5 Tips to Improve Your Employee Onboarding Process with Creative Content

We live in a world where you can shoot high-definition video from your mobile, so why do businesses still create boring old impersonal onboarding experiences for their employees? 

It is time for you and your business to step up your game and create that professional onboarding experience your new team members deserve.

Onboarding is the process of familiarizing new hires with a company’s culture and work environment. This time is crucial for the manager to provide the guidance and expectations for the worker.

How to improve your employee onboarding experience?

An onboarding process should achieve the following:

1. For the Employee
   1. Feeling: new hires feel welcomed to the business, and they made a good decision.
   2. Culture: build and share the company/team culture straight away.
   3. Knowledge: get up to speed and transfer knowledge efficiently.
2. For the manager and human resources
   1. Efficient: checklists and fully documented processes.
   2. Scalable: automation and customizable where possible.
   3. Feedback Loop: process improvement mechanisms built in.

In a study from SHRM, 50% of new employees who failed to meet their performance goals did not have a formal onboarding process. Now, this isn’t hard to fix if the company implements an automated software for employee onboarding with built-in processes, smart documents or other employee onboarding software. 

But with the cost of recruiting and keeping talent in the business on the increase ever since the Covid-19 Pandemic and with work-from-home benefits becoming the standard, it is harder for businesses to compete. In hospitality, for instance, they have come up with a smart formula to calculate labor cost percentage, which is a practice worth taking up.

How can businesses improve their internal processes to keep the talent they hire?

The employee onboarding process is typically a manual one where the manager uses existing but boring PowerPoints and outdated organizational charts. Sometimes they have to create their own content to share with the new employee.

We all know that the Resource Management Department is getting more busier with more responsibility and less time to allocate to new staff, but the statistics are true. 

A positive employee onboarding experience is essential for retention, with 82% of employees remaining at a company after a positive experience (Sapling HR). 

Retention isnt the only factor important to HR, effective ombaording processes boost productivity as well. 

A recent study showed that 92% of recruits feel productive and valued within their first month on the job due to effective onboarding practices (RecogNation, 2021).

How can we help managers improve their onboarding experience and process by developing simple ways to interact and have creative content lead the way in the onboarding experience?

We have developed 5 creative ways for a manager to get out of the dark ages and give their new employees a fun and interactive onboarding experience:

• Create your own team mission, vision, and values

Using your company brand and applying it to make your own team mission, values, and vision can be a powerful way to help onboard new employees into your team. Let’s check out how we can do that quickly and easily on a platform like Canva.

Check out the simple template below with blue, white and black themes. All you need to do in Canva is search for a theme name or simply type “mission statement” into the search bar. 

Choose one and click on the page you want to copy.

Screenshots within Canva – No attribution required.

Canva allows you to copy an image of your brand colors and then quickly extract these into a color palette, this is called the “Photo Colors” feature that you can apply over your team vision and values. 

Check it out here with the bottom right image “TBB Brand Kit” dropped in. This is just an image of the Business Blocks with the relevant colors we want to extract.

Then with a click onto each element, you can change the theme colors to your own business brand. Really simple, then you can even shuffle the colors of your brand to get the right style that you are happy with.

Canva is a simple tool that you can use to help save some time on your creative side!

• Create a Video Introduction For Your Team

Onboarding can be so impersonal, so why not create a nice onboarding introductory video for your new starters? Here are some examples of times when this could enhance the onboarding experience.

1. Welcome introduction showing what information is required for their onboarding.
2. Three days out from starting, how to get to the office and what to look out for.
3. Intro to the team – have each member tell the new starter a bit about themselves.

Clearly you can use the Movavi – Video Editor Plus for your editing but to make it even easier you could shoot the video on your phone and edit all in the one app with Movavi Clips –  a mobile video editor.

Here is an example of what you’ll create quickly and easily in Movavi.

Best Meet The Team Video Examples | Kartoffel Films – Video Production Company London

• Create Video Explainers for Your Processes

Get rid of those process documents (Word or Google Docs) that live deep within your company folder structures. 

Standard operating procedures (SOPs) shouldn’t be hard to understand and manage, so why not create a simple video screen capture of one of your team members recording themselves carrying out the job task?

There are some great benefits to having both text and video references:

1. Both media types cater to visual and reading learners.
2. Video SOPs provide a realistic look at how tasks are carried out.
3. Standard operation procedure text documents can be used for future reference
4. Text and video SOPs can easily be updated

When you bring on new employees, what better way to teach them through video content rather than outdated word documents and images. Also, the time to generate these videos is way quicker with a tool like Movavi Screen Recorder.

• Use an onboarding platform to automate the process

Platforms like Trainual and UseWhale can help your business document and deploy all the necessary SOPs and training processes for your new starter. Creating a structured onboarding approach to each of your new employee has clear benefits including:

• Onboarding automation has been shown to lead to a 16% lower employee turnover rate on average (UrbanBound), and
• New employees are more productive in their first  few weeks of work when digital onboarding is used in the hiring stage (The Talent Board, 2021)

You can also embed your company SOP videos into your processes and checklists for when you send them out. Now with YouTube and Vimeo embedding has never been easier, simply drop in the address or embed code onto the page and watch it become live!

• Professional company video culture video (like Canva)

A company culture video tells potential hires who your business is and what it stands for. It sets expectations, making it clear whether you’re a good potential fit in the business. 

It’s a lot like an online dating profile. You tell people about your values, and help them decide whether they want to send their resume or run for the hills.

Check out this cool company intro video from Mustard Creative Agency.

Mustard Creative Agency – Intro Video

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_lNaWQ8x8K0
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F7BLnm87a7o

The Wrap

In 2022, there is no excuse now for not being able to create high quality content that helps support your employee onboarding process. Employee onboarding does not have to be all about tedious paperwork and manual process.

Using creatives and videos in your onboarding can make the journey more engaging and personal. With the right video suite and strategy, onboarding videos can help your new hires feel welcomed and confident, increasing employee retention and speeding up the integration process.

With the access to mobile tech, and standard video editing software, you and your company can stand out from the competition and really create a positive, welcoming experience for your new employees.