How An LMS Solves Learning Challenges In Remote Working
Imagine your workforce at home, reporting for work in their pajamas. Sounds like a bad dream, doesn’t it? Well, not really. Reports suggest there has been a steady rise in the number of people who work remotely. What sweetens the deal is that organizations have started embracing the concept of employees working from home.
Remote working helps thousands circumvent issues including exhaustive commutes, rush hour, bad weather conditions, and perform their entire roles and responsibilities right from the comfort of their homes with minimal disruptions to workflow. No more nosy colleagues to worry about, no hunting for the other pair of socks, and most importantly, working in a place that is home. For each challenge in remote working, the bright minds have already sketched out a technological alternative, and there are multiple options to choose from. Which brings us to the next question.
Learning In Remote Working
When your team is distributed across different time zones and rarely meets at a centralized location, how can an organization ensure that its learning and development practices are on point? In this article, we share 4 ways an LMS solves learning challenges in remote working.
1. Transparency
Trust is a two-way street. When organizations take the big leap and permit employees to work from home, the time spent in learning and development should be accounted for. Learning Management Systems have features that ensure an employee’s attention is focused purely on the course; for example, configurations that automatically pause a video when you switch to another tab, and include an option to integrate with the team’s collaboration tool to post feeds once a peer completes a course.
2. Effective Communication
Imagine playing a game of Telephone with a group of four. It starts with one person whispering a message to the next person’s ear and this process is repeated. The last person then reveals the message out loud to the entire group. Sometimes the final message will have minimal variations and sometimes the final version of the message will be completely distorted from the original message. Passing on updates to a distributed workforce is like playing a game of Telephone and sometimes a message in the team channel simply gets lost. Stats reveal that eLearning holds a retention rate of 25-60% while the conventional methods have a 8-10% retention rate, and eLearning typically uses up 40% to 60% less time as well.
3. Engagement
eLearning could be the solution for training and development in the years to come. However, one of the most difficult challenges that online learning has is high dropout rates. An independent study reveals the average rate of course completion hovers around 15% as of June, 2015. Emphasis on learning as a core value of a culture isn’t the motivation that your remote team looks for. Gamification, however, helps your peers feel recognized and rewarded for their accomplishments, and enriches the sense of healthy competition among the team. Gamification has produced an increase in peer participation, engagement and course completion rate in Delloite, Salesforce and Ford Canada.
4. Onboarding
The big wide world outside scales to your computers and phones all thanks to technology and the internet. Organizations today have their operations set up at multiple business locations spanning across different continents. This makes it difficult to summon everyone to one place every time there is a new employee. To make it easier, LMSs today feature options to tailor a program effortlessly. Create engaging onboarding content and make them available for new recruits. Talk about convenience, affordability and reliability all in one package, and all of it streams to your remote workers’ computers.
Final Word
The scope of an LMS has evolved from just being a tool that facilitates eLearning at the workplace to a complete learning portal that solves challenges of learning and development in remote working. Administering the Learning Management System and creating courses that have an impact unites your remote team with a common goal. We belong in an age of constant change that challenges our perspective. Ideas are not bound by age, dreams aren’t chained to your sleep and learning doesn’t conform to a place.
