Learning Management Systems During COVID-19

Keeping your employees informed and educated

It feels as though information about the coronavirus pandemic gets updated on a minute-by-minute basis – alerts about the pandemic’s toll, promising news about treatments and vaccines, and the introduction of new safety guidelines and mandates.

Given the rapid flow of information about the pandemic, it’s critical for employers to be able to quickly and accurately communicate with their workforce. Maybe an employer has changed its back-to-the-workplace policies. Or perhaps an employer has revised its social-distancing guidelines. Whatever the case, employers today are tasked with keeping workers informed about countless issues related to the pandemic.

That’s where the right learning management system can lend a high-tech hand. A learning management system arms employees with need-to-know information and fosters employee engagement in ways that emails or phone calls cannot. One of the most vital types of information employers must disseminate centers on workplace health and safety.

These days, employers must make sure each employee reads and understands new health and safety protocols and has committed to following them. With a learning management system, employers can distribute short courses that teach employees about new protocols. An HR professional or another workplace leader can shepherd employees through these protocols, send out coursework and quiz employees about their newly acquired knowledge. As such, everyone in the workplace digests precisely the same information about health and safety standards.

This type of information can help ease employees’ anxiety. Survey data collected by Weber Shandwick and polling company KRC suggests “effective, consistent communications” and an emphasis on employee safety are two of the keys to navigating pandemic recovery. A survey that the two companies conducted in April indicated 45% of workers feared their employers would bring people back to the office before it’s safe to do so.

In light of that data, it’s become even clearer that compliance training and, more broadly, employee engagement now go hand in hand with technology. The proper technology not only can enable smooth communication with employees, but it also can relieve some of the stress and burdens being shouldered by HR professionals. In an HR survey by the Brandon Hall Group, 80% of organizations said managing the coronavirus crisis as challenging or very challenging.

Compliance training frustrates many small organizations (those with up to 499 employees), according to the Brandon Hall Group survey. About one-fifth of small organizations cited compliance training as one of their biggest HR challenges during the pandemic. Meanwhile, 55% of midsize organizations (500 to 4,999 employees) and 37% of large organizations (at least 5,000 employees) indicated training was one of the areas where technology could play a huge role.

When an employer weaves compliance training into a learning management system, employee engagement and confidence get a boost. “Informed workers who feel safe at work are less likely to be unnecessarily absent,” according to the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA). The federal agency suggests that employers provide “refresher” training about health and safety as organizations grapple with the pandemic.

A learning management system allows employees to undergo health and safety training on a number of devices, such as laptops, smartphones or tablets. And they can complete that training on their own timetable. This eliminates the need for workplace managers to schedule in-person training sessions — training sessions that might be difficult to carry out with social-distancing or work-from-home policies in place.

A bonus for HR leaders and an entire workforce is if a learning management system is already folded into a broader HR platform, rather than being a standalone product. This makes it easier for HR professionals and employees, as no one is forced to install and learn yet another software program.

To be sure, a learning management system can be a major benefit during the pandemic. Yet some employers have been slow to adopt this kind of technology.

Why? One reason is that a substantive knowledge-sharing culture is absent in a lot of organizations. According to research released in July 2020 by the Association for Talent Development, 44% of organizations have instituted a formal knowledge-sharing program and 53% have instituted only an informal program. What about the remaining 3%? There’s no knowledge-sharing program whatsoever.

On top of that, the association’s research shows that a large number of organizations haven’t assigned HR professionals or anybody else to handle knowledge sharing and management. Only 49% of organizations have designated someone to direct knowledge sharing and only 54% have designated someone to oversee knowledge management.

Technology should be a core element of knowledge sharing and knowledge management. A learning management system can help an HR professional and an entire organization wraps their arms around communication and employee engagement in general, and compliance training in particular. The ability to generate and distribute e-learning materials to staff quickly and effectively is just one example. 

With no end in sight to the coronavirus pandemic, employers should constantly re-evaluate how they communicate with employers. This ongoing review should include how health and safety knowledge is being delivered to employees. Customizable technology like a learning management system can help give employees the information and assurance required for them to undertake their work in a safe, confident manner. And it can give employees a sense that they have some control in a pandemic-distressed world that doesn’t always make sense.