How To Onboard New Employees Remotely Using Video

6 ways you can use video to enhance your new employee remote onboarding experience.

How To Onboard New Employees Remotely Using Video

Welcome to the new normal, we’re all working from home now and a lot of us will continue to do so in the future. Most companies are now adjusted to the change in work lifestyle brought upon us by COVID-19. That means we’ve embraced Zoom meetings and other video collaboration tools to tie employees together and keep our businesses running.

When it comes to onboarding remote employees, the same mindset and technology embracement is needed. Companies planning to grow and add team members over the next few months must learn how to create and execute a new employee onboarding process that is inclusive, warm and engaging.

In this post we’ll share some ways you can onboard new employees using video and create the ultimate remote onboarding experience for your company.

Start by designing an onboarding process outline

Before you begin and do anything you should start by setting goals for your onboarding period. What experience do you want the new team members to receive? What do you want them to learn? Who do you want them to connect with in their first week, second week, etc?

Since the experience will be remote, it needs to be more structured than a typical in-person onboarding program. So stay away from lots of downtime within in the first two weeks and make sure their calendars are booked with video meetings.

Start to design your process and the related information the new employee needs to know at each stage. You don’t want to deliver all the key information all at once up front, rather pace it out over the course of a week or two. With that said, set a target duration period for your onboarding and work backwards to make sure you are spacing out information.

Once you have the general flow, topics and things, people and processes that need to be involved, next map the content to the stages. This may take some doing and require you to create new video or other content types on topics that don’t exist yet. WARNING: This can be a rabbit hole, be careful not to go too far down it. If you don’t have all the content yet, don’t worry start with something similar or deliver the content orly via video meeting.

Message ahead of the first day

Within 24-hours of the initial employment offer you should follow up with messaging on next steps, HR requirements and what the employee can expert on their first day.

Message again, 24-hours before their start date to let them know day-of instructions and details. Video is a great way to create an introduction and make someone feel included before they have even started their new job.

Use a single video meeting for all onboarding

Normally, if we were all at work, you would have the new employee come in at 9:30am, given them a tour of the office, meet with HR, have first day lunch, etc. Today that’s not always going to happen, so you need to do your best to create that same experience using video meetings.

To make the day streamline, set up a single video meeting for the day, with one link and dial in. Include that link on all the calendar invites through out the day. This will eliminate the need for the new employee to keep changing meeting rooms, and will allow other team members to simple join a meeting that is running all day.

Create video content purposely for onboarding

As you go through building out your remote employee onboarding plan you will notice that there will be a number of things and topics that aren’t documented. Consider how you can create that content and transform others into videos that can be added to a playlist.

Having videos ondemand for new employees is a great option for downtime when new hires can watch at their own pace and revisit later if they need a refresher.

Also, the experts that will need to present in your videos may be hard to lock down due to schedules and availability, so recording videos on their time and making them available later for viewing eliminates that problem.

Centralize all onboarding videos in a video portal

After you have created a number of onboarding videos and weaved that content into your onboarding process, along with video meetings, you should now consider creating a video portal to centralize the content.

To do that consider using a video software platform that makes it easy to launch and manage secure video portals. Today it’s easier than ever to launch these types of experiences and when you do, it serves as a home base for all your video creations. In the case your company has an Intranet, you may be able also embed videos into your existing solution, but you’ll still want to look at a secure video platform to host the video.

Most video software today can track video viewership and provide a detailed look at how the new employees is engaging with the content such as what points in a video were watched or re-watched, this can be valuable for understanding the experience the person is having in your onboarding process.

Introduce the new team member to the company via video

This one is a given, although it will put the new employee on the spot. At some point during the first week with the company, have the new team member film a short 2 minute video introduction with their smart phone.

Once you have the video, distribute it to the wider team using email, a tech communication tool like Slack or Microsoft Teams. There is no better way to be noticed and most employees will generally stop what they are doing to see who the new person in town is.

In conclusion

So there you have it, a few ideas on how to bring video into your new hire onboarding process. Creating a video-based onboarding experience requires time, effort and technology, but if you invest up front, that experience will pay off for years across many employees — making the ROI clear.

50Wheel is the world's leading website for video strategy and marketing technologies. Browse hundreds of software tools, guides and get strategy advice.

You are now leaving 50Wheel.com

On your way!

50Wheel.com provides links to web sites of other organizations in order to provide visitors with certain information. A link does not constitute an endorsement of content, viewpoint, policies, products or services of that website. Enjoy!

You will be redirected to
in 3 seconds...

Click the link above to continue or CANCEL