Greatness, it is said, is not merely achieving excellence, but in achieving excellence consistently.

Ask any HR team and they’ll tell you — consistency is the key to cultivating great workplace cultures and developing the employee skills needed to help an organization achieve its own greatness.

Consistency in communicating values. Consistency in providing training. Consistency in setting expectations. Consistency in managing performance.

So why then are so many organizations so inconsistent right from the start?

New employee onboarding is the name most commonly given to the process of welcoming a new hire and getting them up to speed on their role and the company.

New employee onboarding is the first opportunity an organization has to build foundational knowledge with their new hires — everything from functional skills, like how to use internal systems and sign up for benefits packages, to matters of greater importance: organizational values, standards of performance, and what defines success. Altogether, it’s the information every member of your team needs in order to do the best work.

Related Reading: Remote Onboarding Best Practices

 

New hires, too, have come to depend on effective onboarding — and feel lost without it. According to a survey of employees who had quit a job within six months of starting:

• 23 percent felt they hadn’t received clear guidelines for their new responsibilities
• 21 percent said they wanted “more effective training”

Yet with so much to be gained — or lost — many organizations still don’t make onboarding a priority.

Instead of standardizing an onboarding program that can ensure all that essential information is delivered consistently, companies put their faith in the hiring manager to conduct this essential learning and development task. Sometimes this means new hires get a lengthy, detailed, 90-day onboarding plan. Sometimes, this means new hires get a cup of coffee and a rundown on what their new team works on. And sometimes, this means new hires are simply assigned a task and left to learn the ropes on their own.

It’s a problem that is only exaggerated when organizations expand.

For larger organizations, or those with geographically dispersed offices, storefronts, or sales territories, relying on local managers for new employee onboarding increases the likelihood that your new employee experience will be different for every new hire — and that over time, every physical location will develop its own individual workplace culture, and not necessarily consistent with the values and measures practiced in the corporate headquarters.

What’s the secret to simple, scalable, consistent new employee onboarding?

Video.

With video, your learning and development team can record everything new recruits need to know — and share that information in a standard, consistent fashion. HR teams can even make use of the organization’s central video library to build playlists of videos for new hires to access and play anytime anywhere — so even those new employees coming into offices across the country or around the world will start with exactly the same foundational information as their peers at HQ.

Best of all, Panopto’s employee onboarding software makes it easy to create onboarding videos. Just record the onboarding training already available! Just by recording those sessions you make the information shareable — and in turn, you help the whole onboarding process become more consistent.

Need an example?

 

 

Leveraging video training creates a portable, consistent learning experience for every employee — and ensures that each team member receives that critical information in the same way, regardless of who conducts the training.

Video onboarding doesn’t have to be limited to the basics, either. HR teams can even work directly with hiring managers in front-lines or high-turnover teams to capture the essentials of what new employees need to know — ensuring that every new team member learns everything they should, even if the corporate training team can’t deliver the information in person.

Make Every Employee’s First Day A Great One

Learn how to enhance new employee onboarding with video  in our complete guide to video-enhanced onboarding, 15 Ways To Enhance Employee Onboarding With Video.

Download your copy today!