4 Must-Have LMS Features To Keep Remote Employees Engaged And Tips To Minimize Costly Turnover

4 Must-Have LMS Features To Keep Remote Employees Engaged And Tips To Minimize Costly Turnover
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Summary: Because of the pandemic, 78% of people are now working from home. How can you use your LMS features to keep those workers engaged with your company and learning? How can you avoid the costly turnover of employee training?

Minimize Costly Employee Turnover With Top LMS Features

Your organization puts a lot of time and money into hiring the right employees. You spend time putting together a job description, reading through resumes, and interviewing the right candidates, a process that can take months. Then you spend time onboarding them—a process that requires quite a bit of training—and getting them to a point in which they can ramp up to full productivity. This can take an average of 3 months in the sales industry, sometimes longer. How about minimizing costly employee turnover with the right LMS features?

So what happens when those employees leave for a new job shortly after you hire them? The short answer is that you’ve lost money. According to Gallup [1], businesses in the U.S. lose a trillion dollars annually to employee turnover.

eBook Release: The New Essentials Of Employee Training: Cultivating Engagement And Enjoyment
eBook Release
The New Essentials Of Employee Training: Cultivating Engagement And Enjoyment
Learn how to increase employee engagement and how to get learners to enjoy the experience of learning.

But what does that mean for your business? It turns out, the cost of turnover for an individual business is still pretty high; the cost of replacing an individual employee can range from one-half to two times the employee's annual salary. Gallup estimates that a 100-person organization paying an average salary of $50,000 could face the steep turnover and replacement costs of approximately $660,000 to $2.6 million per year.

Why Do Employees Leave Their Jobs?

Employees look for new jobs for a number of reasons: toxic work cultures, better salaries elsewhere, or following a long-held ambition are all reasons why your team members might look for another job. But there’s another reason your employees might look elsewhere for work: they’re not engaged. And this might lead to a costly employee turnover.

According to Gallup [2], about 35% of the workforce is “actively engaged” at work. That means they’re happy, productive, and like their jobs. Meanwhile, 13% is “actively disengaged.” Those workers are miserable at work and spreading their unhappiness to their work colleagues. That means the other 52% are “not engaged,” just sort of coasting along, doing the bare minimum.

As Gallup writes, employees who are “not engaged” are “psychologically unattached to their work and company and ...put time, but not energy or passion, into their work. Not engaged employees will usually show up to work and contribute the minimum required. They're also on the lookout for better employment opportunities and will quickly leave their company for a slightly better offer.”

That’s more than half of the workforce, and that’s a recipe for turnover.

How Can You Combat Disengagement?

Luckily, one of the best ways to keep employees engaged is training.

Many workers—especially younger workers—value development because they link it with opportunity. A recent LinkedIn study found that 40% of workers 24 and younger would talk to their manager before making a career change if they were offered "access to additional opportunities to learn and grow within the workplace" [3].

Gallup’s most recent data found that the workplaces which create “high-development cultures” [2]—those that offer employees the opportunity “to develop their strengths and purpose into a career”—were likely to see much more engaged workers.

High development cultures tend to value learning, development, and communication. They prioritize mentoring over management, encourage coaching over bossing, and make employees feel as though their development is valued by their organization.

So how can you use the existing features in your Learning Management System (LMS) to boost your team’s engagement, especially now, when most teams are working remotely and are unable to see each other face to face?

Below are 4 features that will help you keep your team engaged and learning. Plus, how you'll manage to use your LMS to reduce employee turnover.

1. Mobile Learning

If your team members are like most employees worldwide right now, they’re working from home right now. That means they might be sharing their laptops or tablets with kids doing schoolwork, spouses experiencing technical difficulties, or roommates who just need to borrow their tech for a second.

Your LMS should support mobile learning for a variety of reasons, but during a lockdown or a pandemic, it’s important to give your team members a variety of ways to log on to their learning. If their laptop has been commandeered for summer school, no problem—they should just be able to pick up their phone and complete a module. More U.S. adults own a smartphone than any other device [4], and you can bet that your remote employees are likely using a smartphone for at least part of their job. In fact, LinkedIn found there was a 5% increase in mobile learning even before the pandemic [5].

It’s not just knowledge workers stuck at home who need mobile learning; there are also essential workers whose jobs take them into the field. These workers likely rely on their devices for work-related communication. By making sure they can access learning from their phones, you can engage them where they are, without requiring them to sit at a computer.

2. Gamification

Who doesn’t love to play a game? Most LMSs offer you the opportunity to gamify your training by adding points, badges, and leaderboards.

What is gamification? It’s the introduction of game mechanics into non-game situations, like work or training. Although gamification can take several forms, in L&D it’s most often seen as a point system. It works like this: Learners take training modules, earn points, and are either awarded a badge or appear on a leaderboard that ranks all learners by their training activity. Thus, gamification LMS features are key to incentivize your teams.

By turning learning into a game, it’s easier to motivate learners to complete modules and continue on their learning pathways and get to tackle employee turnover costs with LMS software. You do need to be careful about gamification, however. Sometimes staff who rank very low on a leaderboard give up and become unmotivated, so consider your individual staff members before making a leaderboard public.

3. Video Assessments

If your learners have been holed up in their homes for a long time, they might forget what it’s like to be in an in-person training session.

Video assessments can be added to a course if a training manager wants to actually see learners’ progress in a module. Say your learner has to respond to a customer’s objection; if you add a video assessment module, your learner can upload a video of themselves giving the pitch, you can review it, and provide feedback. Used in conjunction with other forms of outreach, a video assessment allows you to add a practice component to a remote coaching model, and learners love to be coached.

In fact, Gallup finds organizations with high development workplace cultures encourage managers to act less like a boss and more like a coach; it’s the manager’s job to discover the team’s strengths and weaknesses, to encourage teams to solve problems, and to choose training and development specifically for their employees.

4. Microlearning

If your employees need to learn to do something right now, would they prefer to watch a 5-minute video or take an hour-long course? I bet you know the answer to that one.

Microlearning is a quick, focused burst of information that only addresses one topic. Your employees are probably used to microlearning on their own. If they don’t know how to do something, they’re asking Alexa or watching a 2-minute tutorial on YouTube. By having that sort of learning available to them at work, you can save them time and keep them focused on your materials instead of Google when they have a problem. This is also a great way to tackle employee turnover costs with LMS software and online training. A survey by Software Advice found that learners were 58% more likely to use their company’s LMS if it included microlearning [6].

Engaging Learners During A Crisis Is Key To Avoid Costly Employee Turnover

Engagement is more of a challenge now than ever—as is training. According to a recent IDG report [7], 78% of the workforce is now working from home due to the COVID-19 pandemic, as opposed to the 16.5% of workers who worked from home at least 60% of the time before the pandemic.

That means your content is competing with the distractions of home: kids, families, groceries, roommates, and pets. By using the features in your LMS to their fullest capabilities, you can engage these workers by allowing them to learn efficiently in the time and space they have available. Dig in the eBook The New Essentials Of Employee Training: Cultivating Engagement And Enjoyment to discover more about what employee training has to offer when implemented correctly, focused on engagement and joy!

References:

[1] This Fixable Problem Costs U.S. Businesses $1 Trillion

[2] 4 Factors Driving Record-High Employee Engagement in U.S.

[3] Nearly a Third of U.S. Professionals Are Career Sleepwalking: A Career Pivot Could Be Your Wake Up Call

[4] Internet, social media use and device ownership in U.S. have plateaued after years of growth

[5] 2019 Workplace Learning Report

[6] Top LMS Features To Drive Employee Engagement

[7] CSO Pandemic Impact Survey

eBook Release: Litmos
Litmos
Litmos develops eLearning solutions for top-performing companies. Litmos offers the world’s easiest-to-use LMS with 30 million users in 150 countries, across 35 languages.