How Small Businesses Can Benefit from an Online Training Portal
It’s common for business owners to reach a stage where they realize that the processes they put in place when they started aren’t serving them anymore. Growth can happen fast, and it’s not always easy to assess and adjust as needed along the way.
Small and medium-sized businesses with a small number of employees or low turnover often have training systems that rely on paper documents and inconsistent, manual or just-in-time delivery approaches. For these companies, hiring and onboarding of new employees is commonly ad hoc and less structured as it might be for larger, more mature companies.
Where those organic processes worked well at the beginning, as a company grows, these approaches don’t scale well and commonly devolve into scattered, disparate ‘systems’ and disorganized, non-standardized training experiences for all employees.
That’s where an learning management system (LMS) can be extremely helpful. Digitizing your employee training and onboarding with an online platform is an easy, cost-effective solution that will bring your business into the digital age and provide a streamlined, standardized, and scalable way to deliver training to employees on any topic.
An LMS is an all-in-one training platform that serves up learning materials to employees that can be tailored to provide critical organizational information, like security training or provide the skill building necessary for employees to be successful in their role. Some onboarding forms and tasks can also be incorporated into LMS’ to streamline and digitize new employee HR tasks.
Depending on which LMS you use and how you implement it to suit your unique needs, your digital learning solution might include video tutorials, downloadable PDF guides, gamified knowledge tests, and even virtual reality.
Here are just a few examples of the many benefits an online learning system can bring to small businesses:
Streamlined onboarding
Paper-based onboarding processes aren’t just cumbersome – they costly and require a lot of person-to-person interaction, often onsite, and usually include a significant amount of waiting around for new employees and hands on training time with current staff.
Onboarding through an LMS, on the other hand, allows for easy access to all the necessary information from anywhere, enabling new hires to get started right away and freeing human resources personnel from the distraction and costs of hand-holding them through a paper-based process.
Bringing the process online saves your business money thanks to improved employee efficiency and minimized paid wait times.
More engaging (and trackable) training programs
Given current trends in remote work, in-person group trainings may not be feasible and meet the needs of everyone. Further, listening to a manager run through the employee handbook page by page, either in-person or over video conference is no one’s idea of fun.
An LMS is accessible anywhere, anytime, so new employees have the flexibility to receive training whenever they’re most alert and ready to learn. Add to that the interactive training sessions and eLearning programs that tap into social media-style gamification, and you have a learning platform that’s engaging for all employees .
The right LMS will also provide useful data about training performance, showing you how eager they are to begin their training, how many times they have to retake a test before they can move on to the next module, and how quickly they improve their skill sets.
Standardized training and improved compliance
Even the best paper-based, in-person training processes will inevitably suffer from a lack of standardization. When you have multiple managers training new hires on different days there will always be some variation in the quality and consistency of the information delivered.
An LMS resolves that issue by making the exact same learning materials available to all employees, without any risk of human error or crucial elements falling through the cracks. This is especially important in industries with strict compliance requirements, where everyone needs to have the same knowledge.
In additional to training related to onboarding new staff, digital learning solutions also provide a standard, on-demand platform for company-wide webinars, trainings, and ongoing employee development. The easier and more engaging you make it for your employees to improve their skill sets, the higher your employee retention will likely be.
Asynchronous learning systems not only replace stacks of outdated paper filing systems and enable new employees to train on their own time, through more engaging online courses –they also save businesses a significant amount of time and money.
Prime 8 helps small businesses create learning strategies and customized online training platforms that engage employees across all levels with standardized content and gamified interfaces. The right LMS is affordable, easy to use, provides actionable employee insights, and can scale with your business as it grows into a large enterprise.
If you’d like to learn more about LMS solutions or how our custom-tailored digital learning solutions can help your company maximize the value of your people, read a few of our customer stories then connect with us today at learning@prime8consulting.com
