You already know about the power of video. The challenge, as always, is translating that theoretical power into actual, tangible training and business ops success.
In the hospitality and retail industries, managing your daily business ops and training both new and experienced employees is absolutely crucial. Turnover rates are high, and decisions have to be made on a daily basis. As the clocks turn toward 2019, why not embrace a technology that helps you accomplish both?
Video should be an integral part of your learning program. It engages your teams, helps them better understand information, and keeps their attention even for remote training situations. All you need to know is how to implement it for maximum success.
In this eBook, we’ll cover 7 of the many ways in which you can leverage video for your training and operations efforts, in 2019 and beyond.
1) Tell Your Brand Story
Industries with high turnover often struggle with succinctly telling their employees about the core nature and personality of the brand behind the business. Take retail as an example, where seasonal workers need to be onboarded and leave after a few months without ever truly understanding the company they work for.
You can fight that problem through videos that tell your brand story. Storytelling has been described as the future of digital marketing, in large part because of its innate ability to draw in audiences that connect to well-told tales. It can have the same effect in your sales and operations efforts.
A brand story on its own is not actionable enough to be a training video. But it can be a great way to introduce new employees to your company’s values, core beliefs, and vision. It can reinforce those core beliefs for long-term employees, as well.
Talk to your marketing team about the core brand, and how to tell that story. They might even have built an external-facing video similar to this one. Tweak it slightly so that your new and experienced teams get an ‘insider’s view’ into your company, its origin, and the brand you are building or have already built.
2) Showcase Your Corporate Culture
Research shows the difficulty of building a strong corporate culture in industries like retail and hospitality. Trainings tend to be functional, focused on basic core tasks to be accomplish. Professional development opportunities maximize specific skill sets, but too few restaurants or retailers actually communicate their own culture to prospective and new employees.
Consider this the more actionable angle of your brand story. Rather than simply telling your teams about your organization, you showcase the ways in which that organization actually impacts their daily life. Through video, you can show your corporate culture in a variety of ways;
- A ‘day in the life’ style that follows an employee around on their daily tasks.
- A narrative style that highlights core points in a more linear fashion.
- Testimonials from various employees about their experience working for you.
- The underlying causes and beliefs in your company that drive daily decision-making.
In all of these cases, you can communicate exactly the type of working environment you embrace and want to follow. As a result, you can set expectations for any future, more specific learning experiences.
3) Build Microlearning Experiences
In 2019, don’t rely on hour-long videos that are essentially traditional lessons recorded with minimal editing. Your audience, thanks to limited attention spans, will begin to tune out. You’ll lose valuable time and money making training videos that no one actually pays attention to.
Instead, break up your lessons and training efforts into small, bite-sized chunks. Microlearning should be an integral part of your training programs, allowing employees to pick up exactly what they need to know in just a few minutes. According to the Journal of Applied Psychology, learning in bite-sized pieces makes the transfer of learning 17% more efficient.
Microlearning is applicable in almost any environment. In retail, for example, sales professionals can benefit from short videos on how to operate a cash register much more than they would from a large, more comprehensive video.
Start by finding out the topics your employees are most looking forward to learning. Then, build microlearning experiences specifically designed to address these needs.
4) Incorporate Employee Contributions
Don’t rely on your own, corporate voice to engage in training opportunities or any type of videos. Your employees want to hear from their peers, who are more credible messengers in many ways. That can be difficult to implement in training situations, where an authoritative voice is necessary. Difficult, of course, does not mean impossible.
As you build your training videos, consider:
- Point of view footage for specific tasks from an experienced employee.
- Narration from a well-known team member whose voice others will easily replicate.
- Input from employees on the topics your next videos should and will cover.
- Case studies from previous projects and how team members found a solution.
The more contributions you can directly and indirectly integrate, the better. Your training videos will gain credibility in the eyes of your audience, who will become more likely to pay attention. For both onboarding and daily operations learning, these benefits become invaluable for your overall strategy.
5) Create a Video Resource Library
Too many training videos are based on specific tasks that your audience needs to accomplish. They might even be part of a larger training program, especially when you onboard new staff for your restaurant or retail business. These task-specific videos certainly have their place. That doesn’t mean you should rely only on them.
In addition, build a video resource library for your audience to access whenever they need. Categorize individual videos based on task types and topics. Make it easily searchable, including accurate titles and descriptions that are based on keywords related for the videos themselves.
Then, promote that library to your staff as a constant resource. The easier to recognize the link is, the more likely your teams will be to access it. Individual videos become parts of a larger plan that is designed to give your staff access to the exact information they need, when they need it. This project works perfectly when combined with the microlearning experiences mentioned above.
6) Engage Your Audiences
Among the biggest mistakes training professionals make when transitioning from legacy systems is simply taking the same type of content and converting it into video form. Taking this approach misses the huge potential that this medium offers. Instead, build videos specifically designed to engage your audiences.
Here, the same types of approaches for engagement that apply to marketing can benefit your creative process:
- Spark curiosity by leveraging the information gap, leaving some questions unanswered for further inquiry.
- Hook your audience from the first sentence with a strong opening and summary of the video’s point.
- Make it visual, showing the concepts in action rather than simply focusing on talking heads.
- Tell a story that gets your point across in a more narrative, natural format.
- Inspire your audience through content that induces happiness, hope, and excitement.
- Build credibility through outside sources, numbers, statistics, and contributors.
Training videos seem straightforward, but they can only be that if they actually engage your audience. Otherwise, you bury the information in a linear presentation that has most of your audience tuning out. By focusing on engagement, you can build compelling learning content your staff actually wants to watch.
7) Focus on Authenticity
Finally, never underestimate the importance of authenticity as you build your video strategy. Again, it’s easy to simply make broad claims in a video with little to substantiate them. They may well be true, but if you cannot communicate them in an authentic manner, the takeaways will not be positive.
This authenticity especially matters in training environments. Whether you look to train restaurant or retail staff, they have to trust you in the messaging you put out about the topic at hand. If they don’t, they’ll stop paying attention at best.
Authenticity in videos can be as simple as paying close attention to the body language of anyone presenting on screen. It should also mean showing the actual situations about which you’re looking to train your audience, rather than broad approximations. Finally, consider reviewing raw footage with employees to see where potential improvements can be made in terms of both subject matter and the authenticity of the presentation itself.
Building a Better Video Training Strategy, in 2019 and Beyond
Video has been around for years, but it’s just starting to make an impact in the training industry. As 2019 approaches, it’s time to stop simply treating it as a substitute for more traditional, static media and exploit its full potential in teaching your staff about daily tasks and larger perspectives.
Getting to that point means a shift in mindset. It also means a training solution that can support video in a variety of forms. Microlearning experiences, for example, are best embedded in a larger set of modules related to one topic. Use the above ways to maximize the potential of video, then combine your content with the right platform to share it with your staff.