Part of any effective employee onboarding plan is the transfer of knowledge. It’s a simple concept: new employees need to know how to do their jobs before they can do them. They need to know how their new communications systems work and where to turn when they need help, etc. But when a large percentage of your workforce is remote, or off-site, it becomes more misaligned, and the transfer of knowledge becomes more difficult.

The New Age of Employee Onboarding

Let’s identify the problems with employee onboarding HR managers face today before we learn gather tools to solve them.

Many organizations struggle to shift their ‘traditional’ employee onboarding systems to accommodate ‘nontraditional’ workers. Contract workers, remote workers, consultants, and specialized freelancers for hire are becoming more and more a part of many industries and organizations. Any kind of onboarding system needs to bridge this gap and give these workers—in many cases short-term hires—the information they need and nothing they don’t need.

Onboarding is all about giving employees, full-time or contract, the tools to succeed. Since many more specialists are being hired than ever before to manage specific systems or solve specific problems, employee onboarding efforts need to be more personalized and focused.

How Video Communications Can Help

True employee engagement forms over time as a relationship between management and worker. When workers feel like they’re being heard and communication feels like a two-way street between themselves and their bosses, they are more engaged. Because engagement is not something you can turn off or on at a moment’s notice, the messages between management and workers can only be homogenized and controlled up to a point.

But when a significant portion of your workforce is out of the office, homogenization can be helpful. You can give all your employees, no matter where they are, the same messaging you’re giving to the workers in the office. Even though it’s no longer feasible to speak face-to-face with all of your employees regularly, you can still impart the same information to all of them at once with a bank of videos and live broadcasts accessible on all platforms.

Recording videos for remote workers can be complicated, and in some cases, costly. There are ways to mitigate the costs, of course, and there are few communication investments that can reach in-office and remote workers at the same time in the same ways, but you still have to be careful about the production of your video communications content.

When you have onboarding communication videos that are informative and bring all workers, with or without in-person supplemental information, into the fold, however, you can greatly assist the onboarding process efficiently for everyone.

Video Resources

Ideally, you’ll have a bank of videos to help employees not only learn what they need to succeed in your team, but also welcome them to the team and the communication style of you and your management team. The initial investment can be large, but the payoff in efficiency and employee engagement is huge.