How to Incorporate Manufacturing Safety Training Videos into Your Onboarding
The overall goal of onboarding your newly hired employees is to ensure that they are brought up to speed with your workplace policies, culture, and processes including proper safety procedures to keep themselves, their teammates, and their customers in good hands. Manufacturing safety training videos can be integrated into your existing onboarding practice to ensure each new hire has immediate access to the safety training that they require in order to perform their job roles with minimal risk.
If you’re wondering how to incorporate manufacturing safety training videos into your onboarding process, you’re certainly not alone! We’ve got some tips to help you get started!
Why Use Video in Onboarding?
All too often the onboarding process looks more like throwing an employee a copy of a handbook and calling it a day. Onboarding like this can leave your newly hired employee wondering if they made the right employment choice or at bare minimum, it might leave them wanting more. Complex onboarding processes are almost just as bad, because they can overwhelm the employee and may seem to drag on. Video can solve these problems!
The use of video in employee onboarding can help you to ensure your newly hired employees are comfortable with their decision, feel good about the workplace they’re joining, and have the tools they need for success in their new position. An effective, and efficient, onboarding practice is going to include videos that breakdown important concepts, details, and tasks such as:
- What’s expected of the employee.
- Where the employee can go with questions.
- HR details such as time off, sick time, vacation and other needs.
- Workplace culture information including details on any get togethers or events.
- Safety information specific to the role and the employer.
Providing all of this and other details in a manual will almost guarantee the employee will be lost and confused, that’s if they even take the time to read it. Providing a long, drawn out in-person onboarding process will likely leave your employee with tons of questions and no real way to get the answers after the training or onboarding takes place. But with video, the employee has everything he or she needs for success. They can go back and re-watch the videos if they need to hear the details again or if they have questions and they can train at their own pace.
To incorporate manufacturing safety training videos into your onboarding process, make sure that you’re following these tips.
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Provide Safety Training Videos On-Demand
It’s important that you make manufacturing safety training videos available to your newly hired employees on-demand. This way they can access the training at any time, day or night and from any remote location. Ideally, training videos should be mobile friendly so that employees can access the training from a smartphone so that they are not forced to miss out on training or to wait to train until they are near a computer. The best safety training programs can be accessed on-demand, from a smartphone, at the employee’s convenience.
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Provide Initial Safety Training Concepts Immediately
Think about the concepts that are most important to the safety of your employees before they begin their jobs and consider incorporating those training videos into your onboarding. This might include things like equipment safety, health safety, and safety topics associated with things like fire or other hazards. It’s important that you know each employee that comes onboard and begins working in your manufacturing plant has already received the essential safety training he or she needs to get started without risking his or her own health and safety, or that of others.
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Make Training Short & Engaging
When you’re trying to incorporate manufacturing safety training videos into your onboarding, it’s important to make it short and engaging for your new employees. You don’t want employees to find the training to be long, drawn out, or overwhelming. Videos should be about 5 minutes on average or less. They should be focused on a single topic for each video and they should be engaging for your target audience.
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Incorporate Accountability Features into Your Onboarding
While it’s great to give employees the ability to engage in manufacturing safety training videos at their own pace, you should set accountability standards upfront and incorporate features into your onboarding process to monitor new employee engagement with the training. You want to set goals for your employee to complete the onboarding and safety training within a specified timeframe. Make this clear upfront, and monitor their access to ensure accountability along the way.
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Communicate with Employees About Their Needs
While it’s great to provide manufacturing safety training videos for your employees in the onboarding process, it’s also important to know that video should not take the place of real, face-to-face communication with your employees. Make sure that you are communicating with employees about their needs. Ask them how the training is going. Ask them if they have questions about the safety training, and make sure they know you’re open to communication.
Follow these, and other steps to ensure manufacturing safety training videos are a key element of your onboarding process for the success, and safety, of your newly hired team. For more about manufacturing safety training videos, give Beverly Boy Productions a call!