If you’ve already invested in an LMS, or Learning Management System for your company, that’s great news! You’ve already likely discovered the benefits of e-learning when it comes to training your staff, but have you considered how your LMS can give you the edge when it comes to supporting your teams in lockdown?
The COVID-19 pandemic has radically shifted how we’re getting things done these days, with employees now performing their jobs from kitchen tables and spare rooms at home to stay physically distant and safe. However, remote working comes with a variety of challenges, and keeping everyone focused and productive is no mean feat. While quality online training software can deliver learning experiences to your staff in a multitude of ways, a closer look at its functions should reveal that’s not all it can do. Consider your LMS as a kind of Swiss army knife, a multi-dimensional tool that can bring solutions to all sorts of difficulties. We’re going to run through a few ways you can bring your LMS into play in ways you may not be fully utilising yet so that your processes and team morale don’t fall apart during this most uncertain of times.
Keep Policies And Process in One Place
One way many businesses are currently finding their e-learning software useful right now doesn’t have a lot to do with training modules, but more to do with its information storage and organisational capacity. Perhaps this is an aspect you might not have been capitalising on before the pandemic. Now is an excellent time to get this element of your LMS up to speed. With your employees and their managers now likely separated physically, knowledge-sharing, as the workday unfolds, isn’t quite as straightforward as it might have been a few months back. The answer? Your Learning Management System can act as a library; a dynamic, easily-searchable library of your firm that everyone can access at any time. Ensuring that all company policy and process is in one centralised place is a powerful advantage, and will go a long way to making sure that your company is still operating the way it should. Your Learning Management System can offer your employees policy guidance to refer to as they work through daily tasks. It can ensure your brand voice doesn’t go astray, and you can use it to provide step-by-step instruction to assist staff members with tasks that they may not ordinarily be doing alone. Information is king, and never more so than now when perhaps some of your folks might be feeling a little overwhelmed without the routine and support of the physical workplace.
Communicate Through Your LMS
Don’t forget your LMS is capable of relaying information in real-time too. A library of company information (and the more comprehensive you make it, the better) is a brilliant thing, but your LMS can be the conduit for disseminating company announcements and daily updates. As the business landscape shifts with new government regulation for operations, or as you devise new ways to serve your customers, your training software can be the communication tool to deliver this information to your employees. It’s essential to keep them up to speed with changes, and even more critical to keep them connected to your company’s immediate next steps and the resulting overall goals. Through your Learning Management System, you can deliver anything from CEO statements to changes in processes for example, to every employee in your company simultaneously – and then direct them to related content in your resource library if clarification is necessary. As we’re all discovering, working from home means time is a valuable resource, and delivering essential information company-wide at the click of a button is by far the most efficient way to do this.
Learning Software For Remote Inductions
There’s another way your LMS can save time, and also keep your staff safe while Covid-19 restrictions are still with us. You may be finding that with new areas of business or the new ways you need to keep things moving means you’re hiring. Remote recruiting can be done relatively quickly, but the biggest hurdle once you’ve found your people is induction. Even the best candidate is going to need a little introduction to their new job, and importantly, you’re going to want them to be fully cognisant of your business ethos and the key tasks they’re about to do daily. You’re going to want to see how they perform – and especially given the current climate where everyone is vying for business, you don’t want to be using your valuable clients as guinea pigs!
Let’s look at a quick example of how your e-learning software can deliver that kind of induction when you or your employees aren’t able to in person. Say you run a successful restaurant. Covid-19 means that your regular patrons can’t dine in anymore, but you quickly recognise you’ll need to be bringing meal orders to your customers. You still have kitchen staff who can produce food safely, but you need delivery drivers. Using your hospitality training software, you can rapidly set up courses your new drivers can complete before they hit the road – meaning that health and safety certification is possible and any customer interaction they have via phone or a safe doorstep distance will hit the quality level you expect. Plus, you could even develop a specific course on the streets or towns in your catchment area to ensure any new hires know their geography and the food won’t get cold because they won’t get lost.
Simply put, you’ll be able to deploy tailored courses via e-learning to brand new staff members instantly and then see how they do via reporting tools. This way of inducting new employees means you can also give them feedback, encouragement and offer a route for extra qualifications too – which might result in being able to retain the best people in the long term. Once you’ve tried this, like many other LMS users, you’ll probably keep this kind of induction on in the future as it frees up your more experienced staff who may ordinarily end up spending a good chunk of their time teaching or supervising new hires.
Self-paced Learning In Manageable Chunks
Let’s return to the primary reason you’ve invested in an LMS for your business. The learning bit. Even as we go through this difficult time, learning shouldn’t take a back seat, and in fact, it might be a good opportunity to get your teams up to speed or push them forward. Unfortunately, the pandemic has brought a drop in business for many companies. If this sounds familiar, then consider developing online course modules for staff who may be at home with a significantly lessened amount of work to do. They may be worried about their future with you or finding it hard to connect to the job they might have previously found much satisfaction in. Everybody in your company might be feeling some degree of motivational lapse, a disconnect with a job they love or be experiencing feelings of limbo. E-learning is a great way to tackle these damaging times to staff morale. It might be tempting to hit your company with loads of new courses, but recognise the value of bitesise learning that your LMS can deliver. Take into account that some employees may also be juggling childcare or other interfamilial situations at home which means that lengthy engagement with online training might be impossible. Self-paced learning in manageable chunks is something you can rapidly set up via learning software. Plus it might also stimulate a keenness to aim for new qualifications in some employees, which will be an asset to your whole operation once things get a little more back on track.
Create Relevant Courses Quickly
And here’s a final suggestion you might want to consider when evaluating ways to leverage your LMS right now. The Covid-19 situation is possibly changing how your operation does business, but perhaps your workforce isn’t privy to the ‘how’. Lengthy Zoom meetings are one way to try and communicate this, but it isn’t the most effective approach. One alternative is to get to grips with your e-learning software and develop courses that guide your staff through new tasks or procedures that are coming into force. The length and depth of the training is entirely customisable too, which means that the rapid creation of time-relevant learning modules is just as possible to plug knowledge gaps as more complex long-term training arcs. Using a great LMS, you can upload and disseminate courses on the same day.
Maybe you need your employees on board with new brand voice guidelines, effective immediately (perhaps you want to speak to clients in a more friendly, informal tone for example) or introduce them to a new area of business. Additionally, while company policy is important, so is employee wellbeing. Assigning courses that cover managing stress, anxiety, and work/life balance can help support your staff right now. You’ll also be able to track their progress in your LMS to see how they’re holding up. Bottom line? Whatever it is you want to say, look to your LMS to get your message through.
To wrap up, we’re going to acknowledge that it’s not an easy thing to be an employee or a business owner right now. Times are tough, and remote working, while necessary to flatten the curve and save lives, isn’t necessarily plain sailing so you’ll need to use every tool at your disposal. Looking to stay commercially agile in this climate while ensuring your employees feel they’re with you every step of the way? Making the most of your LMS is a surefire way to do both.