You just spent 12 months procuring and deploying a Learning Management System (LMS) or Learning Experience Platform (LXP). It’s now available from your intranet, and every employee has access. But no one’s using it for anything except compliance content – and even that requires significant effort from your team to encourage uptake. Sound familiar?
A 2018 literature review on LMSs in the workplace concluded most are seamless for managing learning, but not for delivering learning. This review has gaps as few organizations are likely to announce publicly that platform adoption is low. However, the summary aligns with what many L&D professionals will have seen in practice: engaging learners with online resources is tough.
In reality, few will access their learning platform as a destination in its own right: The platform is a tool to connect learners and provide content that helps them perform. So, what can we do to make that journey seamless, no matter which platform you use?
Cater to colleague needs
Lack of platform usage is not due to a lack of problems. Look around your organization: is everything working great? In all likelihood, there are opportunities everywhere to improve efficiency and help your people perform — it’s a case of finding out what these are.
Asking questions, running surveys, setting up focus groups and observing people at work are all great techniques to uncover the day-to-day concerns of your colleagues. Then, by using these insights to create or curate content that actually addresses these concerns, you can populate your platform with resources that genuinely add value.
Link to content where it’s needed
Much workplace learning is contextual: managers don’t require absence-management training once a year; they need it when managing absences. Rather than expect people to seek out the support they need during an otherwise busy day, L&D can make this connection for them by ensuring that useful content is presented when needed in the flow of work.
Examples might include:
- Linking to absence-management training at the top of the absence-management policy.
- Highlighting relevant resources when sending out reminders to set goals.
- Encouraging support functions like procurement and finance to link useful content in their email footers. This way, whenever a colleague contacts a department like procurement for help, they are reminded that content which could address their need already exists.
Don’t require a password
As soon as you ask users for a username and password, some of them will give up and go elsewhere. This is a barrier to learning that is easily solved through single sign-on. With single sign-on, your colleagues log in once – typically to Microsoft 365 or similar – and are granted frictionless access to your other enterprise platforms.
Provide frequent nudges
Nudge theory, popularized by Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler, is based on the concept that humans are too busy to think deeply about each decision. ‘Nudging’ is often reduced to ‘sending email reminders,’ but it’s more accurately about structuring choices to encourage a preferred outcome.
One way to do this is to change the defaults. For example, if you offer a training request form, you could include the ‘Top 10 Requests’ at the top of the form with links to relevant content. This way, you shift the default from ‘requesting training’ to ‘using an existing solution.’
Another approach is to structure complex choices by promoting just a few pieces of monthly digital content. By doing so, you can reduce the need to search an expansive content library for something useful and instead present a more binary choice: ‘This month, we’re focused on goal setting, is resource X something that would help you?’
Test what works and iterate
Engaging colleagues with digital-learning resources is not a one-off activity. The best results are achieved when learning professionals measure what works and adapt their approach based on the feedback they receive: whether that feedback is in the form of comments, usage metrics or – in an ideal world – organizational metrics.
Let’s go back to the start. You’ve implemented the ideas above. Now’s the time to re-run your surveys and focus groups. What’s changed? What hasn’t?
You linked to content where it’s needed and provided nudges. Is that content getting used more? If not, why not? Speak to your colleagues to discover why they haven’t engaged with resources.
Every organization has problems, and digital resources can be part of the solution. But only if your colleagues actually use them.
