Removing Barriers and Improving ROI for Your LMS

In the past, employee training has been famous for delivering a subpar ROI. Most companies questioned recently during industry-wide surveys reported not being satisfied with their company’s training program or ROI.

A large portion of employees claimed they haven’t received the skills they needed to become efficient at their positions. These types of reports have a significant impact on a company’s bottom line, and it’s not a good one.

When a training program is effective, it leads to higher levels of engagement, more retention, better job performance, and increased productivity. The areas with the highest costs are retention and turnover rates.

If you don’t think retention and rehiring aren’t expensive, consider the following: A company with 100 employees that pays a salary of $50,000 per year will average about $700,000 per year in replacement costs. This should be enough to cause alarm.

One of the main reasons employee training doesn’t deliver an efficient ROI is because of barriers to corporate learning. When you eliminate these barriers, leaders can boost the overall effectiveness of training and maximize their ROI for training and development goals.

Barriers to Corporate Learning

The following section has examples of some of the most significant barriers to corporate learning. Consider each of these to potentially maximize your ROI when it comes to your training program.

Fear of Failure

Fear of failure can be a killer when it comes to corporate learning and training. It’s very common for individuals to assume that not trying is safer than stepping into the unknown. This can stop team members from gaining important skills and taking advantage of key learning opportunities.

There are several ways you can take down this barrier to corporate learning in your organization. Allow your employees to make learning mistakes during training – it’s a part of the process.

Let your employees get items wrong and use empowering language to help them develop a more positive approach toward training. Encourage them to practice often, and instill in them that making mistakes now during training is better than not knowing what to do at all while they’re on the job in real-time.

Online learning can lead to reduced fear of failure for many employees. You can use remote learning especially to avoid the fear of failure.

Creating Quizzes with Several Attempts

Create quizzes that allow employees to get answers wrong, giving them several attempts. If they are incorrect, offer automated encouraging feedback to question responses.

Additionally, positive reinforcement when they are correct can be helpful as well and give them momentum. For example, a simple change in wording can promote higher levels of engagement and reduce the fear of failure.

When you’re creating course material, remember that a large portion of employees fear failure. Make learning a challenging exercise but also allow for forgiveness. This can do big things to eliminate the barrier to corporate learning and training.

Poor Adoption of Remote Learning Software

One of the major barriers is the poor adoption of remote learning programs. Many companies use an LMS platform or some other solution to meet the needs of a segmented workforce.

However, if things aren’t adopted by employees in the right way, there will be a huge barrier to corporate learning and will hinder ROI. Organizations must find a method to encourage the proper adoption of remote learning platforms.

There are several ways to encourage team members to adopt these training programs. Consider the following:

1. Create a support team for your LMS. Companies that use an LMS or any other type of eLearning platform should always have a support staff. This team is separate from the IT team, although IT members may be present in some fashion. The purpose of this team would be to quickly respond to employee questions about the platform and guide them through technical glitches.

Not understanding how to use an LMS platform or dealing with constant technical issues will prevent any type of engaging learning. If they know an LMS support team exists, they are more likely to ask questions about the software and be active in training.

Each of these support teams needs to be led by an LMS expert. Additionally, having an IT expert who can train the team in troubleshooting and reply to learners’ questions is a huge asset.

2. Use incentivized learning if employees aren’t being interactive with remote learning platforms. It could be an issue of them just needing a little nudge. Offering incentives each time they complete a module encourages them to use their learning solutions on a regular basis.

Many companies aren’t sitting well financially because of the pandemic. If you find your organization in this situation, offer low-cost or cost-free incentives. These can be just as effective as options that cost money. Using gamification and badges or certificates is an effective way to accomplish this.

You can also offer your best learners extra training for no charge. Many of your team members may be motivated by learning or training.

3. Improve the learning experience by ensuring your company’s training meets your employees’ needs. Do they have access to helpful resources that promote their success? Does your LMS or other learning platform provide an efficient user experience? You can find answers to these questions by utilizing surveys. Example survey questions are as follows:

“Is any part of the course difficult to navigate?” 

“What are your top three questions regarding the LMS platform?”

“Are you running into issues accessing any of the remote training modules through mobile?”

Use team member feedback to make changes to the LMS platform and encourage training participants to use it regularly. This will increase your ROI.

It’s also critical that you’re using the right LMS platform overall. If your platform doesn’t meet your team’s training needs, your ROI is doomed from the start. Make sure the system is clunky or outdated. It’s important that it doesn’t cause their devices to crash.

Making these minor, simple changes will gradually increase your learners’ engagement, which in turn will increase ROI. Consider using these practices if you’re having issues with your learning platform investment, especially considering the substantial investment in them.

After witnessing the potential of these platforms, take advantage of a corporate learning managing system and add customizations. This leads to developing a uniform system, which is what you’re looking for in the end.