How can you use your LMS effectively to save time, and what are you risking by wasting your time?

In this blog we’ll explore the negative impacts of mismanaged L&D hours, and go over some easy ways to avoid the issue. L&D’s time is incredibly valuable, and can be tangibly linked to higher revenue, increased productivity and a more positive company culture – so it’s crucial that it’s spent wisely.

Sometimes time just gets away from you, tasks pile up, and precious hours are spent where they didn’t need to be. There are a few ways you can take control, and optimise your LMS to produce the best results for your organisation while freeing you up to focus on other things.

Read on to find out more.

The risks of an inefficient LMS

Saving time is all well and good, but what does the opposite look like? Sometimes it’s easy to let things slide when you’re not confronted with the consequences, so let’s face them head-on.

Financial risks

The biggest and most obvious pinch: The financial risks.

Everyone has a budget, and inefficiently allocating your resources – no matter how limited or abundant they are – puts a strain on that budget. There are a few ways in which this manifests. Some of them are obvious – but others are much more subtle, insidiously sneaking up on you and causing problems that you hadn’t even thought to consider.

Productivity: Mismanaging your LMS leads to unengaged staff, which leads to reduced productivity, which leads to reduced profit.

In turn, you’ll be sinking your own working hours into fixing issues that aren’t already optimised, meaning that you and your team are also less productive. It’s a line that can be clearly traced from Point A to Point C – but it can also be diverted before it’s too late, and we’ll get to that later.

Knowledge: When your LMS is not user-friendly or optimised for the best possible outcomes, your learners will quite simply not use it (or try to get away with using it as little as possible!) This results in staff who are less knowledgeable, which then has a knock-on effect on the organisation’s budget.

Firstly, it decreases the organisation’s chances of meeting its goals (financial or otherwise.) It also kicks the can further down the road so that more training needs to be paid for at a later date. And most obviously, a connection can easily be drawn between employee knowledge and customer satisfaction, then between customer satisfaction and customer spend.

(Just check out Thrive customer Homebase’s case study to see how we helped them increase customer spend by 35%.)

Compliance: Compliance is arguably one of the most important aspects of workplace learning and training. As we’ve stated in a previous blog, it’s the key to safeguarding your company in today’s world. But if your LMS is inefficient and hard to use, your learners are less likely to complete crucial compliance courses – and you may run into hefty fines and legal issues down the road as a result.

‍

Low levels of adoption

An unoptimised LMS that is largely left to its own devices without much oversight or support will in turn lead to unengaged learners and low adoption rates. (In other words, literally the diametric opposite of what you’re trying to achieve by implementing an LMS.) Having read the previous section, we know we don’t need to tell you what unengaged learners lead to.

Misappropriation of resources

A time-suck of an LMS will drain your resources instead of making the best use out of them. This also leads to opportunity loss for your L&D team, which is almost more painful than financial loss because you may not even be aware of the specific opportunities you could have had.

The fact is, time sunk into fixing issues with an inefficient LMS could have been allocated to much more important, valuable projects that would benefit your organisation and its employees. Don’t let your L&D team stagnate instead of reaching its full potential.
‍

‍
How to save time by optimising your LMS

Now we’ve counted the ways in which an inefficient LMS is detrimental to your business, we’re guessing you’re ready to hear some solutions – so here’s five:

Prioritise finding a learning platform with a user-friendly interface

During your LMS selection and tender processes, make sure that “ease of use” is at the top of your priority list. This may be an obvious point, but it’s important enough to state in black and white: The easier your platform is to use, the more your people will enjoy using it, and the less time you’ll have to spend dreaming up ways to engage them.

What exactly does “ease of use” look like?

When it comes to a user-friendly interface, just think of the platforms and software that you (most likely) use every single day: Netflix. Instagram. LinkedIn. Facebook. (Well… okay, maybe not that last one.) These platforms have been designed with the user experience in mind, and this intention shines through each and every decision made about their interfaces.

Your LMS should be exactly the same. Look for platforms with features like personalised dashboards, awards and achievements, comments, likes and shares, straightforward navigation, intuitive search functionality, progress updates, and the list goes on. You’ll know, as a regular user of the platforms we listed above, what you’re looking for – and you’ll also know a clunky interface when you see it.

Encourage self-directed learning with social-first features

Delegation, quite obviously, saves time. So who should you delegate learning to? The answer is the  learners themselves.

An LMS with social-first features will help you achieve the coveted “self-directed learning culture” that L&D teams are so often striving for. This leads on from our previous point about user-friendly learning platforms: If your LMS’ features mimic those of the social platforms your people use all the time, they are much more likely to enjoy using it.

Remove any possible friction from the learning process, and cultivate connection by allowing your people to post and share user-generated content. A good LMS will be set up to provide just this, and it’ll save your L&D function countless hours.

‍

Make use of your LMS’ full suite of features

We’ve all been there: You launch a shiny, new piece of tech in your company with wide-eyed aspirations of using every single feature to its full potential. After a few months, you’re only using a tiny percentage while the huge swathes of functionality that got you excited in the first place lay idle and underutilised.

Now, we’ll offer a slight correction on the title of this section: We’re not saying use every single feature your LMS has – some of them are just not going to be relevant to you. But the chances are, there are several features that you’re not taking full advantage of, instead going around the houses to carry out manual processes that could be completed in minutes by your LMS.

Take Thrive’s AI Content Authoring Tool as an example. L&D teams can save literal hours on content creation by harnessing this feature, which helps you auto-generate fresh and engaging content on any topic with a few simple prompts.

‍

Make use of the team behind your LMS

The other side of the “underutilised features” coin is “underutilised people.”

Just think about the hundreds (or maybe even thousands) of hours worth of experience that the team behind your learning platform has. That’s weeks, months, and years spent working with businesses just like yours to help them get the absolute most out of their LMS. Don’t let that expertise go untapped; make sure you’re regularly connecting with your learning platform’s team to make full use of their knowledge.

Most importantly, during the tender process, make sure that your learning platform actually has a great team behind it, e.g. a dedicated Implementation Specialist to make sure launching your platform goes off without a hitch, and your very own Customer Success Manager whose sole responsibility is to ensure that your platform is adding the most value possible to your organisation.

At Thrive, we believe so deeply in utilising our people’s knowledge that we’ve recently launched a new Platform Admin Specialist service. This service sees a dedicated specialist assist our customers with streamlining operations to get more learning done, faster.

Including services like platform optimisation, campaigns and audience management, content and structure management, platform configuration and analysis, and tailored support to help you set your platform up for success, the Platform Admin Specialist is the extra pair of hands your team needs to save time managing your LMS.

‍

Remove the red tape from compliance training

It’s 2024; there’s no reason for compliance training to be clunky, boring and hard to manage for both the learner and the admin. Gone are the days of eye-wateringly dull compliance courses that make your learners wish to be anywhere but the office. This is some of the most important information your new starters need to learn, so why wouldn’t you deliver it in a way that actually sticks?

Engaging compliance courses results in higher completion rates, which in turn results in less time spent chasing people who have fallen behind. This leads us to the next part of modernising compliance training to save time: Management. Through advanced analytics dashboards, you can easily see your team’s progress all in one place, making it easier than ever to make sure everyone is up-to-date.

Thanks for reading our guide on how to save time managing your LMS. If you’re looking for a user-friendly, engaging LMS inclusive of the time-saving features mentioned above, book a Thrive demo today.

‍