Video training

Hey Leaders! I hope you are having an awesome day. 

 

I’ve been talking about today’s leadership idea with a few of my clients and felt like this is something that could benefit everyone. One of the things we have to be as leaders is innovators. We have to be able to look at how we can take our businesses and be on the cutting edge. Let’s be honest, there are lots of companies out there that are trying to take your space in the marketplace. It is your job to innovate so that your business stands out from the crowd of your competitors.

 

One easy area to implement this principle is your team training. Whether you love training or hate it, it is not something you can avoid. When you have a new employee joining the team or even an existing employee whose performance is not up to snuff, you need training. And at this stage in your business, it is most likely that the main training you will have to do will be for one or maybe two people at a time. This can be both time-consuming and expensive. (Cue the ‘time is money’ adage.)

 

So here is your lightbulb moment: You do not need to spend time to train your employees each time you hire someone new. WHAT?? Dino- you just finished telling me how crucial training is. Hear me out here: YOU don’t need to spend time training employees EACH TIME you hire someone new.

 

Your time is valuable. I want to propose the idea of utilizing training videos for your business. With training videos, you create and edit the videos once and then utilize them every time training is needed. By building a training video library, you can direct employees to the exact videos they need, creating a customized, tailored training program for each individual. Imagine you have hired a new receptionist. How great would it be to tell them to go watch videos 1,2,4,8 and 12? What about that employee who is still struggling to close the deal? Have them rewatch video 9. 

 

I get it- the idea of making a whole bunch of videos can seem overwhelming. If I had my druthers, I would encourage you to shut down your office for a week and focus solely on making training videos. However, this is the real world and it is highly impractical to do something like that. So let me break it down for you and share some tips that will help this idea become reality.

 

• Identify which processes and procedures need to be trained. Go through each position in your business and list the skills needed and tasks to be done to be successful. The more comprehensive this list is, the more effective your training program will be. You may even want to involve your team members to assist with this task.
• Keep it short and sweet. We don’t want a video to be longer than 10 minutes, with the majority of videos lasting 5 minutes long. The longer videos should be reserved for the technical videos. Make each task be its own video. If you want to train someone to answer the phones, that will be one video. If you want to teach them the scheduling program, that’s a second video. Make sure your videos are very specific.
• Look for organic training situations. You do not need to write a script and hire actors to create your training videos. For example, let’s say you are training someone how to do a certain procedure. Stick a GoPro on an existing employee’s head and film them doing the procedure. You can save time by having someone talking through the procedure as it is done. It can be the person doing the procedure talking through it or you standing next to someone who is doing the procedure. Make sure you tell them the do’s and the don’ts, what to look for, how to know when it is done correctly. Even better- record the training videos as you are training a new employee and kill two birds with one stone.
• Use screen capture software to walk through processes. There are lots of great, low-cost software programs that allow you to easily show the flow through your business systems. Two that I really like are Camtasia and Screenflow.  
• Make sure you capture several examples for each topic. I recommend filming 5 different variations for each scenario that you are going to record. For example, if you want to show phone conversations, show five different conversations so that the team member watching can really understand what you are looking for and expecting.
• BONUS: Create a companion manual. Once your videos are complete, you can upload them to fiverr.com and have someone transcribe the videos for you. Voila! You now have a manual. You can include instructions to take out the “Umms” and “Ahhs”. Take it a step further and hire someone to edit the transcription and add images to enhance the learning experience.

 

Can you see why I love this idea so much? Just imagine how great it will be to make these videos where the majority of them will never need to be updated. You will just have them there for the rest of your career! Yes, it is a process at first, but the payoff, in the end, is so worth it!

 

I hope you will take this idea and run with it.