Creating Training Videos for Frontline Employees: The Good, The Bad and The Ugly

Video is the most popular form of entertainment today. TikTok has almost 2 billion global users. YouTube has 2.7. Over 200 billion Reels are played on Instagram and Facebook each day. 

It’s no wonder, then, that video isn’t just consumed in our leisure time. Instead, it’s a key part of most business’s marketing and training strategies today. 

Companies with frontline workers have published training videos for years - and 98% consider creating training videos for employees an important facet of their organization’s L&D strategy. 

But is it successful? We know not every TikTok is created equal - otherwise, you really would never get off the app - and training videos are no different. 67% of frontline workers admit to not fully concentrating on concentrating on training videos, and just 28% say they ‘always’ pay attention. The result? Training that doesn’t have a significant impact on the customer experience, worker engagement and retention, and ultimately, the bottom line. 

Understanding what makes a good training video and what makes a bad one can be the difference between yours being a point of pride or a problem. In this blog post we’re going to dig into the good, the bad, and the ugly of creating employee training videos - and what elements you need to consider to make a truly great one. 

Coming up:

• The bad and the ugly: what not to do when creating training videos for employees
• The making of a good frontline training video 
• Set up: nail the basics
• Segmentation: give workers control 
• Story: create emotional connections
• Stars: get employees involved 
• Specificity: keep content on-brand
• Subtitling, spatial contiguity and more: optimize post-production 

Lights, camera…let’s get started.

The bad and the ugly:  what not to do when creating training videos for employees

There are some training videos no employee, whether office-based or frontline, would want to watch. Think dull, dated content that could have been explained in half the time - or delivered in a different format entirely. 

Frontline workers, however, do have specific training needs. These people don’t work at a desk or a computer; their working environment could be a warehouse, a shop floor, a construction site, or out on the road. They don’t have fixed salaries; they’re paid by their hours worked or tasks completed. They could be part of a team, or they could have never met another employee at their company. 

Learning experiences that don’t adapt to these varied working conditions aren’t going to successfully teach frontline workers what they need to know. Let’s take a closer look at the components of a poorly executed training video.  

Make videos too long

The majority of frontline workers have training lasting from 30 minutes (42%) to multiple hours (23%). This is, to put it bluntly, too long. 

Taking 30 plus minutes out of the working day may be an annoyance to a traditional employee. To a frontline worker, it's the difference between a larger paycheck and a smaller one: is it any wonder that 63% want training to be shorter? 

If training isn’t mandatory at a business and each lesson takes over half an hour at a time, that’s already a significant barrier to completion. Most workers aren’t going to miss out on significant amounts of pay to do something non-essential. 

Use irrelevant content

48% of frontline workers would like to receive training that is ‘relevant to me’. 

It’s obvious when a business has pulled a training video from a public source like YouTube rather than invested in making one itself. 

For example, a fast food restaurant may teach its staff about using the coffee machine with a video created by the manufacturer. This may seem efficient, but it doesn’t link the task (making a coffee) with what comes before or after (what type of cup each different beverage is served in, what the worker says when they hand the coffee to the customer). 

This leaves the frontline worker filling in the gaps themselves or having to go elsewhere for the information they need - which disrupts their flow of work and increases the time the task takes to complete.

Use dated content

The content we consume changes by the year, or even month - and our tastes change alongside it. 

Digital asset management platform Bynder found the average video created in 2016 lasted 168 seconds. By 2023, the length had decreased by 75% to 76 seconds. And that’s before we even get onto other aspects of video production like filming styles, sound quality, and so on. 

Training videos created a significantly long time ago - years, rather than months - are unlikely to engage your workers. Plus, your business and the tasks your people do are likely to have changed in this time. If a training video is out of date, it won’t tell your workers everything they need to know. 

Use unknown people - or no people at all

Businesses have used actors in training videos since the 1960s. While a Hollywood-inspired approach felt novel at the time, now it feels impersonal. Or, your training videos might not feature anyone at all, which makes the lessons more difficult to place into context for your workers. 

 Including staff members in training videos appeals to frontline workers - 21% want themselves or peers to be featured in learning content. We can attribute this preference to the theory of social (or ‘peer-to-peer’) learning, a process where people learn by watching, copying, and interacting with their peers. 

Including people, roles, or tasks workers recognize also keeps the experience exciting and engaging - plus, it builds a connection with your business which may not come naturally to someone who, for example, spends their days making deliveries alone.

Fail to optimize

There are three main ways a training video might not be optimized for effective learning: 

• For device: a horizontal video sent to vertical phone screens, for example, may make the content difficult or impossible to see 

• For environment: if a training video without subtitles is sent to employees working on a noisy construction site, they’ll either have to take the time to go elsewhere to watch it, or risk missing vital information 

• For skill application: if a process with multiple steps, like setting up a CNC machine in a manufacturing plant, is presented in one long video, the employee has to keep on pausing and rewinding the content as they complete the task. This takes them out of the natural flow of work - which can hinder productivity by up to 40%

Over optimize

On the other hand, a video might be over-optimized to the point of disrupting the worker’s learning experience. 

For example, if an animation with text elements also has subtitles, then the viewer has to read two separate pieces of text at once. This is overwhelming and confusing and will hinder the overall comprehension of the video content. 

Educational psychologist Richard E Mayer’s ‘Cognitive Theory of Multimedia Learning’ details 12 principles learning designers should use when implementing multimedia in learning contexts. In this particular instance, Mayer’s Redundancy Principle states that over-repetition of information can result in cognitive overload. 

Our animation with text elements and subtitles repeats the information too many times - but keep the text elements to a minimum, and the information will be delivered in a way that’s easier to comprehend. 

The best thing to do here is to put yourself in the shoes of the intended audience. You should be able to judge if there’s too much information in there to handle when watching the video in real time. 

The making of a good frontline training video

We’ve covered the bad and the ugly of frontline training videos. Up next - how do we make training videos for employees that are optimized for knowledge retention and completion? 

A good rule of thumb here is to think about what makes good content - think about the type of content that makes you stop scrolling, or stay on one TV channel. If you stop thinking about the distinction between ‘training content’ or ‘content consumed at work’ and ‘content we consume to enjoy’, you can see the underlying principles behind them are one and the same. 

Want to know what this approach looks like in action? Jesse Romero creates employee training videos as part of his role as L&D Project Manager at home goods delivery and installation solutions provider Temco Logistics. 

“Use what’s trending today, it could be anything…don’t just stick to one style” he explains. “I like to go to TikTok for inspiration, and try to be as diverse as I can.” 

Notice here how Jesse doesn’t make the distinction between the content we consume in our leisure time and training content. The result? Training that delivers: after introducing video training content created to engage learners, Temco’s auto accident rates reduced by a third, workers increased their daily earnings by double digits, and turnover rates decreased. 

The six S's of a good training video

So, we now know about the optimal approach to creating frontline training videos that work. But what else do we need to consider during the process? 

You can think of the following as the six S’s of a good training video: Set Up, Segmentation, Story, Stars, Specificity, and Subtitling and Spatial Contiguity. Follow these principles to create the best employee training videos for your business: 

Set up: nail the basics

Let’s start with the technical elements: is your lighting good? Can the viewer hear properly? Is the video quality high enough? 

You’ll also want to think about framing and orientation (particularly important if you’re filming people, rather than creating an animation) and whether the content fills the entire screen. 

Beyond the technical: have you chosen the right format for the topic?  

Different training video formats include: 

• Talking head videos: good for giving instructions and adding personality 
• Animations: good for simplifying complex topics 
• Screen recordings: good for walking through simple digital tasks  
• UGC (user-generated content) videos: good for giving context and building trust  
• Scenario-based training videos: good for preparing for unpredictable situations and soft skill building  

Some formats are going to be more appropriate than others. For example, if you needed a training video about safe driving you’d be better off showing a car, the roads, and other people on them rather than someone in an office talking to a camera. 

Equally, if you need to record a new hire welcome message from your CEO, filming them in their car probably won’t give the same impression as filming them in their office. 

Segmentation: give workers control

Here we can look at another of Mayer’s 12 Design Principles: the Segmenting Principle. This principle states that a lesson presented in learner-controlled segments is more effective rather than a lesson presented all in one go. 

Let’s revisit our worker setting up some machinery. If the supporting content is one long video, they’ll have to keep on pausing and rewinding it as they undertake the task. 

If, however, the information was presented in manageable segments that the worker could move between at will, the content would be more effective. Digestible bite-sized chunks of information prevent cognitive overload and allow the worker to focus on one concept at a time as they work. 

When people consume a large amount of information at once, they’re more likely to forget it. Smaller pieces of information that can be revisited, on the other hand, are more likely to counteract the forgetting curve. Delivering information in bite-sized chunks speeds up the pace at which our worker can set up the machinery this time and next time. The less they forget, the less they’ll need to refer back to the training material. Eventually, they might not need to at all.

Story: create emotional connections

The most engaging video content has a good hook - and the same goes for training videos. An exciting, attention-grabbing opening counteracts shortened attention spans and engages workers from the start. 

Moving on from the beginning: does the story flow logically? Is it easy for learners to follow? Is all the detail necessary? When storyboarding your video, make sure it’s geared around learning objectives and there’s no unecessary additional content. 

For time-poor frontline workers, keeping things simple - and therefore quick to understand and put into action - is key to making learning effective. A coherent video makes sure learners don’t waste time filtering out distractions, and can engage fully with the material. 

Another element of a good story is emotion or novelty. Sasha Howard, Learning Strategy Lead at eduMe, calls emotion an “often overlooked method of increasing knowledge retention”. 

Why? Well, emotions help us “focus, engage, and remember”. The brain’s emotional centre, the Amygdala, and the memory centre, the Hippocampus, are closely linked. Experiencing an emotional moment focuses our attention in the way that a neutral experience does not, which is why a compelling story leads to better retention. 

In practice, Sasha explains, this could look like using employees in training videos, featuring case studies workers relate to, or connecting material to real-world tasks or responsibilities. The more meaningful the video is to a frontline audience, the more they’ll remember. 

Stars: get employees involved

You need the right people to star in your video. And by that, we mean real people in your organization. The reasoning here comes back to Mayer’s Personalization Principle, which states that more effective learning comes presented in a conversational rather than formal style.  

Let’s say you don’t use employees in your video, and instead rely on a text-to-audio tool to turn a script into the voiceover. Unless the script is written by the employee that does the task, you’re likely to end up with a generic, functional piece of audio content rather than anything conversational. 

For example, a generic narrator might say “Insert the metal piece into the holder and tighten the clamps” whereas a real employee might say “I always make sure the metal piece is securely in the holder before tightening the clamps. It’s a small step, but it makes a big difference.” 

Here, the employee speaks conversationally and provides contextual insight - which fosters connection and increases retention. 

Digital role-play videos can also make use of the personalization principle, if you craft them to feel more like a conversational exchange between two employees. For example, if the employee in the video says “What happens when you press this leaver? Let’s find out together!”, and then the learner is able to choose what happens next and see the outcome of their actions, their comprehension and retention will improve.

We should also think about B.F. Skinner’s theory of social learning. Allow your employees to share their expertise and insights, and you’ll enhance learning and build connections between them (something which isn’t always a given in the frontline space). 

What does this look like in practice? You can make use of different personalities in your team by tying different people to different topics. Jesse elaborates: “You’ve got to figure out the nature of the video - is it serious? Humorous? I’m a humorous guy, so they have me in the funny videos. It makes them feel a lot more real.” Doing so, he says, “builds a culture of getting your people involved and engaged. It makes them feel important”. 

Getting your business’s frontline workers to participate in training videos doesn’t have to be time-consuming, or involve traveling to multiple locations. The best training providers should have employee video training software with features that allow anyone to film and upload a video. This lifts the burden of filming contextual videos from the shoulders of training creators alone, and allows lesson content to be recorded spontaneously, with employee contribution. 

This ‘on the ground’ style of training video ties in with today’s trend for unpolished UGC: it’s not only easier for everyone involved in training video production but inherently more powerful, too. 

Specificity: keep content on-brand

How else do you make training videos for frontline employees feel relevant? As well as using your people, you should use your brand. 

Tamara Palmer, Internal Communications Manager at traffic control services company Flagger Force, makes sure the organization’s training videos are meticulously branded. They use industry- and Flagger Force-specific language in the training, brand colors, and feature actual employees using real machinery on the job: “It’s like you’re on the job site itself”. 

Subtitling, spatial contiguity and more: optimize post-production

Last in our S-themed list is subtitling and spatial contiguity - but really, what we mean is anything you can do in the post-production stage to optimize the video for frontline consumption. 

Frontline workers often work in noisy, high-distraction environments (like a construction site or warehouse). Subtitles make sure they don’t miss any information - and help with comprehension too. 

Mayer’s Contiguity Principle states that related words and pictures should be placed close to each other on the screen for optimal learning. Doing so reduces the cognitive effort required to understand, and helps our brain to naturally process the information from both, at the same time. 

With this in mind, subtitles or accompanying pictures or diagrams can help your workers process and commit the new information to memory. 

Let’s go back to our example of a CNC machine used in manufacturing. A video training workers how to operate it might show a close-up diagram or video of the machine control panel. 

To apply the Contiguity Principle to this part of the video, you could label buttons and controls with text annotations placed right next to each component being described. As the voiceover explains, say, “Press the start button to begin”, you could include an arrow pointing to the button in question. 

Including text and an arrow here makes sure that learners associate the verbal explanation (the voiceover) with the visual element (the button). In turn, they’ll experience increased retention and decreased cognitive load. 

Creating training videos for employees: final thoughts

Creating a good training video for your employees is typically thought of as a high-effort, high-budget activity. But if there’s one common thread running through these principles for creating training videos for employees (apart from the letter S, that is), it’s that they don’t have to be either. 

No frontline worker expects a Hollywood-level production - and over-focussing on quality will prevent you from getting the training out in the first place. When it comes down to it, combining the ‘real’ and ‘relatable’ with some basic learning design principles pre- and post-production will bring the most success. 

Want to learn more about what a quality training video for frontline employees looks like? We’re eduMe, a frontline worker training provider, and we do exactly that. If you liked this piece, you might be interested in our webinar on the myths and truths of effective learning - it’s a must watch for anyone responsible for creating or executing frontline training.