Welcome videos for new employees create a sense of belonging, making people feel part of your team and company culture from Day 1. Used to support a great onboarding process, they drive deeper connections and help employees understand how to make a difference.
As the ‘Great Resignation’ looks set to turn into the ‘Great Retention’ in 2023, first-rate onboarding is becoming increasingly important. Yet, with two-thirds of employees finding their own onboarding experiences stressful and a fifth of new hires saying it made them question their choice in jobs, onboarding is a universal challenge. First impressions count, and organisations need to step up their game.
What are employee welcome videos?
The essence of any welcome video is to help your new hire get to know your organisation in an engaging and inspiring way. By recording a message which is authentic, purpose-led and meaningful, you’ll support your onboarding programmes and enhance each new starter’s onboarding experience on many levels:
- Help new employees understand the all-important ‘why’ with headlines on your company culture, mission and values.
- Get a sense of how the organisation successfully works together with welcome messages from key employees, CEO and the leadership team.
- Learn about their own department and how they’ll make a difference in this new role on a day-to-day basis.
- Show your organisation as an inclusive workplace with a strong, diverse range of voices – you can even invite your DE&I network leaders to introduce your communities and how to get involved.
- Build high engagement and make a strong first impression.
Welcome videos can often be make or break – they need to leave people feeling part of the team from the beginning. As many as one-third of new employees left their role within 6 months of joining because it wasn’t what they expected. Whether it’s for those who are office based, remote working or employees in different time zones, these videos are the building blocks to guide your new starter’s career.
What makes employee introduction videos so important?
Reports show that having a strong onboarding process improves new hire retention by 82% and productivity by over 70%, yet 88% organizations don’t onboard well. With many inductions taking place virtually, there’s a serious risk employees will end up feeling isolated and unsupported. This, of course, leads to poor engagement, performance challenges and attrition as well as a worrying impact on well-being. People need to feel connected.
Using employee welcome videos to add a human touch to onboarding programmes offers several important benefits:
- Accessibility and efficiency: Onboarding conversations and meetings often get delayed when other deadlines get in the way. Pre-recorded welcome videos allow new employees to access them at a time and place that’s convenient for them and their coworkers, saving everybody time. They are 100% repurposable!
- Consistency: Introduction videos also help make sure each message uses the correct tone of voice and covers all the necessary details.
- Connection: Providing new hires with a series of onboarding videos helps create an immediate connection between the company and the employee, getting them more engaged and ready to hit the ground running.
With viewers retaining as much as 95% of a message when they watch a video, compared to just 10% when reading text, it makes sense to use it as a format that will drive your welcome message home.
1. Employee welcome video #1 – Annie’s
Annie’s is one of our top five employee onboarding video examples. But when it comes to welcome videos in particular, organisations can learn a lot from them. New starters joining the organic food producer get a real insight into the company culture, mission and values from the Annie’s employee welcome video. It showcases real stories, from real employees, offering a personal and relatable glimpse into what they do and why they do it. You get a clear sense of company purpose and values, helping people connect with the team and the organisation. This gets them in the right mindset to start their own career journey and start performing from Day 1.
To capture these employee stories from the team, Annie’s used a video film crew. Whilst this delivers excellent results, it can be very time consuming and expensive. One simple way to reduce costs, save time and still get the content quality needed is to use an employee-generated video tool like StoryTagger. With ready-made, customisable templates and the ability to record a video from anywhere, StoryTagger helps organisations achieve more with less resource.
2. Employee welcome video #2 – Adidas
To onboard a 250-strong sales team during an innovative 3-day induction bootcamp, Adidas needed to help new starters understand their brand, core values and get to know their new coworkers.
Supporting the opening of their London flagship store, the bootcamp used StoryTagger to record a variety of different welcome videos and enhance their onboarding experience. As well as messages from the senior leadership team, they captured personal stories from each participant including their own experiences of the brand and their favourite thing about London. These welcome video icebreakers added depth to the programme offering more opportunities for the cohort to connect with Adidas and each other.
Authentic videos from leaders and other new employees shows the true company culture. And by using StoryTagger, leaders were able to communicate their passion without impacting their busy schedules. It also meant new employees were able to start developing core skills, like communication and storytelling, from their very first day.
By capturing and sharing these stories, Adidas helped its new employees grow affinity to the brand, core values and each other.
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3. Employee welcome video #3 – Google
Getting an internship at Google is a big deal and their company welcome video does an exceptional job of building on that initial excitement every new employee feels. Interviewing a cohort of interns, they used a video crew to follow them around HQ, showing real faces and places for an authentic flavour of company culture. It keeps the enthusiasm alive with snapshots of what they’ll be doing in their first week.
With large, global organisations like Google, its wide reaching network of employees can be difficult to pin down due to different work hours, workspaces, technologies and time zones. To enhance their intern onboarding process further, Google could have used an employee-generated video tool like StoryTagger to scale across the whole organisation and capture video experiences from around the world.
If you’re thinking of using employee welcome videos for your interns, you could even go one step further and use video to recruit and retain talent for your early careers programmes like internships, apprenticeships and graduate programmes.
How can I create an employee welcome video?
Employee orientation is critical in those first few days. Building on the enthusiasm of new starters is paramount and using video is a great way to make people feel like they belong from the start.
There are several ways you can choose to create an employee welcome video, which one you go for will depend on your resources, budget, distribution of colleagues and onboarding needs.
Video film crew
The traditional way of capturing the content you need for a welcome video is to hire a film crew. For those with big budgets looking for Netflix quality videos, this is a good option. But more often than not, companies just don’t have the resources to achieve this especially when colleagues are scattered in different locations. In addition, over-slick video can often feel a bit too top-down so if you’re keen to convey the authentic employee voice, this isn’t the best option.
Animated video
Using animation to welcome your new employees can create a memorable onboarding experience. Animated videos can be fun, engaging and an interesting way to introduce concepts during employee orientation.
But animated video doesn’t usually convey authenticity well – there are no humans after all – and it can be hard to get a sense of company culture from cartoons on a screen. You’ll also need to write a script, create the animation, arrange and record voiceovers plus any amendments and revisions. This can be a labour intensive process so unless you have an in-house studio, you might not have the resources or budget needed.
Employee-generated video
Teams are increasingly turning to user-generated content as a cost-efficient way to capture the content they need. With employees also demanding more relatable and trusted ways to learn and communicate at work, hearing from coworkers helps engage, teach and inspire new employees.
Welcome videos generated by your own employees not only offer an authentic glimpse into company culture, but it also helps those recording develop future skills and with the right tools, frees up valuable HR resources.
With StoryTagger, teams quickly develop repeatable workflows to curate the welcome videos they need. In-built smart recording and prompts guide creators to plan and share their messages and experiences in short impactful videos that others can learn from. The platform also offers a host of ready-to-use and customisable ‘welcome’ templates so that anyone can share their experiences on video for:
- Welcome videos.
- Leader welcomes for new starters.
- A day in the life videos.
- Introduce yourself.
And, many more besides. As well as welcome videos, employee-generated videos can be used to improve the whole onboarding experience from capturing new starter feedback on their journey for future joiners to tips and short intros to employee services and opportunities.
Final Thoughts
Making a good first impression counts. With employee attrition likely to continue to rise, retaining new and existing talent has become a priority. Providing a seamless onboarding experience to make new starters feel part of a unified team from day 1 is a must. By using employee welcome videos you’ll give a real sense of who you are and how you do things. This builds trust, drives deeper connections and leads people to feel more engaged, aligned and ready to grow with your organisation.
There are numerous options for creating employee introduction videos and which one you choose will depend on your needs. Bigger budgets and more resources mean video film crews and animated videos could be an option for you. But, if you need a relatable, scalable and human way to get the organisation-specific video content you need, employee-generated video is fast becoming a cost-effective and time-saving approach.
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