HR specialists face multiple challenges daily, from recruiting new employees (and ensuring they stay) to providing corporate training that the staff doesn’t look forward to. Besides, many HR issues need to be resolved to enhance a company’s internal processes and increase employee productivity. With so much going on, some tasks don’t get the attention they deserve, and some goals remain unachieved. Luckily, some issues have solutions.
HR Issues and eLearning Software Solutions
In this article, we will examine those matters that you can resolve with eLearning, namely employee turnover, obligatory corporate training, lack of time, and identifying true competencies.
Issue 1: Employee turnover
Recruiting new employees is an essential part of any company’s dynamic. According to the Society for Human Resource Management, the average cost of hiring a new employee is $4,129 [1]. When a business invests this amount of money, it expects to get a return on its investment – a hardworking specialist who handles the tasks they’ve been assigned. But the 2021 U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics report states that 57.3% of new employees leave their job.
Let’s say you have ten new hires, and the company has invested around $40,000 to hire them. Roughly $23,000 will eventually have been spent in vain. While there’s hardly a way to eliminate turnover, you can reduce it significantly.
Solution: Continuous learning can help you increase employee retention. But please notice that this doesn’t necessarily apply to face-to-face corporate training, because such a training approach increases employee retention only by 10% [2]. However, eLearning (online corporate training delivered by a learning management system (LMS)) can reduce employee turnover by up to 60% [2].
Issue 2: Mandatory corporate training
This issue might seem to contradict the previous statement of the great benefit that continuous learning provides. But there’s actually no inconsistency here. The keyword here is “mandatory.” If you’ve been in the HR field long enough, you must have faced the sad reality that many employees aren’t exactly fans of training. This is especially true when talking about formal training programs, such as fire safety, compliance, and sexual harassment prevention training.
People rarely find interest in such topics and either complete the programs without really diving into the new knowledge (at best) or ignore them entirely. As a result, the staff members don’t gain the needed knowledge and skills, which could lead to many consequences, including those which are least desirable.
Solution: You can’t change the fact that not following the fire safety rules can lead to dangerous consequences. Therefore, you can’t realistically cancel training programs that bore employees and/or oppose corporate training overall. What you can do, however, is deliver the needed information in an engaging manner.
Authoring tools, like iSpring Suite, offer numerous ways to involve trainees, from short video lectures to dialogue simulations. You can upload eLearning content to an LMS to provide employees with access to online courses at any time. An LMS can make the training process more competitive. iSpring Learn, for example, can gamify the training process by awarding points and badges to trainees for their progress and showing their status on the leaderboard. This approach can help you motivate your trainees and transition corporate training from a formal obligation into an entertaining activity.
Issue 3: Lack of time
Lack of time is a common issue for most people, and HR specialists are no exception. There are some time-consuming routine tasks, such as notifying trainees, preparing certificates of completion, and grading their results. While these are undoubtedly important, they don’t need much human involvement anymore. Think of it as washing dishes. Sure, plates need to be clean, but you don’t have to wash them yourself when you have a dishwasher.
Solution: As the name suggests, a learning management system helps you with training management processes. An LMS can notify trainees about new courses they’ve been assigned and due dates to complete them. It automatically collects all the results from tests and provides you with reports on trainee progress. It can also automatically send certificates to trainees once they’ve completed a training course. In other words, an LMS can do the routine work for you, so you can focus on more critical issues.
Issue 4: Identifying true competencies
When your job is to make sure employees get better at their job and overall working processes improve, it’s essential to know what competencies employees have at the moment. In the old days, an HR specialist would ask supervisors to get this information. Some companies still use this approach. Its significant limitation is the subjectivity of the data.
When you have only one viewpoing, you can’t be sure the data is correct, and you therefore don’t know the actual competencies of workers. A more progressive approach is 360-degree feedback. This approach gives multiple perspectives on an employee’s performance but is quite challenging to use and requires a lot of time.
Solution: You don’t have to meet each interviewee face to face to receive their feedback. Some tools allow you to do this faster and easier. For example, iSpring Learn enables you to launch 360-degree assessments online. Employees complete a survey to share their perspectives on colleagues’ skills, and as a result, you get an objective image of each employee’s actual competencies.
Unlike the traditional method, you don’t have to spend your and employees’ time and effort analyzing all the feedback manually — that’s a machine’s work. In this way, you can focus on the tasks that require more human involvement, such as preparing the right questions and developing ways to enhance trainees’ skills and knowledge.
To Sum Up
A fast-changing and developing world brings many new challenges for HR professionals. Luckily, it offers solutions too. eLearning software can automate most training management processes, turn formal educational materials into engaging training content, and provide 24/7 access to them, increasing employee involvement in corporate training. In other words, eLearning software can help HR specialists make their work much easier and achieve much higher results.
About iSpring Solutions
iSpring Solutions is one of the top international eLearning companies. For over 20 years, iSpring has produced many award-winning software products, including iSpring Learn, one of the best LMSs on the market according to eLearning Industry and Training Industry.
Contact us to know more about how iSpring Learn can meet your particular needs.