Having made a huge investment in your LMS, are you making the most of it?
There are over 700 Learning Management Systems in use today. That’s a large number that becomes more comprehensible when you realize the value of each of these systems – both as Talent Management platforms and full-scale training delivery.
Of course, in an ideal world, every business would leverage its LMS to 100% of its potential, given the expense usually involved in setting one up. In reality, however, we know that inefficiencies creep in.
Any HR professional therefore, especially those in HRD/OD, will want to make sure they’re getting the most from it. The question then becomes, how do you ensure this happens? It’s a tricky proposition because an LMS is generally designed to analyze employee performance, not its own return on investment. How well the system itself gets analyzed is another matter.
There are some key things to bear in mind, however.
- Set up a metric which tracks employee engagement as a proportion of your total workforce:
This is relatively straightforward. If you want clear, demonstrable evidence that you are getting more from your LMS, then you’ll need to track the degree to which the workforce as a whole is interacting with it. This is necessary because it gives you a macro, top-down view of how overall strategy is affecting all employees’ involvement with the LMS, rather than just how well particular training or compliance procedures are running in isolation.
- Build a mobile strategy to reach out to more employees:
Ideally, you’ll want to increase employee engagement as a whole. This is desirable not just because it demonstrates that the investment in the LMS was and continues to be justified, but because in broader terms, the more data you can aggregate, the more conclusions you can draw about general trends.
For example, a mobile strategy that allows your communications department to publish the company newsletter to managed or personal tablets would result in more people reading the publication. The more people read the publication, the more data you will gather about browsing habits; in other words, what they’re interested in and consuming in terms of company materials (if anything!) can be discerned more clearly.
Mobile strategy is particularly important here because, as you’re no doubt already aware, mobile devices, either managed or personal, are proliferating more and more in office environments. Giving mobile users an avenue to consume company content is desirable in itself, but in this context, as a HRD professional, it’s particularly useful because it also provides a data channel.
In layman’s terms: More data means more easily observable trends in your workforce. For this reason, increasing the flow of data from employee to LMS should be a key priority. Moreover, as already mentioned, it’s a good litmus test of how your LMS itself is actually doing and whether you’re getting value for money from it.
By Nicholas Kleanthous
