
Webcasting as a training solution has a key benefit in its reach. But in order for that reach to be effective, you’ll want to make sure any solution you’re looking at has ways to create engagement so that training sessions have all of your staff’s attention and aren’t relegated instead to a window running in the background
Key features to look for include:
- Text-based chat
- Emoji reactions
- Breakout rooms
- Shared note-taking
- Quizzing/polling
- Q&A
- Robust moderation
- One-click access
Video Portals
Live video training is exciting, but so is the ability to preserve that training for future employees and as part of your organization’s institutional knowledge.
To make that happen, you’ll want to be sure that any video content management solution you choose provides excellent support for ways to create, preserve, archive, and reuse training content. This includes recording and automatic transcription that gives employees easy ways to review covered materials in the format they like best.
Features to look for include:
- Recording and archiving live events
- Ability to set access controls on content
- Automatically generated transcription and/or translation
- Easy-to-use video editing features so you can trim and chapter recordings
- Searchable video libraries that go beyond video titles into content
See all the ways you can leverage video in the hybrid workforce.
