Here we look at how a branded LMS can help to boost employee engagement, productivity, and retention of top talent – some of the biggest headaches for L&D and HR teams.
Engaging staff in order to maximise their productivity, and retaining top talent are two of the biggest headaches for HR teams. Keeping your workforce both happy in the present and optimistic about their future with your company is more of a challenge than ever, as staff have such regular visibility of opportunities elsewhere via their social networks.
Importance of Staff Engagement for Businesses
Research by Gallup found that only 15% of workers around the world feel engaged with their role and their employer, and ready to work to the best of their abilities. This has tangible business consequences, with 37% more absenteeism, 18% lower productivity, and 65% lower share price over time reported in companies with low staff engagement.
Not only then are employers generally failing to maximise profitability by not engaging their workforce, they are at risk of losing staff, and going through the expensive and opportunity cost of recruitment and onboarding.
So how are successful companies engaging their staff?
Joint research by CV Library and e-Careers found that of UK workers who reported happiness in their current role, 62% pointed at the ability to learn and develop new skills as the main reason. Furthermore, confidence and a feeling of proficiency in one’s role is essential for morale at work. Employers need to help their staff develop the knowledge and skills to do their job well right now, but also give them the time and tools needed for continuous personal and professional development.
LMS for Employee Engagement
It’s clear that good training can help you to create a happy workforce and a more profitable business. But how do your ensure that the training is always available and delivered consistently well? An LMS is a key part of your L&D toolkit, allowing training materials to be made available 24/7, and wherever your staff are based.
Below are some key considerations for maximising staff engagement and the overall effectiveness of your LMS:
- Analyse learner data to highlight skills gaps – your LMS should be able to help you to identify individuals or groups who need additional support, or areas of the content that need to be improved.
- Personalised learning – create specific areas for different types of employee. People will engage more with training if they feel that it is relevant to their needs. Next steps should be well-signposted, rather than making staff feel that using the LMS is hard work.
- Use mixed media – regardless of role, some people prefer and / or learn better with visual / audio / text materials – or unique combinations of all three. Multimedia training creates a richer, more engaging overall learning experience.
- Enable knowledge sharing – not only does the ability for your experienced staff to add their insights to the learning platform help to reduce the brain-drain involved if and when talented people leave, your learners will appreciate the relevance of materials that are informed by the experience of successful peers.
- Ask your staff – use one to one conversations offline to discuss what could enhance their online learning experience.
- Use your branding to engage and empower your staff. It’s been shown that people who understand their company’s brand feel more empowered to carry through its values. Helping to instil pride in your brand also reduces the chance that they will want to leave. Following the onboarding process, the LMS can be a powerful tool in reinforcing your brand in the minds of your employees.
Help your staff to develop the knowledge, skills and confidence they need to perform their jobs well. Signpost opportunities and encourage lifelong learning and continuous personal and professional development.
Make all this available with an LMS that’s bespoke to your company’s needs, and that helps to reinforce your branding and ethos throughout.
Further Reading
- See how we helped ghd to create a branded LMS for training their staff, as well as partners and distributors at over 50,000 salons worldwide.
- Our Moodle services for business training – giving you the freedom of an open source learning platform.
