
Employees are the lifeblood of any organisation. A business’s success is directly tied to the quality of its employees. Their expertise and dedication drive your processes, products, and overall productivity.
Therefore, investing in internal training is not just beneficial—it’s essential.
By enhancing your employees’ skills and knowledge, you not only improve their performance but also boost overall company efficiency and innovation. Statistics show that companies with comprehensive employee training programs are 17% more productive and generate 218% more profit per employee.
However, many leaders face a significant challenge: ensuring that training is not just a formality. It must be engaging and truly effective in imparting the necessary skills. Ineffective training costs companies $13.5 million per 1,000 employees annually. This is where internal communication video solutions come into play.
Video has proven to be a powerful training method. In fact, a recent survey found that 97% of respondents believe video effectively helps employees retain the information they receive during training.
Our experience as a corporate video production company shows that explainer videos for internal communications are particularly effective in engaging employees and enhancing their learning experience.
The Case for Animated Explainer Videos in Internal Training
Animated explainer videos can transform complex concepts into easily digestible content, provide consistent and accessible training, and engage employees in a way that traditional methods often fail to do.
In this blog, we will explore the challenges of traditional training methods and demonstrate how explainer videos for internal comms can serve as an effective solution.
Challenges with Traditional Internal Training
Traditional internal training methods such as classroom training, on-the-job training, workshops, seminars, mentorship programs, and printed manuals can fall short in addressing the dynamic needs of modern employees.
These methods often encounter issues such as:
- Limited Accessibility: Traditional training materials, especially printed ones, may not be readily available when employees need them. This can hinder the learning process and delay the application of new skills.
- Inconsistent Quality: The effectiveness of traditional training can vary greatly depending on the instructor’s skills and the materials used. This inconsistency can lead to gaps in knowledge and skills among employees.
- Lack of Engagement: Traditional methods can be less engaging, leading to lower retention of information. Employees might attend training sessions just to take a break from their regular duties, rather than to genuinely learn and improve.
- Resource Intensive: Organising and conducting internal training can be time-consuming and costly, requiring significant administrative effort. This can divert resources away from other critical business functions.
Enhancing Internal Training with Explainer Videos
What Are Explainer Videos?
An animated explainer video is a short, engaging video designed to communicate complex ideas, products, or services in a simple and visually captivating way.
These videos often use a combination of animations, voice-overs, and storytelling to break down intricate concepts into easily understandable content, making them highly effective for marketing, training, and educational purposes.
Benefits of Using Explainer Videos for Training
Explainer videos effectively address several challenges associated with traditional internal training methods. They offer numerous advantages:
Visualisation : Training employees on certain topics can be challenging to convey with words alone. An animated explainer video can visually represent the process, making it simpler and easier to understand.
For example, we developed a series of videos demonstrating how to use ITWCP’s products. These videos provide step-by-step instructions, visually guiding construction staff through each stage of the process.
Accessibility: Available anytime and anywhere, allowing employees to learn at their own pace and revisit the material as needed.
Consistency: Using explainer videos for internal comms ensures that the quality of training is consistent, as the same high-quality video is used across the whole organisation. This ensures that all employees have a uniform understanding of the material. This reduces discrepancies and misunderstandings, leading to more team synergy and better overall performance.
Inclusive Features: Accessible to all employees, including those with disabilities, by incorporating features like subtitles and audio descriptions.
Global Reach: Global companies can use them across different branches in different countries, as you can change the language. This is cost-effective and ensures consistency in training on a global scale.
Engagement: Explainer videos are inherently engaging, using visuals and storytelling to capture attention and enhance retention. They also boost team engagement with animated content, making the training process more interactive and enjoyable.
Cost-Effectiveness: They reduce the need for repeated live training sessions and extensive printed materials.
In addition to these benefits, explainer videos excel at making information easy to understand and remember.
This is because animation breaks down complex ideas into simpler, visual chunks, reducing cognitive load and making the message easier to comprehend.
Animated Explainer videos reduce cognitive load through:
Guiding Viewer Attention
Animated explainer videos excel at capturing and maintaining viewer attention by emphasising the most important aspects of the message, thereby reducing distractions. This approach is crucial for minimising unnecessary cognitive load, which can obstruct learning and understanding. By focusing on key elements, animations facilitate more efficient information processing.
Integration of Visual and Auditory Elements
The Working Memory Model explains that our brains manage verbal information through the phonological loop and visual-spatial information via the visuospatial sketchpad. Dual coding theory indicates that combining verbal and visual inputs enhances cognitive efficiency, prevents overload, and improves learning outcomes. In animated explainer videos, the synchronisation of sound and visuals ensures that the content is both comprehensible and memorable.
Storytelling for Engagement
Animated explainer videos do more than just convey information; they employ storytelling techniques to captivate employees, maintain their interest, and encourage active participation. This makes internal training sessions not only more effective but also more engaging and memorable.
For a deeper dive into the psychology behind the effectiveness of animated explainer videos, check out our detailed blog on the subject here.
Continue reading below for case studies on internal training videos we produced for our clients.
Engage and Educate with Content Creatures
Ready to take your internal training to the next level? Content Creatures specialises in creating explainer videos that make learning engaging and effective.
Promote a culture of continuous learning and enhance your training materials by getting in touch with us today!
Case Studies
To illustrate the effectiveness of explainer videos in internal training, let’s look at some case studies from our own projects. These examples showcase how our explainer videos have transformed training programs for various organisations.
Grundon Clinical Waste Training Video
We were commissioned to create an animated training video for Grundon Waste Management.
The video aims to educate their employees on the proper management and disposal of various types of healthcare waste.
The video includes a brief lesson on each type of waste, followed by a quiz to reinforce the information presented. Presented below are excerpts from the video.
ZSL
ZSL commissioned us to create a series of training films, approximately 45 minutes in length, aimed at training asset management and finance companies that invest in the soft commodities sector. These films covered topics such as palm oil, rubber, timber, and tropical deforestation.
Additionally, they commissioned us to produce shorter training videos, around 2 minutes each, focusing on topics like gender inequality, traceability, living wages, biodiversity, supplier engagement, FPIC, and deforestation. Here is an example of one of the training videos on traceability.
Xaxis
The Global Learning and Development team at Xaxis, a WPP Agency, approached Content Creatures to develop an internal engagement brand for a series of ongoing campaigns. The goal was to engage a predominantly young demographic of highly educated data scientists based in offices worldwide. Our Creative Partners studied the Xaxis brand in detail and discovered that Xaxis employees are energetic, ambitious, and enjoy learning new things.
From this insight, we proposed a dynamic creative concept called ‘Always Learning’. This concept emphasises learning as an active and empowering activity that makes experiences more vibrant and future opportunities brighter.
The brief required a wide range of assets, including a animated explainer video, a logo, branded name-straps, kinetic typography, and character animation. The characters were designed to represent a diverse workforce, encompassing a broad range of age, gender, race, and ability. This approach ensured that the creative assets resonated with the global and diverse nature of Xaxis’s workforce.
For more details, check out the full case study and video here.
Conclusion
Investing in explainer videos for internal comms represents a forward-thinking approach that aligns with the demands of the contemporary workplace.
By embracing this training method, communication managers can create training programs that are not only informative but also impactful, fostering a culture of continuous learning and development.
Ready to enhance your training?
If you’re ready to take the first step towards more effective and engaging training, then get in touch today. We are a corporate video production and animation studio that specialise in adding value through concepts, creativity and content.
You can book a free consultation with our Creative Strategy Partner here, where we can discuss your needs and explore how our creative solutions can benefit you.
Want to learn more about us?
Feel free to explore our previous work and discover our studio capabilities!