Employee-generated video: frontline training's next big trend?

The day of the anonymous employee is over. 

Brands no longer think of employees as part of the organization. Instead, employees are the organization. Their voices, expertise, and experience all carry weight - perhaps even more weight than that of the brand itself. 

As a result, more and more businesses are involving their people in content creation. These efforts tend to be for one of two purposes. The user-generated content will either be published as part of consumer marketing efforts, or will be used internally for employee communications or training. 

It’s this second side of the coin that we’re going to talk about today, as employee-generated video is a particularly effective medium through which to train frontline employees.

This might seem counterintuitive, or downright impossible - how do you build an employee-generated video strategy when your employees are located across a city, country, or even the world? - but done well, it’s actually an opportunity for every employee to be taught, and to teach others. 

Today, we’re going to cover what employee-generated video is, why you should introduce it as part of your frontline training strategy, and how to do so effectively. Read on, or skip ahead:

Let’s get started. 

Is frontline training working today?  

Frontline leaders broadly agree about the contribution training makes to business performance. 93% believe training significantly impacts the customer experience. 91% and 89% believe it positively impacts productivity and retention respectively. 

Frontline workers have busy, fast-moving days and the location of their work varies. A delivery driver might cover vast distances in a single day, while a factory worker completes the same complex task multiple times in one hour. A retail worker might move between assisting customers on the shop floor and organizing the stockroom, while a hospitality worker has a quick 15-minute break during an 8-hour kitchen shift.

These people need training that fits into their busy, varied days - but how we currently deliver it doesn’t add up. The majority of training sessions last between 30 minutes and multiple hours. The most common approach to training is in-person coaching (53%) followed by video courses on desktop computers (34%). 

Fitting this kind of training into a frontline worker’s day-to-day is like fitting a square peg into a round hole - it just doesn’t work. Is it any wonder, then, that 52% of frontline workers say they remember what they learned in their last training session “somewhat well” or “not well”? 

39% would like more engaging, interactive training formats, such as video, but even these aren’t always effective. Only 1 in 5 employees find training videos valuable. Admissions such as “I multi-task while the video is playing - training on one device and [doing] something else [at the same time]” are common. 

So, how do we train frontline employees in a way suited to their working days?

Introducing employee-generated video: a new way to train frontline employees 

One emerging medium is employee-generated video, the rise of which can be attributed to two preferences. 

A modern-day preference for short-form video 

Short-form video is our preferred way to consume content. 72% of consumers say they prefer watching videos over reading text when learning about products. Short-form videos get 2.5 times more engagement than long-form videos, and those under 90 seconds have a 50% retention rate. 

Some L&D leaders have caught on - and corporate training looks increasingly like something you might see scrolling TikTok in your downtime. Learning from short-form videos speaks to the needs of the frontline: 39% would like more fun and engaging formats, and 31% would like more interactive experiences. 

21% would even like to have a role in training design themselves, which speaks to the broader “creator economy” trend. Getting employees involved in training has two benefits: it allows managers to utilize their frontline workers’ firsthand experience, and it’s an effective way of teaching, too. 

Learning from our peers, rather than our seniors 

Humans like to hear from humans - particularly those we deem similar to ourselves. Take Google’s Googler-to-Goolger (g2g) learning program, in which Google employees volunteer to upskill one another rather than relying on a top-down approach. 

The g2g program is Google’s employee’s primary channel of learning. Why? Well, according to a senior leader at the business, “it’s very unlikely that you’ll ever learn faster, or better than you will from one of your fellow employees”. 

Naturally, Google’s setup is different from a frontline business’s - but that doesn’t detract from the fact that  the human preference underpinning the success of Google's g2g initiative is universal.  Peer-to-peer learning is already (informally) one of the most-used learning techniques in a frontline environment: 59% of frontline employees turn to their colleagues or managers for work-related learning. 

Put yourself in their shoes for a moment: who do you think is most likely to understand the intricacies or problems of your role? Your manager’s manager or your peer who works on the frontline alongside you?

Psychologically, turning to our 'equals' also feels less inherently daunting - people are far more comfortable admitting they don’t know something around peers rather than around their seniors.

Benefit Cosmetics is a great example of a company who found a productive alternative to top-down knowledge sharing by instead opting to crowdsource staff video content globally. 

Michelle Stoodley, Benefit’s Head of Digital, explains: “We have a trend team who are are core make-up artists, and they do things a certain way, but seeing how [our counter staff] put on eyeshadow or apply their brow products, for example, has shown us there is more scope for tips and tricks and mixing make-up in ways you didn’t do before”. 

Peer-led learning's surprising impact on knowledge retention 

Training is, by default, seen as a formal domain. To see someone who you have camaraderie with - or even know on a personal level - in this formal context has the effect of 'softening' the material - it is immediately less impersonal, but in addition is now novel and relatable. 

Learning Scientist and Design Lauren Waldman explains “The brain is a prediction-making machine. When we disrupt predictable patterns, the brain becomes more engaged, as novelty and unpredictability stimulate its attention systems. This can reignite curiosity and tap into our intrinsic drive to learn.” 

Bulldoze expectations in a positive way, and you’re inducing emotion - which also has a positive impact on the learning experience. 

Sasha Howard, Learning Strategy Lead at eduMe, calls emotion an “often overlooked method of increasing knowledge retention”. 

When we experience an emotional event the brain releases chemicals that heighten our senses and focus our attention [...] When people experience an emotional response during training, their brains prioritize that information for long-term storage over a neutral experience. By tapping into emotions during training, we increase focus - which in turn enhances retention.

Emotions help with in-the-moment focus, too. A recent study found positive emotions such as interest, pleasure, and curiosity substantially predict learning engagement, and have a direct impact on engagement through their influence on intrinsic motivation. 

Temco Logistics is a great example of a frontline business that has utilized emotion through employee-generated video training. Dan Drenk, Temco Logistics's Director of Learning and Development, shares “We’re trying to run an influencer campaign with our workforce…We love to give the opportunity to spotlight somebody who knows how to do something really well.”

Jesse Romero, Temco’s L&D Project Manager (and star of many of Temco’s user-generated videos), goes on to say “Figuring out the nature of the video” is key. “For example, I’m a humorous guy so they put me in the funny videos. It makes them more real”.  

Temco’s emotion-led approach to learning via employee-generated video has significantly reduced injury rates and lowered auto accident rates by a third. Employee safety has an impact on the business’s bottom line - to the tune of a $600,000 cost saving for the company.

The Temco workforce is now more efficient. Drivers and technicians have increased their daily earnings by double digits, which has in turn reduced driver and technician turnover. 

The benefits of employee-generated video: why you should use it to train your frontline workers 

So far, we’ve looked at why employee-generated video has emerged as a trend and why it is such an effective medium to learn from. Next, what impact does introducing it have on a business, and on its employees? 

Benefits of employee-generated video: for employees

Introduce effective training channels, and you’ll boost your employee’s ability to remember. The more your employees remember, the more efficient and productive they’ll be. 

According to 19th-century psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus’s forgetting curve model, we gradually forget what we’ve learned over time. By the end of one day, we forget 50% of new information. Once a week has passed, it’s 90%. The percentage of knowledge the brain does retain is called a knowledge retention rate. 

There are several ways to boost frontline employee retention rates: repetition, re-sharing information in a novel way, applying lessons to real life, and assessment to name a few. Sharing knowledge through employee-generated video allows you to present information in a novel way. The channel’s also a perfect tool for repetition - you can, for example, send a video to follow an in-person training session, and your employees can watch it as many times as they please. 

When training is effective, employees are more motivated to stay - think back to Temco employees’ boosted earnings, and subsequent increased retention rates. Training your frontline workers is a way of showing them you care; that you want them to progress and be successful. When employees feel valued, they’re more likely to stay loyal to you in return. 

Benefits of employee-generated video: for organizations

The person responsible for employee training differs from frontline business to frontline business. They could be an L&D manager based in head office - which makes communication with and knowledge about the people they have to train difficult. 

Or perhaps they’re a frontline manager, who does understand the intricacies of frontline work and what employees need training on. In this instance, L&D might not be their only priority - and as we already know, busy, fast-moving days don’t lend themselves to a task as time-consuming as training. 

Or maybe they’re both a frontline manager and the person responsible for L&D. Even then, conceptualizing, creating, editing, and sharing a training program can be a time-consuming and difficult task. And if creating and managing L&D content isn’t doable within a typical day, or involves recalibration of a role, then it’s likely production velocity will soon turn into a bottleneck.

Employee-generated video goes some way to mitigate this risk. It’s often not too complicated to learn to create - as Jesse Romero from Temco Logistics notes, “I came from the frontline…I really had no training on making content, or creating  videos…the only experience I had was posting videos on my Instagram or Facebook.”

The crowdsourced nature of the content also removes the onus from just one person - meaning the organization can benefit from higher training completion rates, a safer and more productive workforce, and a stronger company culture without a huge time or financial investment. 

Employee-generated video is also cost-effective to make. Rather than the high production costs that typically come with creating a new piece of video content each time, you’ll need to invest once in an employee-generated video tool - and let your frontline workers take it from there. 

Toppers Pizza has an interesting story to look at here. Joe Dunlap, Director of L&D at Toppers Pizza, explained how “recently, we had to come up with a new way to reduce our ‘out-the-door’ time on our makeline [...]To get a comprehensive view of the challenge, we reached out to each one of our stores and asked them to share videos describing how they actually went through the entire makeline process. It opened up an opportunity for people to record the way they work, and to share their particular tips and techniques for everyone’s benefit.” 

After just one month, Toppers Pizza saw an increase of about 4% in proficiency improvement. This improvement increased to over 10% in the following month - and the business also saw a 7% drop in resignations, plus a 40% increase in employee engagement. 

Democratizing content creation: steps to introducing employee-generated video 

Used well, employee-generated video boosts retention and engagement and eliminates common bottlenecks on the administrative side. But that doesn’t mean it should be rolled out for every type of training possible. 

Here’s what it tends to work well (and not so well):

Now, onto best practices. How do we make sure our employee-generated video initiative is a success? 

1. Democratizing content creation: Make it easy 

A new behavior needs to be easy if it’s going to stick. Allow employees to share content with you easily by removing friction in the sharing process. 

If you don’t provide frontline workers with a dedicated area/mechanism through which to share on-the-ground footage, you’re unlikely to get it cascaded up to training creators in the way you need.

They could upload a video to a third-party file-hosting platform like Dropbox or Google Drive, share a link to this location with their manager - let's say via email - who could then forward this onto the relevant L&D team member, but the likelihood of this being adopted as a habit and executed over time with any consistency among an entire workforce  is low. It involves too many platforms -  each requiring their own membership/log-in/associated list of actions - for it to be easily followed or integrated into the daily flow of frontline work.  

This process also doesn’t best support the end recipient - the training creator. The employee who shares the Dropbox-hosted link via email may not have provided the correct access permissions on the file shared, meaning the end recipient can't access the file. In addition, an already busy inbox isn't the best place to store media - any content shared via this medium is without a home, lost to the noise of daily communications. 

What does work well is having one, centralized place for employees to upload videos. Certain training platforms enable employees to shoot, scan a QR code and upload the video in one, from their phones, rather than having to move between different hardwares and softwares to get the job done. And it removes the headache of content living in too many places for the training creator - as they have a whole history of content in one place. 

2. Democratizing content creation: give the right guidance 

Be too prescriptive, and your employees won’t feel empowered to take creating content into their own hands. 

That said, leaving them to it with no guidelines isn’t going to be effective either. Offering some guidance around what needs to be made, and key components to consider is a happy medium. Jesse Romero recommends starting with creating a list of high-priority content: “What do people need to know? Come up with a list of items you want to cover first and go from there”. 

He also discusses starting each video with the 'why'. “For us, the why really centers around people’s reasons for wanting to learn. 90% of our employees are field technicians, and we have a pretty unique pay model where they get paid for the more jobs they complete. The more they know and the faster they can work, the more they earn.” 

Allowing employees to experiment is also important: “Encourage them to use what’s trending, and to be as diverse as they can rather than stick to one style.”.  

3. Democratizing content creation: spread the word 

Communication is a key part of any new initiative - particularly one where you’re relying on team members to deliver their part. 

Make sure you use the channels that are already embedded into your workers’ day-to-day workflows. You’ll want to focus on in-person channels, like: 

• A printout in your breakroom notice board, with reward-oriented messaging or graphics to grab attention 
• A toolbox talk on-site before everyone disseminates to start their day 
• An announcement at the start or end of in-person training sessions 

as well as digital channels, like: 

• An email campaign sent out to all employees 
• A feed post to your employee communications tool 
• An SMS delivered to all company mobile phones, or personal devices  

A multi-touch approach, where, say, you inform employees in-person, follow up with email, and have printouts put up gives your message the best possible chance of being read - and, crucially, acted on.

4. Democratizing content creation: promote with champions

Herd mentality is a real thing. While it can be an advantage once your employee-generated video initiative is up and running, it can make things slightly more difficult when you’re starting out. 

One approach is to recruit a closed group of ‘champions’ to start filming employee-generated content first. These might be high-performers or those with a personality well-suited to the task. 

Jesse Romero comments “getting people involved and engaged, and making them feel important” is key to the success of your program. Another way to gently introduce your employees could be to ask for “critiques and constructive feedback”. 

Think back to the stories of Benefit Cosmetics or Topper’s Pizzas mentioned above - in both instances, the project owner found employees were able to share multiple new tips, tricks, and techniques. If you don’t assume one person has the best approach, and your content will be all the more well-rounded for it.

Plus, the more people that get involved, the less of a burden content creation is to one person. Get this approach right, and you’ll improve the quality and reduce the workload in one go.  

5. Democratizing content creation: reward participation 

Recognizing and rewarding employees for their participation has a dual advantage: it encourages the creators to keep on creating and might inspire their peers to get involved, too. 

This could look like a shoutout in a team all-hands, a physical reward such as company merch or a piece of tech, or even some light gamification with a scoreboard based on, say, the number of videos created for those who have chosen to get involved. 

Employee-generated video for frontline training: final thoughts

Not all trends should be taken seriously, but employee-generated video content definitely should be. Introduce a crowdsourcing video program, and you’re speaking to the wants and needs of frontline workers today, as well as harnessing key knowledge retention principles to improve the effectiveness of your lessons. 

Give your employees the chance to share what they know, and you’ll enjoy increased worker engagement, productivity, and retention rates. Put your people front and centre, and they'll do the same for your brand in return.

We’re eduMe, a frontline training tool obsessed with helping training creators and frontline managers crowdsource impactful video content from their employees. Learn more about how we help you create engaging training content, or see how Temco Logistics uses employee-generated video to train its workforce.