6 How-To Video Examples for Effective Employee Training

Employee training is a necessary evil; you know it’s important, but between your daily tasks, KPIs, company revenue goals, and personal responsibilities, it’s hard to find the time to get it done. 

And when you consider that an employee onboarding and training process can range from a few days to an entire year, finding the time to create up-to-date training can feel virtually impossible.

This is where online video training makes a huge difference.

Creating a few simple how-to videos will allow you and your teams to scale up your employee training programs across multiple topics, including onboarding, sales training, cybersecurity training, leadership training, and much more. And with the influx of new AI video creation technology, it’s never been easier to start producing high-quality videos at scale.

In this post, we’ll share six examples of different how-to videos you can create within your company and how you can use AI to streamline the production process.

The benefits of creating how-to videos for employee training

At first glance, creating a series of how-to training videos seems like a daunting task – especially when you account for the research, lengthy production timelines, editing, and revisions involved in putting out a single video.

However, the benefits far outweigh the cons. For starters, video assets like these are evergreen and become permanent fixtures in your onboarding and training workflows once they’re complete. 

Here are some of the other major benefits of creating how-to videos for employee training.

Decrease employee onboarding times

How-to videos are a fantastic way to streamline the onboarding process for new hires. Rather than spending hours in your initial training sessions, you can direct new employees to pre-recorded videos on all the essential procedures and policies needed to start working at your company.

Not only does this free up time for your existing staff, but it also allows your new team members to learn at their own pace and rewatch these videos when they have questions. 

Keep your teams up-to-date on new processes

No matter how long employees have been with your organization, they’ll have to keep up with processes that are constantly evolving. How-to videos provide an easy solution for keeping everyone updated on any changes within their direct team or across your organization.

By leveraging AI video technology, you can easily create new how-to videos to ensure your teams are consistently up-to-date on new processes and procedures. 

Increase accessibility and inclusion

Not only is creating how-to videos important for your employees who may be visually impaired, but it also benefits your team members who learn best from a combined visual or auditory medium like video. Unlike text-based mediums, a good how-to video should help you explain complex concepts in just a few minutes.

Plus, employees at fast-growing companies don’t necessarily have hours to spend poring over text-based manuals or SOPs with step-by-step instructions, so a how-to video allows them to watch and process new information at their own pace. 

Enhance employee engagement and retention

Video is more engaging than plain text alone. Videos evoke stronger emotional responses than text, keeping viewers interested and engaged for longer periods.

And it’s not just because of the visual element; by using dedicated video creation software, you can add interactive elements, like polls or quizzes, that just aren’t possible on a text-based document.

Greater cost efficiency over time

While video production sometimes requires a greater upfront investment of time and money, it’s much more cost-effective than repetitive in-person training sessions – especially over the long term when you amortize the costs and time savings over months or years.

6 how-to video examples for corporate training

You can create how-to videos for a virtually unlimited number of use cases. As a general rule of thumb, if a detailed company process requires a tutorial or lengthy explanation, you can probably create an instructional how-to video for it instead. 

However, for the purposes of this article, we’ll walk through six types of how-to video examples for you to reference. Even better, we've included templates for each of these video tutorials and trainings so you can get started right away.

1. Compliance and ethics training

At most companies, employees are required to complete mandatory compliance courses on topics like anti-harassment, data privacy, and health and safety. This is due to the wide range of federal, state, and local regulations that make compliance training a requirement. 

And when you factor in any additional industry-specific standards and internal company policies, that’s a lot of material to work through.

However, by creating a series of how-to videos on your employees’ mandatory compliance training, they’ll be able to breeze through the content and get back to their day-to-day responsibilities. Here’s a quick example of a compliance training video that you could create within a platform like Colossyan:

Get the video template.

2. Continuing education

Creating a series of how-to videos is also a great way to support your employees’ ongoing skills development. For instance, a manufacturing plant could record video guides on how to operate new machinery. Or a tech company could publish tutorials showing employees tips and tricks on how to get more value from their internal tools or tech stack. 

This training could extend to soft skills as well, like how to give effective feedback or strategic planning and decision-making. Here’s an example that we created with Colossyan to illustrate our point:

Get the video template.

3. Leadership training

Similar to continuing education for your employees, managers and team leads can also benefit from video lessons focused on leadership. With the right video creation tools, you can quickly produce videos on how to delegate difficult conversations, run a weekly 1:1 meeting, or give a fair performance review. 

Here’s an example video on coaching and mentoring that you could give to your managers:

Get the video template.

4. Sales training

For sales teams, ongoing training in new sales techniques is a must. But instead of building a repetitive slide deck or waiting to meet in person once a quarter, you can create how-to videos that walk your reps through specific tactics and strategies based on your company’s sales process.

For example, your sales leaders could create video clips modeling effective cold calling, how to respond to objections on a sales call, and negotiating strategies. These efforts will standardize best practices across your sales teams and ensure your reps are making the most out of every potential customer engagement.

Here’s an example sales training video to help illustrate our point:

Get the video template.

5. Product training

Regardless of their department, everyone in your company needs a baseline understanding of the products and services your company provides. 

However, as your organization scales and you expand into new verticals or release new products, it’ll become increasingly difficult for new hires to learn and retain all of this information.

This is where instructional videos come in handy yet again. With a little effort upfront, you can publish a series of videos to ensure that everyone in your organization understands your company’s core service offerings, who you serve, and what makes you stand out in the marketplace.

Here’s an example of a product training video we created using Colossyan:

Get the video template.

6. Cybersecurity training

According to Harvard Business Review, the number of cybersecurity threats companies are facing each year is steadily increasing. This is largely due to the fact that companies are using more SaaS and cloud applications than ever before, creating more opportunities for hackers and bad actors.

Creating detailed cybersecurity training and best practices is crucial for neutralizing these threats. Everyone in your company should have a basic understanding of how to identify and avoid any potential threats that could harm your business.

To implement this training, you could create a series of how-to videos on topics like identifying phishing emails, strong password practices, safe information handling procedures, and immediate steps to take in the event of a cybersecurity breach.

Here’s an example of a cybersecurity training video made with Colossyan:

Get the video template.

Common problems with corporate video production

At this point, we’ve made a pretty strong case for why you should start using how-to videos for your employee training. But producing these videos can pose some big challenges for your teams.

Lengthy production timelines

First of all, one major hurdle is the lengthy production timeline associated with formal video shoots. Coordinating the schedules of your videographers and on-camera talent, editing and producing, and then making any necessary revisions can take weeks or months at a time. 

And if your company is growing at a rapid pace, these videos might already be outdated by the time they’re published.

High production costs

Professional cameras, lighting, microphones, and editing equipment represent a sizable initial investment, which can make video content cost prohibitive for some teams. And even if you plan on using an animated explainer video instead, hiring a skilled animator will still eat up a good chunk of your budget. 

Sure, these costs may not be a problem for large companies, but they could be a deal breaker for small businesses that need to put their dollars elsewhere.

Research and script writing

Finally, even with dedicated in-house teams at the ready, ensuring that your subject matter experts have time to prepare and review your video scripts can be seriously time consuming. 

Unless you’re at an enterprise company, most employees wear many hats; prioritizing tasks related to preparing video training could get backlogged behind your team’s more immediate responsibilities.

Despite all of these bottlenecks, you shouldn’t dismiss how-to videos just yet. Fortunately, there are solutions available. We’ll show you exactly how to use AI to both improve and streamline your team’s video production capabilities.

How to use AI to improve employee training videos

Everyone’s rushing to find new ways AI can help them streamline their existing workflows, automate repetitive tasks, and spend more time on higher-value activities. In other words, AI technology is largely being viewed through the lens of quantity rather than quality.

But what if you could use AI to improve the quality of your work too?

The good news – this is entirely possible. Here’s how you can use AI video tools like Colossyan to both streamline production and improve the quality of your how-to videos.

Use custom AI presenters

You don’t need to wrangle your employees’ schedules or worry about hiring on-camera talent to start producing videos. With AI video creation platforms like Colossyan, you can generate realistic AI presenters to read your scripts and deliver video training.

Even better, these AI presenters are fully customizable: you can choose the presenter’s voice, visual appearance, rate of speech, and persona to match your specific needs. 

And once you’ve finished customizing your AI presenters, you can use them again for future video presentations to ensure consistency – which is much easier than trying to schedule a reshoot or record new video footage with human actors.

Enable multilingual support and auto-translation

For global companies, developing localized training resources is a must. But creating these specific trainings in various languages requires a significant investment of an organization’s time and resources. 

With traditional video, for example, if you need content in five different languages, you’ll need to record your footage five different times – with an actor who speaks each language. 

However, with AI tools like Colossyan, you can automatically translate your video script into 70+ languages and generate realistic voices for each one. That means no more recording footage multiple times – simply select your language, and your script will be translated for you. 

This improves the accessibility of your how-to videos and ensures that employees across your global teams get the same level of training, regardless of their native language.

Include interactive elements like polls and quizzes

One big problem with your typical training video is that it’s a passive, one-way experience. But with AI video software, you can easily add interactive video elements like knowledge checks, polls, reflective questions, and quizzes. Not only does this help reinforce learning during training, but it also helps keep your employees accountable and ensures they’re engaging with the material you’ve created.

Create engaging how-to videos with Colossyan

With a bit of creativity and the right AI tools at your disposal, you can quickly produce high-quality how-to videos for your employees in a matter of days. And with Colossyan, you’ll have everything you need to create videos that will change the way you onboard and train team members across your organization.

Want to start producing high-quality training videos of your own? Try our tool for freeor book a demo with our team to get started.