We see it time and time again: A business introduces a new learning management system (LMS) to its HR deck, but it doesn’t have any impact on the company’s workforce. And when employee adoption of the new LMS is low, the new platform just feels like a wasted effort.
Low LMS adoption doesn’t have to be an insurmountable barrier, though. We’ll dive into how you can turn the common barriers to LMS adoption around and engage learners in development.
Common barriers to LMS adoption
You know the saying, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” It’s a sentiment held in the workforce too. It’s the reason behind resistance to change management contributing to 39% of failed change programs, alongside a lack of support from leaders and managers (which contributes about 33%). After all, the business has carried on just fine so far, so why introduce a new-fangled learning management system? And many organizations have a long-established preference for traditional learning programs (like face-to-face or on-the-job learning) so adopting new learning strategies feels alien and uncomfortable.
A big part of this is a lack of emphasis on continuous learning. Maybe personal development is an activity that happens in isolation from other business processes, so it’s not linked tangibly to business strategy. It just becomes an afterthought that learners have to do to keep the bosses happy (and we have a word for that kind of learning: Compliance). So, if learning isn’t a strategic priority, then a new LMS will probably be viewed as extra work for employees to deal with rather than a pathway to career growth. In our experience, this often leads to:
- A lack of time for employees to complete learning outside of their job-related tasks
- Poorly executed LMS implementation (which further prevents user adoption)
- No incentive to complete training because there is no chance of recognition or advancement, and
- Siloed learning initiatives developing teams in isolation from each other (rather than furthering business objectives).
It’s not very strategic, and it means you’re wasting a lot of resources, time, and money for little gain. It prevents your organization and workforce from being proactive about business challenges, and that’s nota position you want to be in when your industry is constantly subject to change.
Best practices for successful LMS adoption
It’s easy to fall into the trap of filling your LMS with a lot of content for learners to choose from. But having more content doesn’t necessarily mean learners will find something engaging, or even be motivated to find engaging courses in the first place. Learners don’t want more content, they want contextual learning that helps them grow within their careers.
We have the answer to fix that right here: Capabilities. They’re the combined skills, behaviors, knowledge, tools and processes that deliver desired organizational outcomes. Capabilities are the foundation of L&D and performance management, and bridge the gap between the two to increase user engagement in the L&D and performance process.
We have four strategies you can use to increase LMS adoption using linked learning and performance management.
Strategy #1: Align learning and business objectives
Your LMS should be linked to your organization’s strategic goals so that:
- Completed learning improves how employees perform (and therefore drive business outcomes), and
- Employees can actually see how their learning contributes to business outcomes, which is more likely to drive employee adoption of learning.
When asked, we found 95.5% of companies agree that linking employee L&D to career advancement improves employee satisfaction and retention. And when employees see the value the LMS brings, productivity and engagement with learning increase.
An easy way to create this link is to define clear, measurable objectives for the LMS. They’ll provide a focus for the system’s use and will help measure its impact on organizational capabilities. These goals should go beyond L&D alone and integrate with other HR systems like performance management and talent development systems. If you have effective communication between HR systems then you can automate how you track progress, measure and deliver performance evaluations, and assign updated development plans. The idea is that integration allows you to create a strong link between learning and strategic business objectives.
Strategy #2: Secure leadership buy-in
Once the leaders are championing continuous learning, the rest will follow. Executives have very specific pain points they want L&D–and by extension, this new LMS–to answer. It may be that they’re concerned about the organization’s profitability. In that case you’ll need to demonstrate how the LMS can deliver a capability development initiative to your sales team to increase sales-related profit. Convince them that the LMS is well worth the investment and their involvement with it will send a strong message to the business about the LMS’s worth to broader business objectives.
Don’t forget to get buy-in from leaders across the business, too. They’ll have their own pain points and KPIs that need to be met, specific to their departments, which will need to be answered for them to buy in to LMS adoption. Learning that doesn’t improve performance is useless, and performance management that doesn’t result in actionable development plans for employees is also useless. Show your business unit leaders how they can use an LMS to develop relevant capabilities within their teams, and they’ll back your L&D initiative. (P.S. This is also a super important learning incentive for learners as well, who want to receive training and professional development lest they move on to greener pastures.)
Strategy #3: Curate relevant learning
We’ll be honest, the best way to do this is to use your learning management system. We like to recommend a performance learning management system (PLMS) for the job, because making sure learners receive high-quality, relevant content is kind of a PLMS’s whole deal. When we say relevant we really mean develop capabilities. A PLMS identifies role-specific capabilities for individual learners based on their job descriptions and assigns them learning designed specifically to develop those capabilities.
It makes user adoption less about creating engaging content and more about providing relevant learning. The engagement comes from training modules that can actually facilitate career growth in employees, not simply being “fun”.
Just remember that your business will have to adapt to changes in the industry and technology over time, which means the capabilities you need to develop will change. Maybe new technologies mean new capability sets will need to be catered for, or capability development needs to evolve past a “proficient” competency level and become “advanced” instead, because developing this particular capability wasn’t a high priority before these changes came into effect. Make sure you’re conducting regular capability gap analyses to identify the areas that need development so you can have relevant training on hand for them.
Strategy #4: Continuously improve the system and its content
Setting and forgetting your LMS is a sure-fire way to make it become redundant and ineffective. You need to provide ongoing support to make sure the LMS (and the content it hosts) is up-to-date and relevant to your evolving business needs.
This is where L&D metrics come in to play as important indicators of employee engagement. It’s important to gather feedback from users to get an idea of learner satisfaction, but it’s also important that you analyze the tangible data here, too. Yes, LMS adoption increases if learners are engaged and satisfied with learning, but the hard numbers like return on investment (ROI) are a tangible indication of how effective learning has been within the LMS.
If learners haven’t improved their capabilities, then that’s an area where learners are struggling or disengaging. Review these areas to improve the learning experience–maybe the courses aren’t as relevant to employee job roles as you initially thought, and employees were checking out as a result.
Key takeaways
LMS adoption can be hard to attain, especially when there is no shared vision of what learning should look like within your organization. But you can improve employee adoption of learning management systems by linking learning and performance management with capabilities. It’s pretty simple, but it’s a lot easier to do with a PLMS that can do the heavy lifting with capabilities for you. Employees want to learn, improve, and grow their careers, and using capabilities to underpin learning that drives their performance is crucial to getting LMS adoption in your business.
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