Three reasons staff neglect your HRMS learning module

Engaging employees with your HRMS can be an uphill battle sometimes but you would imagine that one function with user-appeal would be your HRMS’ learning and development module. After all, its purpose is to enhance the skills and knowledge of employees, effectively making it easier to do their jobs, and modern learning management systems (LMSs) are the gateway to all that. But popularity is far from guaranteed and there are a number of reasons – from the technical to the social – that can account for that; here are three of them.

1. Are you integrated?

As with any business software these days, the real benefits come from integration with the rest of your systems, allowing the additional features that come from a free flow of information. In an ideal system, the LMS doesn’t simply log and record requests for training and subsequent approvals, it connects with your time and attendance system, blocks out the training time to avoid scheduling conflicts, it contacts the payroll module to adjust the necessary pay code for the training days, it ‘makes a note’ on the employee’s record of any new skill levels or certifications. This should all be automatic - if the system is ‘isolated’ then it’s nothing more than an automated booking system – and no wonder people don’t get excited by it.

2. Do you have the right content?

As organizations become more complex, and training needs proliferate, the range of learning materials on offer must keep pace. In larger organizations, with a variety of specialist function and departments, it’s easy for the content of your LMS to lag behind requirements.

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A common response is to create (or buy in) a huge library of training materials for all occasions. The risk and common result is an unwieldy mass of learning content, probably off-the-shelf, too generalized, and frequently difficult to navigate. Not only is the right content hard to find but once your users do find it, it’s too generic to really have the desired impact.

One solution is to structure the content differently. The bite-sized approach order topics, principles, techniques, information, etc. into individual ‘chunks’; effectively mini-training sessions that last minutes rather than hours. Not only is this easier to find and more focused, it also makes bespoke training courses easier to construct, assembling them from only the necessary content, avoiding all extraneous information.

3. How’s your learning culture?

Remember the idea of a Learning Organization which first arose almost two decades ago? A learning organization encourages continuous and collaborative learning at all levels, taking a long-term perspective, with the aim of becoming or remaining highly competitive in its market.

Well, it’s still a current and valid concept but we don’t seem to hear about it too much lately.

Financial crises, job uncertainty, even political turmoil, all have an impact on the workforce and workplace behaviors. For some time, it’s possible we’ve been adopting more of a bunker mentality – just get the next job done. Understandable, but it doesn’t encourage long-term thinking and planning and learning & development is all about the future – preparing for the job that must be done tomorrow. If you really want to find out why your employees are neglecting your HRMS learning module and other development tools, it’s worth taking a look at your current company culture and the prevailing attitudes to learning that it encourages.