(By Rajiv Kumar)
When this world-changing event began touching every aspect of personal and professional lives, it gave business leaders very little time to connect their emergency response phase to the recovery phase. Overnight, organizations had to quickly come up with business continuity plans and employ the right tools to keep their business operations running smoothly and ensuring their talent pool stays engaged while working from home.
Only those organizations which got creative and seamlessly leveraged their assets were able to reduce stress and keep workforce engaged. One such tool which helped organizations navigate this time of crisis and maintain employee engagement and productivity is a learning management system (LMS). A robust LMS and strategy is the perfect recipe to not only disseminate critical information in a secure and trackable manner but also to provide employees quick access to business continuity resources.
Apart from enhancing your organization’s learning strategy, an LMS can be effectively leveraged even for critical, trackable communications. Here’s how:
Trackability
It is difficult to keep a tab on all policy updates from regulatory authorities, governments, and workplace management. On top of it, with so much incoming information and multiple sources, how can one ensure that the message or the email has been read by the recipient? LMS distribution system provides trackability and notifications. It can also nudge the user until the content, be it written or a video, is consumed. This mitigates the threat of non-compliance or violations by employees.
Comprehension
The LMS should be able to change the external messages such as “our employees have all been briefed on the new procedures” to “every employee has taken training and is certified on our new COVID-19 procedures.”
Security and Validity
A good LMS gives deeper control over shared information. Versioning also plays an important role in tracking down updates on critical policies, ensuring the older information can be updated instantly. The approach can deliver and track multiple versions of a document as well as learning activities. Doing so ensures that people can easily make out what and when the changes were made and update themselves accordingly. Hence, it reduces the risk of someone referring to outdated information.
Discoverability
An LMS – with its tie-ups with multiple content providers – can aggregate relevant content into easily discoverable channels. A centralized dashboard of applicable resources is paramount and offers a unified solution for employees to quickly refer. Some of the resources that a good LMS can aggregate are company policy updates, government notifications (including public health departments), publications, and engaging content on business continuity practices.
The LMS has long been known as an incredibly useful tool in the corporate world as it supports orientation training during hiring and facilitates ongoing training. However, it also lends the much-needed agility to the organizations for not merely surviving in tough times but thriving in the same. The best part is that an LMS seamlessly aligns the desired information with all relevant stakeholders. Thereby, it automatically shifts the focus on acquiring knowledge and learning, followed by growth.
(The author is the Vice President and Country Leader – India, SumTotal Systems)