Harnessing In-House Talent for Effective Employee Training Videos

Lights! Camera! Action! At some organizations, workplace thespians are starring in the training videos their fellow employees are watching. It's a more personalized approach to training that off-the-shelf videos lack, some employers have found.

That's the case at ParamountQuote Insurance Advisors in Chattanooga, Tenn., where two employees on the 25-agent staff role-play sales techniques before the camera.

The actors in the five- to 10-minute dramatizations are employees on track to become managers. Company founder Tim Connon, who is experienced at shooting videos, writes the scripts.

"We don't allow agents to completely wing it on their calls," he said, explaining that the videos are used to educate agents on how to respond to common customer concerns and objections.

During training, employees watch three videos. The first, which is scripted, illustrates a client call that goes smoothly. In the second video, which is unscripted, the insurance agent must think quickly when a meeting with the "client" does not go as planned. A third video, which is scripted, addresses how to effectively respond to typical client issues and concerns.

And while no stars have emerged from the small screen, "the employees do enjoy having conversations among each other about the training" and especially enjoy the unscripted video, Connon said.

"They really enjoy the acting style and watching a role-play," he said, and are amused to see their colleagues improvise responses to the disgruntled client. "There's something about friends wanting to see other friends perform."

And the videos work, Connon said. He follows up training with one-on-one meetings he describes as "the icing on the cake where we get into a lot of important things they need to hear from me in person."

Personalizing Training with Employee-Led Videos

Training content that features your own employees "unlocks the power of peer storytelling and enables training departments to tap internal 'learning influencers' who can communicate persuasively to their peers and promote additional learning offerings," said Mariel Davis, cofounder of Spokn, a software development company in New York City.  

Employee-generated content is particularly effective for training in soft skills, she said, and "can help to make abstract concepts tangible and memorable." Davis's company offers a tool for employers to create their own learning and development content.

Her top advice for using homegrown talent: Keep the video short and don't over-produce it.

"The whole point of tapping your own employees as training content creators is their authenticity. Over-scripting or adding too much polish in production defeats the purpose," Davis said. 

On-camera staffers at CJ&CO, a digital marketing company headquartered in Brisbane, Australia, share their experience working with various pieces of software and offer workarounds they have used when problems arise.

It's a practice the company has followed since the start of the pandemic in 2020. Most videos are how-to's conducted by the company's 15-member staff, who explain a process or how software is used.

They are given bullet points of what to cover and a brief introductory script, but "our employees wing it from there," said Casey Jones, founder and head of marketing and finance. An employee might demonstrate how to log data in Google Sheets, for example, and narrate the process.

"I found that letting them do their thing and giving them their freedom in approaching the videos makes them more comfortable filming rather than pressuring them to memorize scripts," Jones said. "It just makes it more human and personalized rather than having them stick to a script."

Sharing what they have learned during their tenure gives them a sense of responsibility and makes the training more relatable.

"They feel valued and recognized for their expertise," Jones added.

He also sees the homegrown videos as an onboarding tool that helps showcase real-life scenarios in the workplace.

"Trainees can peek at what it's like in the workplace and imagine where or how they can fit in with their roles and responsibilities," he said.

Using staffers in company training videos has been a practice the last three years at MusicGrotto.com, said Jenna Carson, HR and operations manager. The practice was adopted, she said, "to personalize onboarding messages and better explain processes when employees live in other parts of the globe" with work schedules that make live video meetings challenging.

The videos are produced by a manager or a staff member experienced in a specific topic. An HR-conducted survey found a higher compliance rate for watching the videos and correctly answering post-video questions, Carson said, compared to externally produced videos that did not incorporate employee actors.

Manick Bhan, founder and chief training officer at digital marketing agency LinkGraph, based in New York City, also uses employees in his company's training videos. Workers have found the material practical and relatable, he said.

Bhan noted that his company complements its training videos with other learning formats to appeal to diverse learning styles.

"Not all employees may prefer video-based training or find it as effective as other learning methods, or [they may] prefer in-person interactions," he said.