Three reasons we’re glad we invested in a Learning Management System to streamline resource sharing across our global team
Learning Management Systems (LMS) aren’t cheap, but they’re well worth the cost. Last year, Insider Inc. signed on with an LMS. Here are 3 reasons we’re glad we did.
It’s a great way to share resources across teams on a single, organized platform.
At Insider, we’re obsessed with employee happiness. In fact, we have an entire team dedicated to organizing internal events geared towards: Diversity & Inclusion, Social Responsibility, Training & Development, Mental & Physical Health, and Networking. So what happens when a new hire finds out they missed an Employee Experience event that sounded really, really cool? They watch it on our LMS!
Our Employee Experience team records every event they can and hosts it on our LMS — and they’re not the only ones. Every team across the company has the ability to create and post their own trainings and events through the system. That means that everyone — including new hires and coworkers on other teams — can access any recording we make public, all in one place.
(Crystal Cox/Insider Inc.)
Our LMS allows us to cut down on admin time while amplifying training impact.
If you’ve ever led a training — no matter what format — you know it doesn’t just happen off the cuff. Creating and leading trainings takes time, effort, coordination, and a whole lot of scheduling. Just consider a single weekly 1-hour training. Seems simple, right? Now add to that the time it takes to roll out the email communications, schedule conference rooms, coordinate calendars, and actually create the training material itself, and suddenly you’ve got a project that’s eaten into all your other goals.
(Crystal Cox/Insider Inc.)
Unless you’ve got a Learning Management System.
LMSs come with a pre-existing repository of trainings — typically hundreds. These trainings largely address fundamental topics relevant to all company employees, such as giving and receiving feedback, management best practices, and interview tips, to name a few. When combined with auto-assignment capabilities, this means that required trainings literally run themselves.
And if you’ve got a more specific training you need to create from scratch? Upload the training once you’re done, set up the assignment criteria, and the LMS will do the rest for you.
You’ll be able to reach employees across the globe, en masse, and at a time that works for them.
Let’s face it: Nothing will ever beat an in-person training led by a company employee. An online training course just doesn’t compare.
But when you’re part of a global company with 800+ employees across the world, you can’t provide every training live or in-person — even required ones. Scheduling conflicts, time zone disparity, and a finite number of admin hours means that many of our trainings have to take place remotely and/or as a prerecorded video.
(Crystal Cox/Insider Inc.)
And while anyone could mass email a training video, the added capabilities an LMS offers means that you can be sure that every training gets assigned to all the right people and that those employees actually view and understand the information, too.
We’ve found these additional capabilities especially helpful during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. Even in the midst of transitioning our entire workforce to a remote work culture, auto-assigned trainings went on without a hitch. We’ve also been able to mass assign trainings to brief our employees on time-sensitive information in an instant, and we’ve been able to include comprehension assessments too. Advanced reporting capabilities mean that we can track who has and hasn’t taken required sessions. And we plan to use these same capabilities to communicate critical information to our employees prior to opening our office again. Our LMS’s ability to auto- and mass- assign, assess, and track trainings will play a crucial role in our return to the office.
So does all this mean companies should replace training and development teams with an LMS?
Absolutely not! There’s so much more that goes into career development: open conversation, employee engagement, the honest show of in-person, empathetic support. Training and development is one of our highest priorities across the organization, and an LMS alone would never provide the full career development support employees need. But signing on with an LMS is an incredibly impactful step in the process of improving the efficiency, variety, and consistency of our training program at Insider. Now that we no longer have to host ten trainings per week just to make sure every new hire sits through the same essential onboarding, we can focus our efforts on collecting feedback, creating new content, and hosting more interactive workshops. We can’t wait to see what other training opportunities we’ll be able to explore now that we’re properly set up with an LMS.