Top LMS features to drive compliance and benefit your business

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Rachel Sweeney, Marketing Executive

Effective training, delivered to the point of need, is essential in making sure your organization and its people continue to operate compliantly.  Placing a Learning Management System (LMS) at the heart of your compliance program allows you to deliver training efficiently and gives you the hard data you need to prove compliance.

Why an LMS?

A Learning Management System is a vital tool for ensuring your workforce is fully compliant.  It allows you to build, adapt and repurpose digitized learning.  It acts as a catalogue and repository for information and microlearning resources.  Available across mobile and networked devices an LMS is a one-stop shop for training.  It can be easily customized to reflect your organization’s culture and brand.  You can configure your LMS using its interface templates to facilitate social and peer-to-peer learning to support a sustainable culture of compliance.

As the name suggests, an LMS is about the management of learning as well as its implementation and delivery.  Compliance relies on mandatory and robust reporting to check who’s compliant and who hasn’t accessed or completed training assignments.  That tracking generates the reports needed to analyze an individual’s performance.  Those reports help identify gaps and reveal where remedial training is required.  Remedial training can then be delivered via the LMS completing the virtuous circle.

What can an LMS do for you?

Let’s look in more detail at the features and functions an LMSs bring and how they can help with your compliance training.

• Engaging content in one location: To cover compliance adequately, you’ll need content. LMSs come with a content building package that allows you to create and adapt compliance content using a variety of media to aid engagement and information retention.  It can also host and deploy ready-made, off-the-shelf content offering you the best of both worlds: internal and external sources of expertise.  The content can be quickly and easily updated, adapted, and repurposed to suit different audiences and changes in rules and regulation.  Once a change is made it’s immediately accessible to all employees no matter where they’re working.  This is vital in a field like compliance where things change fast and there’s no excuse for being behind the game.  The automatic enrolment feature helps you make sure no one misses out on required training.  An LMS can also be used to facilitate virtual instructor-led training through webinars for example, meaning your LMS can be part of a blended-learning solution.

• Seamless access to courses and resources: LMSs should be fully responsive and work effectively on both mobile and networked office devices.  This total connectivity allows training to be accessible in work and on the go so employees have the options to access training at a time and in a place that suits them best.  The LMS curates content in a variety of formats from full-blown courses to smaller microlearning assets.  Content can be formal or informal, containing vital tips from your own workforce.  From a learning management point of view you can be confident that compliance training is always there reducing the risk of non-compliant behavior.

• Data collection and reporting: That sense of confidence in the management of compliance is boosted by the LMS’s ability to collect data on a range of interactions and output it in an accessible way using standard and customizable MI reports and easy-to-read dashboards.  This benefits both management and employees.  At a basic level the LMS can tell you who has completed training and who hasn’t.  But it can also form the basis for skills-gap analysis that shows who requires intervention and remedial training.  The data also fuels the notifications and recommendations features of an LMS which can be used to keep learners on track as part of a general compliance communications policy.  Reports generated by the LMS can be used in audits (external and internal) as evidence of compliance and due diligence for statutory or supervisory agencies.

• Transparency: LMSs can display data collected on compliance training in the form of dashboards.  These can be used by managers and L&D to track uptake and engagement with training resources and assignments down to the level of the individual employee.  Alerts on the dashboard trigger remedial action.  For employees the dashboards act as a reminder to complete training tasks with visual representation of their progress to date and what they still need to do – all in real time.  This transparent display of information encourages personal responsibility for compliance and at the same time provides a safety net to avoid a slide into non-compliance.

• Certification: A key component of compliance is the need for certification.  Certificates of compliance can be automatically generated on completion of milestones and the certificates are stored in and accessed from the LMS as proof of compliance.  Certificates can be created with an expiry date so that they trigger an alert when refreshed or new training is required to maintain compliance.  You can also use a digital badging system with the LMS to generate a series of awards for reaching certain milestones and encouraging progression through the training program.

• Notifications: The LMS can be configured to generate a series of notifications via email or SMS or through a personalized home screen.  These notifications are used to alert employees that new training is available, that training needs to be started and completed by a certain date or for general or for personal communications connected to compliance.  Notifications can also be used for recommendations for further learning or moving from one level or area of compliance to another.  Notifications form part of a nudging strategy that reinforces positive behavior and support a mindset of self-motivation and responsibility for keeping up to date with compliance training.

• Collaboration: An LMS need not only be about deploying, managing, and tracking learning.  It can also be a tool for learning.  An LMS can be configured to add social media features so it becomes a space for social learning and collaboration.  Users can use their LMS home page to curate their own information, share their knowledge and work and learn with their peers.  Forums and discussion boards facilitate the sharing of information, tips, and experiences from real-life situations from instructors or experienced staff

• Targeted learning: Not everyone needs to be doing the same compliance training at the same time or in the same order.  By using the LMS as the easy-to-access, go-to center of compliance training you allow for separate and targeted learning environments.  This personalized and more focused approach to training acknowledges the diverse needs of your workforce and can be organized by departments or geographies so that everyone gets the compliance information they need and avoids what they don’t.  By allowing learners to pursue their own learning path through compliance you make training more relevant and therefore more impactful.

Giving business an advantage

Using an LMS for compliance training has certain advantages for doing business:

• You’re not reinventing the wheel.  LMSs integrate with existing platforms and programs and can curate content in a variety of formats and from a variety of sources allowing you access to the very latest and best compliance training resources.  Content can be adapted rather than always created from scratch saving your L&D time and money.
• The overall budget benefits from the 24/7 access across locations to training.  An LMS saves time and money in organizing one-off training events that take people away from work. 
• Using an LMS accessible from anywhere imposes structure to training.  Its position at the center of all training aids standardization which is critical in compliance
• The LMS’s reporting and tracking features improve company compliance and build confidence and trust in the organization which enhance competitiveness.
• Cloud-based LMSs keep people in the field and enable remote-working employees to stay compliant.
• The LMS’s learner-centric approach fosters self-motivation, engagement, and responsibility.  This means compliance is more sustainable
• LMS-based training has a wide application and can be used for compliance in all organizations for health and safety, information governance, diversity, codes of conduct and so on.  It’s also suitable for businesses working in specialized and compliance-critical areas such as finance, healthcare and pharma, and the law.

Delivering on the bottom line

Using an LMS for your compliance training goes straight to your organization’s bottom line.  By making compliance sustainable through engaging and effective training and sound learning management an LMS ensures you avoid the risks and penalties of non-compliance and brings the tangible, financial benefits of reduced costs, better performance, talent retention, better brand awareness, improved customer relations and increased competitiveness.

Compliance must become part of normal working practices so you can ensure your business is operating safely and legally. Get in touch to find out how Learning Pool can help you with this process.