The return on investment (ROI) for your LMS is essentially a detailed look at how your eLearning software is positively impacting business. As with every investment you make in your company, it’s wise to keep tabs on how online training is going and evaluate the benefits. But what should you be looking at? Read on for our top ROI indicators to help you see the value of a Learning Management System in concrete terms.
Reduce Training Costs
First up, let’s tackle the obvious: training expenses. You’ve likely adopted an LMS to roll out top-quality training to your employees, and the savings you’re making on in-person training should be clear. Traditional classroom learning comes with all sorts of expenses, including space rental, generating printed materials, buying physical learning aids and paying instructor fees.
A good LMS will allow you to create courses and educational experiences online, store them, and distribute these to whoever, whenever. The beauty is that you can re-run courses over and over, without having to set up a session in person – meaning SMEs won’t have to teach the same course multiple times. A recorded video module is a one-time expense, that can train hundreds of employees, and similarly, onboarding courses or standard procedure methods can be delivered to staff whenever necessary.
Trim Travel Expenses
Business travel is undoubtedly expensive. Whether it’s for conferences or seminars, sending employees overseas to network and learn from their industry peers can send expenses through the roof. Plane or train tickets, accommodation, meals, and per diems all add up, so why do it if it’s not always necessary?
While some travel is essential for business, your LMS can replace a significant chunk – particularly if you have a global business. Using your Learning Management System to connect a team in one location to another via live video is a fabulous asset, as is group learning in real-time and on-demand support for remote workers. With an LMS, you should be seeing some serious reduction in travel costs while retaining multi-location rewards.
Convenient Training Hours For Employees
We all know how a busy workday feels, and sometimes, essential training can fall by the wayside. Taking time out of a hectic schedule to attend a classroom session isn’t always convenient for your staff or your business operations. Luckily, your LMS can solve this issue to ensure everyone not only manages their daily workload but also enjoys their learning experience.
An excellent Learning Management System should be fully compatible with mobile devices such as phones, laptops or tablets and be able to deliver enjoyable, gamified eLearning. Fun training games that last just a few minutes keep learners engaged and can be completed whenever it’s convenient. Whether that’s in transit, or as part of a break from dealing with clients, staff can stay on top of key skills or pick up new ones in a way that doesn’t take them off the shop floor for a whole afternoon. And in optimising employee time, you’ll be able to keep things running smoothly without skimping on skill uptake.
Encourage Higher Productivity
This neatly leads us to the critical issue of maintaining a skilled workforce. If you’re able to keep employees on an enjoyable and accessible learning journey via LMS, the result is a highly skilled set of folks who excel at their jobs. Great training helps people reach a high level of competence quickly, and it follows that your business thrives as a result.
Elearning through your LMS can begin right at the beginning, offering onboarding courses before a new hire arrives for their first day, and can offer support and information to help them settle in fast. Further along the line, regular online training can offer paths to certification, tangible career progress and skills specialism; all of which are a great boon to both the individual in question and your operations as a whole.
Automation Tools For LMS Admins
While delivering courses and other engaging learning materials are the key tasks of a Learning Management System, your training software also has another useful string to its bow.
Most learning tech now comes with a raft of automation tools, meaning that L&D supervisors can focus on strategy, rather than daily admin.
Powerful reporting tools mean that your HR teams can generate accurate reports for managers, remind learners of content via automatic notifications or enrol a whole bunch of folks into appropriate courses at the touch of a button. By taking the legwork out of training delivery, and offering up a clear glance at the stats from whichever standpoint you need, automation tools offered by your Learning Management System are of great value.
Hassle-Free Data Maintenance
Another tech-related ROI area lies within the pricey business of data storage. If you’ve plumped for an LMS with cloud storage, you’ve dispensed with the cost of on-site server maintenance, or even server hardware purchase for that matter.
Robust training management for a whole workforce requires comprehensive data storage so you can benefit from this information. If it’s up in the cloud, it’s not only your LMS vendor’s expense to caretake, but you’re also safe from a potential disaster if something happens to your premises. Less hardware and fewer caretakers equal a smart financial move.
Time-Saving With Social Learning
We’ve briefly touched on the importance of getting your employees up to speed quickly when they join your team, but what happens when a member of staff needs support on the job? We’re social creatures, we humans, and we tend to learn best with or from others. This means we either pick up the ability to perform a task by watching someone else do it, and we turn to each other when we need advice. In the workplace, when a tricky issue crops up for the first time, we tend to visit the desk of a more experienced employee.
A Learning Management System can offer an opportunity to share the knowledge that your more tenured or skilled folks have without them having to suffer regular interruptions. Encouraging these workplace wizards to share tips, methods and learned information through online learning content has several advantages. First up, they only need to share their knowledge once, say, through a video. Second, your learners are getting accurate information on procedure rather than resorting to Google. And thirdly, while both of these things might be time-saving in the long run, contributing to a learning program is an affirmation to those who have quality know-how to share.
Reducing Staff Turnover
One key area where your Learning Management System is worth its weight in gold is employee retention. High staff turnover in any workplace is a sure sign something isn’t working. Whether that’s to do with workplace culture, or you have skilled individuals who feel their career is stagnating once they reach a certain level, both of these things mean you require some serious changes.
Elearning can offer a solution to both of these bad situations for your business. Leverage online learning to boost professional development, and employee satisfaction and educate teams about healthy workplace behaviours. Losing brilliant staff members to your competitors is expensive – and it takes time to bring someone else up to speed. We say invest in your people and they’ll go the distance with you.
Revenue Generation
In a similar vein, offering quality training via LMS creates individuals that are not only good at their jobs, but will also nurture innovators who have the potential to improve your business operations. Consequently, your revenue stream will benefit too.
Delivering courses that are challenging, entertaining, fulfilling and easy to access is at the heart of an LMS’s reason for being. You can create your own custom content or purchase off-the-shelf world-class courses from your LMS vendor. Either way, stimulating a culture of learning through quality online training software can open doors to new product development, system improvements, and as a bonus, group learning courses can also help everyone pull together as a team.
We’d say that’s definitely a great return on investment: don’t you think?