The Human Resources (HR) function has evolved rapidly over the past decade. Once a department concerned with hiring, arbitrating workplace conflict, and administering policy, HR has been given a lot more responsibility lately.
Now HR is responsible for major organization-wide initiatives, such as employee retention, leadership development, morale, navigating a skills gap, and maintaining compliance with fast-changing laws. This year, according to research from the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM), the top three concerns for HR professionals are maintaining employee morale, retaining top talent, and finding job candidates with the right skills.
All of this can be overwhelming, especially for small and medium-sized businesses. According to the Academy to Innovate Human Resources (AIHR), businesses usually hire their first human resources employee at between 20 and 50 employees. That one person is then tasked with all the responsibilities of a full HR department.
With so much to do and so few hands to do it, HR departments are turning to digital tools like the LMS (learning management system) to help them manage their many responsibilities.
Why Do HR Departments Need an LMS?
Learning and Development (L&D) often falls under the HR umbrella. Even in organizations with separate L&D departments, HR is responsible for onboarding new hires, regulatory compliance, and managing the performance of existing employees. An LMS can help manage those responsibilities as well as the growing list of initiatives spearheaded by many HR departments.
Until fairly recently, many organizations conducted training in person. Research from Brandon Hall Group in 2020 showed that, at the time, 96% of companies were accustomed to providing instructor-led training. Since then, more organizations have moved to at least some digital learning. This is good news for overworked HR departments; digital learning means HR can use an LMS to centralize and manage several tasks that used to be performed manually.
How can an LMS benefit human resources?
While the primary advantage of an LMS is streamlined training and development, there are several others — even if your HR department doesn’t directly handle L&D. Below are a few ways that an LMS can help any HR department, no matter what its responsibilities are.
1. Faster onboarding
When an employee is hired, it’s HR’s job to get them up to speed and ready to work. This is always a challenge, but even more so in a skills shortage; a position may have been vacant for weeks while recruiters worked to find the perfect job candidate.
Naturally the business is impatient for every new hire to start working as soon as possible, but onboarding takes time. For example, in sales the accepted wisdom is that it takes an average of three months for a new rep to start hitting sales targets. This doesn’t mean onboarding should be skipped however; research shows that good onboarding can cut ramp time by 50%, and improve win rates by 14%.
An LMS can digitize the onboarding process, letting HR assign courses to new hires, monitor their progress, and offer feedback as needed. Using features like micro learning or learning in the flow of work, HR can also get new hires to work quickly while they’re in the process of being onboarded.
2. Improved compliance
Regulations change fast; this year alone has seen major changes, from California’s new Workplace Violence law to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) updating guidance on workplace harassment for the first time since 1999. And those are just the tip of the compliance iceberg.
An LMS allows HR to quickly assign compliance modules to everyone who needs training on a new regulation, and track learners’ progress through each module. Having an LMS makes it easier for HR to know who is compliant and who is not — something that’s essential for audits. An LMS with a course authoring tool can also help HR departments that might need to author their own regulatory training modules.
3. Leadership development
With a staffing crisis in full swing, companies are often desperate to attract and retain top leadership talent — but competition for leaders is fierce and the pool of candidates can be small. In response, some organizations are taking a grow-your-own approach to leadership, fostering talent within their own organizations.
This approach has the added benefit of helping with employee retention. Many employees, especially those in their 30s and early 40s consider a pathway to leadership a job perk; Pricewaterhouse Cooper’s (PwC) report on Millennials At Work found millennials are interested in moving into leadership positions, and fast; 52% of respondents said they’d choose a job that would let them advance quickly over one with a higher salary.
Unfortunately, career paths aren’t always emphasized; Gartner found that 86% of HR leaders feel career pathways at their organizations are unclear. An LMS can help leadership development initiatives by creating personalized learning pathways for employees, and allowing HR to monitor performance, assign mentors or modules, and make other recommendations that will help those in leadership training to thrive.
4. Providing learning to the remote workforce
Remote work has become a norm in some sectors. While many have returned to the office post-pandemic, remote work is three to four times as prevalent as it was in 2019. This can present a problem for HR departments who are used to having staff on-site for training, onboarding, and feedback.
An LMS allows HR to manage all employees’ performance, feedback and upskilling from one central platform — no matter where they are. This doesn’t necessarily mean relying on asynchronous learning modules. Depending on the LMS, it’s also possible to offer virtual instructor-led training (VILT) so that your employees are able to learn from an instructor in real-time.
5. Tracking employee performance
An LMS gives your HR team hard data on all of the learners in your organization, tracking employee performance and completion rates for every module. Using an LMS dashboard, HR can easily see who has taken which training modules, which learners are struggling, and where employees may need more support. Using these data-driven insights can help an HR department decide whether to assign further learning, schedule a meeting with an employee or their supervisor, or whether to recommend an employee for advanced training.
What does it look like when an HR department uses an LMS?
Canidium, a software consultancy that partners with clients to improve business processes and deliver technology-driven solutions, wanted to grow its own talent. The HR department was looking for an LMS that would allow them to develop both business and technical skills internally, to foster a team of world-class consultants.
With only two administrators running the LMS, Canidium needed a solution that would simplify the process of creating and delivering training to their learners.
Litmos allowed the Canidium team to deploy and easily manage self-paced learning for more than 150 learners across five continents. Canidium also uses Litmos to onboard new associates and author its own content.
Why integrate an LMS into your HR process?
Because it provides a central location for learning content, an LMS can save time, track the performance of employees, and automate time-consuming manual tasks.
Compared to the costs of in-person workshops or conferences, providing remote-first training through an LMS can save time and money, for both employees and HR leaders.
Overall, an LMS helps HR professionals efficiently manage training processes and foster organizational growth.