Today, there’s almost no end to the types of employee onboarding videos organizations create. As you build your onboarding video training library you’ll no doubt discover which concepts work best for your offices — and likely invent a new concept or two of your own as well.

While every onboarding video will be unique, David Lee, founder of HumanNature@Work, proposes five basic story types that effective onboarding should tell:

• How your product or service is different from the competition
• How your product or service has affected your customers
• How your company reaches out to your community
• Examples of employees who perform at high levels and how they do so
• Ways in which your company shows integrity, respect, competence and other values

Of course, you don’t need to try to tell all these story in a single video. A better option is to address each story individually, drawing upon common themes as you share separate lessons.

How are organizations using video to share those stories today? Let’s take a look:

Introductions to Company Culture and Values
Your corporate vision and mission statements are essential guideposts to who your company is, where you’re going, and how you’ll get there. Presenting these in video helps to make the all-important guiding principles easier for your team to find, to see, to share, and most importantly, to remember. It’s no wonder why Gartner Research has identified vision and mission onboarding video as one of the five greatest-opportunity, lowest-risk ways organizations should be using video.

Organizational Overviews
Many experts believe that interdepartmental training is key to the success of every employee, no matter what type of work they’re involved in. Larger companies in particular do well to make sure all employees both understand the bigger picture and how their own work supports that vision. Providing overviews of all that the company does and how each team, department, and business unit support the whole is a valuable way to get new hires invested in their roles.

Executive Messages
Often a helpful addition to the organizational overviews is a welcome message from the CEO and members of the executive team. Insights from these leaders help humanize your corporate org chart and provide your new hires with a sense for the style of your leadership team. As Forrester analyst Philipp Karcher notes, “No message from the top can be delivered quite as powerfully or directly as one where you are staring at the CEO across his or her desk.”

Office Tours
Sometimes, an in-person tour of your entire campus, including where to find common facilities, safety-related locations, and other spots of interest simply isn’t practical. Yet your new hires still need to know where to go to find colleagues, cafeterias, and their HR coordinators. Video tours of your workplace can help employees settle in more quickly.

Team Tours
Equally helpful to campus tours can be similar walkthroughs of the new employee’s own team. Likely, the hiring manager already plans on walking their new team member around the office and making introductions. Encouraging the hiring manager to record that tour with a smartphone or webcam is an easy way to help new hires learn names, locations, and responsibilities without the embarrassment of having ask twice.

Product and Service Functional Demonstrations
While cultural introductions and logistical considerations are essential steps in welcoming a new hire, the core of most onboarding training will focus on the specifics of your company’s products and services.

The most fundamental of these will be how-to videos intended to show your company’s offerings in action. The goal of these videos should be to provide a detailed overview of how each of your company’s offerings work. Depending on your organization, you may find it’s best to partner with your product management or marketing teams to capture this information.

Product and Service Value Proposition
Going a step beyond how your company’s offerings work, it’s also valuable to show why — the benefits they provide your customers in working the way they do. This may be recorded alongside the technical how-to, or separately to allow your team to further reinforce your value proposition.

This type of video is another specifically identified by Gartner Research as one offering the greatest potential value to organizations.

Product and Service Competitive Insights
A third type of demonstration video may not show your own company’s offerings at all. Recording insights from sales engagements, competitive news and analyst coverage, and available demonstrations of competitors’ offerings can provide a helpful overview that your new hire can refer to time and again to understand your market as a whole and your company’s place in it.

Find out more in our latest free white paper, Make Every First Day A Great One.

In it, we detail how video can be used to improve onboarding for businesses and universities, including:

• 15 kinds of onboarding videos to supplement your training program
• 5 capabilities your onboarding video platform needs to be successful
• How to develop an onboarding program that works

Download your free copy today!