What is your business doing in the way of training? "Oh, that's just for the big boys," you say. No, it's not. Every company must offer their employees training from the initial training at orientation to ongoing development. Or is your organization one of those that practices the "throw them up against the wall and see if they stick" type of approach? If your company is anything larger than a mom and pop operation, I can almost guarantee that it's costing a lot more than you think to train employees.

"The way you train your new employees is important in not only enabling them to do a good job, but also with their retention. Recent studies have shown that when a new hire is adequately trained in the beginning, they feel more confident in their job and therefore will stay with you longer."
- Peggy Morrow; Training for Success

Video has long been recognized as a valuable teaching medium because it can effectively convey to students an instructor's visual clues, for example, gestures, posture and facial expressions that aid communication and comprehension. Decades of research show body language is the single most important element in verbal communication. - MediaPoint Technology Boosts Streaming Video as Training Tool.

In good times as well as bad, one of the biggest hidden expenses for many businesses is the cost of bringing new workers up to speed or training existing employees for new job duties.

A detailed training video is one of the most direct routes to lower employee training costs. Don't confuse an occupational procedures video with a job description - another valuable tool for any organization. Job descriptions outline the duties to be performed by employees. A procedures video demonstrates exactly how to do those jobs.

Such a video can be extremely useful in recruiting and interviewing job applicants. But more importantly, it can streamline employee training and all new people to become productive more quickly. The out-of-pocket payroll savings alone can be substantial. Suppose it takes eight weeks to bring a new employee up to speed in a particular job, and the person's supervisor must devote 25% of his or her time to training during that break-in period. A good training video should reduce the necessary training time by at least 20%.

At, say $10 per hour for the new employee, and $20 an hour for the supervisor, in the example above the training time costs would come to $4,800 ($10 x 40 hours x 8 weeks x %25 = $1,600). A %20 percent reduction in training costs would save you nearly $1000 for each new worker - enough in itself to justify the effort involved in developing a procedures video.

Aside from these training cost savings, there are other reasons to develop procedures videos for your organization. Indeed, the very process of preparing such a video will provide invaluable insight into the operations of your business. You'll be surprised, and maybe even shocked at what you will learn!

Inevitably, you will discover that your people are doing things a particular way for no reasons other than that's the way their predecessor did them.

A large non-profit organization developed a training video for its staff. The process was a real eye-opener. In preparing the video, the managers discovered that the group's accounting department would routinely log each incoming check in a cash receipt journal, and then photocopy it as a safeguard.

This organization depends on outside donations for funds, and receives an enormous number of checks in the mail. It took one clerk four hours every day just to photocopy the daily influx of checks.

But it was all wasted time! All the information about the contributors had already been recorded in the journal, so copying the checks served no purpose!

Nobody was sure how or when this senseless procedure began, but it had been going on for at least ten years. In effect, the organization wasted the equivalent of one employee's salary for five years - $125,000.

If it were not for the training video, this waste would still be taking place.

So, the question remains, what are you doing in your organization to give your employees the training they need to make themselves and your business successful?

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