How to write an onboarding film people actually watch

The new person is on day one. Their laptop is not set up, three people have said hello, and the new hire video in their calendar says watch this when you get a chance. They get a chance on Thursday afternoon, and by then they have booked a desk by asking the person next to them, so the film now explains a problem already handled.

That is the ordinary failure of the employee onboarding video, and it is almost never a failure of craft. The film is well made and asked to do the wrong job at the wrong hour, so it is watched once, politely, and never again.

The rule that fixes most onboarding films

A film gets watched when it answers a question the viewer already has, and remembered when the answer arrives just before they need it.

The test is not whether a new person could learn the material, but whether the film changes what they do tomorrow.

What goes in the first fifteen seconds

The opening has five jobs. Four must be done by the fifteenth second.

1. Name the viewer. Say who this is for, so the people it is not for can leave without guilt.
2. Ask the question they are carrying. Not your question, theirs, or the first sentence is only the start of something.
3. Show the system moving. The thing being explained is on screen and doing something before it is named.
4. Make a promise you can keep. One promise, small enough to be true by the end.
5. Say what they will be able to do afterwards. This one can wait until the last seconds of the opening.

An example line, for a film about holiday cover:

Everyone here gets the same three weeks. The hard part is not the booking system, it is agreeing who is on call while you are away, and that conversation happens before you book, not after.

Four things are doing work there. It addresses somebody rather than talking about something. It opens with a number the viewer can check on their own contract. It introduces a difficulty and the fact in one breath. It ends on a sequence, before you book rather than after, which is where people get it wrong and therefore worth filming.

Orientation and instruction are two different jobs

Orientation answers why we exist: why the work is organised this way, why we measure what we measure. It is told once, it is the same for every role, and its useful life is measured in years.

Instruction answers how to do this here: how to book holiday, how to file an expense, who to ask when the system is down. Its useful life is shorter than the interval between system upgrades, and it belongs wherever the person is doing the thing.

Run the two together and you get a film too abstract to orient anyone and too general to instruct anyone. Split the material by half-life.

• Why the company exists lasts years, so it belongs in the film.
• How a decision gets made here lasts years and is invisible, so it belongs in the film too.
• How to book holiday lasts months and breaks with the next HR system, so it belongs where the booking happens.

This is what most internal communication videos get wrong. A four-minute film about booking holiday is out of date within the year, and it was never the film's job. Orientation is where film earns its cost, because it is the part nobody reads and everybody needs.

There is one exception. Instruction belongs in a film when the action has a sequence and a consequence, when getting the order wrong breaks something visible. Steps that must arrive in order are film. A list that can be looked up in any order is a list.

Write for the ear, not the page

Speech is linear and the ear cannot scan backwards. A reader who loses the thread rereads the paragraph. A viewer who loses the thread will not rewind.

• One idea per sentence. If a sentence carries a condition, a consequence and an example, it is three sentences typed as one.
• Shorter than writing. A sentence that reads well at twenty-five words is usually too long spoken, because the viewer is also looking at something.
• Say the same word twice. Variety is a page habit. On the ear, one term per thing is what lets the viewer build a map.

The same instruction, written both ways. First as a page sentence:

In the event that a customer requests a change to an existing order, the relevant account manager must be notified prior to any adjustment being made in the system.

And as an opening line of a training video script:

A customer wants something changed. Tell the account manager before you touch the order.

The second is shorter, and that is the least of it. The actor stands at the front of every clause, so the viewer knows who does what. The final word is the noun the screen is showing while the line plays, so picture and sentence land on one beat.

The test that catches all of this is unglamorous. Read the script out loud, record it, and listen back while looking away from the page. Every place your attention drifts is where the viewer reaches for a phone.

How long each part should be

Divide the film by job rather than by topic. For a film of three and a half to four minutes, this shape works. Each beat is ten to fourteen seconds on screen, which is two or three short sentences.

1. The opening runs about fifteen seconds and does the five jobs above, nothing else.
2. Orientation runs about sixty seconds and covers why the place exists, why the work is shaped as it is, and the one decision rule that explains most of what a new person notices.
3. The core sequence runs about ninety seconds and shows the one thing they will do in their first fortnight, in order, with the consequence of getting it wrong.
4. Who to ask runs about thirty seconds and names roles rather than people, with what each role is for.
5. The close runs about twenty seconds and says what to do first, where everything else lives, and the version date.

The total is set by how much must be remembered, not by how much there is to say. Most scripts run long because every line was written by somebody who cannot bear to leave out something true. The film is not the archive. The handbook is, and the close should point at it.

Working method: write the film backwards. Draft the close first, because it fixes what the viewer should do next. Then the core sequence, then orientation, then the opening.

Where the film goes in the onboarding sequence

The order of the first week matters more than the film does. A film shown on the wrong day is worse than no film, because it teaches people that your material is safe to skip.

• The day before, send the link with no obligation attached. The ones who watch it early arrive with better questions.
• The first morning, play it. Fifteen minutes into day one, while they are comfortable asking about it and before anybody has told them how things are really done.
• Straight after, a person takes questions for ten minutes. The film handles what is the same for everyone. The person handles what is specific, and their being there is the difference between a film watched and a film received.
• Day three, the sequence section again. That is the day the thing it describes comes up, and the second viewing is what turns watching into remembering.
• Day thirty, the handbook and the film link side by side, wherever the person will still look in month six.

Put one line in the script that invites the second viewing out loud. The part about approvals starts at two minutes, and you will want it again on Thursday. That does more for retention than any polish in the edit.

To decide whether an onboarding film is worth making, count the explanations. If three people are saying the same five sentences to every new arrival, in slightly different words, you have a film. If the answer is that it would be nice to have, the handbook was working. The wider case is set out in where a short animated film earns its keep.

Keeping the film true when the company changes

An onboarding film outlives most of the facts inside it, and a film that is nearly right is worse than one that is obviously old.

• Names of people. Use roles, which outlive the person and are what the viewer will actually need.
• Numbers that grow. If a number is not load-bearing in the argument, cut it. If it is, write the year beside it.
• Pictures of screens. Every interface in an onboarding animation ages within a year. Show the shape of a step rather than a copy of a screen, and it survives a redesign.
• Promises the organisation quietly stops keeping. If the film says every project starts with a written brief, somebody has to own that sentence after the person who wrote it has moved on.
• The word here. Carry a date on screen and a version number in the record, so a viewer can tell which here they are watching.

Then decide how the film gets rebuilt rather than patched. Keep the script as structured text rather than a finished edit, and the visual layer light enough that a re-render takes minutes. Rebuilt from the script, a change is a diff you can read. Patched in an edit, a change is an argument about which version is current.

If your onboarding video script needs replacing every six months, it was written about a specific moment rather than about the company. The films that last describe how decisions are made and what the work is for, and those two things survive it.

The short version

Write the ending first. Put the viewer in the first sentence. Keep orientation and instruction apart, because they have different half-lives and different homes. Say each idea once, in the order it happens, with the actor at the front. Budget ten to fourteen seconds per beat and fight anything that pushes the film past four minutes. Show it on day one, mention it again on day three, and keep it true.

None of that depends on the film being clever. It depends on the film arriving at the hour when somebody needs it, which is a scheduling decision as much as a writing one. A written brief exists largely to force those decisions before anything is drawn.

If you want to see your own colours in motion first, Nine's free page reads your website and plays Nine's own films in your colours, with no account. It makes no film of your own; a film of your own comes with a plan. Where the film has to carry a procedure rather than a welcome, animation for training and routines nobody reads takes the argument further.