3 Ways to Help Your Employees Love Using an LMS

Do your employees love using your company’s social learning management system (LMS) of choice? You’d know if they did. When employees truly enjoy interacting with an LMS, the following things happen within an organization:

A collaborative learning culture is effortlessly created – An eLearning system facilitates employee collaboration by providing workers with resources like realtime chat, video conferencing, access to social media for professional purposes, and social learning tools. When given these tools, employees are better able to connect with one another and work in teams. The result is a collaborative learning culture that came about naturally.

Revenue goes up as the bottom line goes down – An LMS can save companies money in a variety of ways. The most obvious way is by eliminating the need for costly in-person training. Just imagine how cheap training would be if you didn’t have to pay for multiple instructors, paper supplies, and physical classrooms and other venues. Add to that lowered travel costs, and you have a healthy bottom line.

Employees become more skilled at their jobs – A social learning management system’s primary reason for existence is to provide companies with train

ing solutions that work. An LMS utilizes state-of-the-art technology to deliver impactful learning experiences to individuals. As a result, workers become more skilled at performing their job functions, leading to increased workforce productivity.

If your company has an LMS but doesn’t have a collaborative learning culture, a healthy bottom line, and workers who are really good at what they do, chances are your employees just don’t like using the organization’s eLearning platform. Or perhaps they don’t dislike using the LMS, but don’t enjoy it enough to fully tap into its many benefits. You along with other company leaders can change this by taking a few simple actions.

3 Ways to Get Your Employees to Love Using an LMS

Your company is destined for greatness. There are several tools that will help it reach its destination as quickly as possible. One of these tools is a revenue-boosting, skill-building, collaborative culture-creating LMS. The following 3 tips will help you get your employees enthused about consistently operating such an eLearning system:

• Teach employees basic LMS operation – Don’t assume that all your employees will easily catch onto operating an LMS. Some people are just not tech-savvy. Help these workers out by providing them with readily available online instructors who can answer questions and help them navigate the LMS.

• Create course content that is meaningful – Do you remember which of your college courses you disliked most? More than likely, the classes you hated had content that was not meaningful to you. Like these dreaded classes, eLearning is often void of personal meaning. This is not the case with good eLearning. The article How to Make People Fall in Love with eLearning says, “Good eLearning…uses learners’ experiences directly and actually incorporates these thoughts and scenarios into the eLearning unit. For example, the eLearning could ask a user to input their name, job role and company name. The unit is then made personally significant to the learner by referring back to these details. Instruction in a good eLearning unit might be: ‘[Timothy], take a moment and think about how this information on laws and ethics applies to you in your role as [Sales Manager] at [BlinkBox]. Write your thoughts in the text box on screen.’ The information Timothy provides is then compiled into a worksheet to be downloaded at the end of the eLearning unit, providing him with a ready made plan of attack that he can begin to apply to his job immediately.” Do you see how an approach like this could put a meaningful spin on any type of online course content?

• Regularly update eLearning software – There’s no point in investing in an LMS if you are not going to keep it updated. Employees will shy away from using an outdated, dysfunctional system. The best way to make sure your LMS stays up to date is to launch one that is hosted remotely. This way your IT team (or lack thereof) will never have to put forth an ounce of effort toward the LMS. You might as well leave that to the software provider.

Your company may have the best LMS money can buy, but if your employees don’t welcome interacting with it, it will prove to be a wasted investment. Help employees love using your company’s LMS by ensuring they know how to operate it, keeping the system up to date, and creating meaningful course content. These measures pay off in big dividends.