How can your business reap benefits and increase margins with an LMS? You wouldn’t use an Apple watch just to tell time. An LMS is designed to do more than “check the box” on training. It’s also a powerful platform ready to deliver meaningful, targeted education; engage workers with career development opportunities; and help organizations align organizational goals with employee aspirations.

An LMS can increase ROI by:

1. reduce costs and inefficiencies by streamlining the delivery of learning

2. reduce hiring and turnover costs by retaining high performers

3. increase new hire engagement and productivity by integrating ongoing learning with onboarding

4. drive unified success by aligning employee and organizational goals

5. reduce cost of administering compliance training

Reduce costs and inefficiencies by streamlining learning delivery across the organization.

Companies can use an LMS to efficiently deliver and track new hire training, professional development courses, compliance and leadership training. Learning opportunities can be targeted to engage specific audiences, e.g., high performers, disengaged employees, and succession candidates. An LMS also enables companies to continuously analyze the efficacy of certain 5 Ways to increase ROI on your Learning Management System types of training, key to ongoing improvement in both employee and company performance. Save time by using an LMS to streamline the creation and delivery of learning. Instead of spending hours (or days) managing hundreds of Excel docs, your HR staff can deliver, track, and report on training in minutes. By reducing the time spent on manual processes—and decreasing the likelihood of human error—staff can now focus on more critical HR activities, such as analysis and strategy.

Reduce hiring and turnover costs.

High performing employees (HPEs) can deliver 4x the productivity of average employees. Yet while this productivity makes HPEs valuable, it also means they’re continually recruited by competing companies. An anonymous study of 3,000 employees in multiple industries discovered that 68% of high performers receive new job offers at least once a month—24% receive offers once a week. The secret to keeping your HPEs happy, engaged, and loyal? While compensation and consistent performance reviews are critical factors in retention, top performers also want—and expect—meaningful learning and career development opportunities.

Use an LMS to engage your HPEs in continuous learning with the following tools:

• Create structured leadership and career paths to nurture HPE aspirations and boost retention.

• Provide more meaningful content to inspire ongoing, self-driven learning. Today’s content libraries contain thousands of ready-to-go modules on leadership, soft skills, professional development, and more HPE-targeted courses.

• Enable expanded learning with outside content to encourage HPEs to take advantage of learning opportunities outside of the organization. If your LMS offers an xAPI, you can allow users to receive transcript credit for this training.

• Align HPE learning opportunities with job opportunities to make learning relevant, sticky, and part of chosen career paths.

Increase new hire engagement and productivity.

A slow, inefficient onboarding and new hire training process is costly. On average, companies can expect a loss between 1% and 2.5% of total revenues from unproductive new hire, and it can take between 8-26 weeks for most workers to get up to speed.

A sluggish new hire learning curve doesn’t just hamper productivity. Incomplete, slow, or ineffective onboarding processes also threaten engagement. New hires are most vulnerable in their first few weeks on the job and need tools and resources to help them effectively navigate new responsibilities, foster new relationships, and quickly align with company goals.

An LMS can help engage, motivate, and inspire new hires by facilitating meaningful training and community-building opportunities, even before day one on the job. Create an onboarding/learning welcome module to get them excited about their new responsibilities. Generate enthusiasm for the first week by providing learning paths that help them feel prepared and ready to engage in your culture of continuous learning.

Drive unified success.

In the Harvard Business Review Analytic Services study, “The Impact of Employee Engagement of Performance,” 67% of respondents stated that aligning individual staff goals with company goals was the “most impactful employee engagement driver.” Yet today’s “aligning” isn’t the same as yesterday’s “cascading.” While cascading goals from the top down leaves employees with little freedom of choice, experts now recommend working from bottom up, by asking employees to align individual goals with company ones.

Go beyond merely announcing company goals at all-staff meetings. Instead, make the company’s goals relevant and meaningful by communicating and embedding them within the LMS, via trainings, courses, and professional development opportunities. Then, populate the LMS with meaningful content and career pathing to help employees take the training they need to achieve both individual and company goals.

Reduce cost of compliance training

Like the Apple Watch and an LMS, today’s technology is designed to perform more than one function. What’s the most common justification for implementing a new learning management system (LMS)? To deliver, track, and manage compliance training. And with good reason! An LMS offers a way to administer training at a significantly reduced cost than in-person or on-site training. The amount of time and effort it takes to funnel employees to teacher-lead course or to one of a few devices with training courses installed is astronomical.

User-friendly administrative capabilities are designed to deliver more insight and analytics, making it easier than ever to track and manage compliance. The old paper and spreadsheet method is cumbersome and, more importantly, leaves room for error. And LMS streamlines the process of compliance training in a way that is guaranteed to increase ROI and reduce costs. Why leave money on the table? Increase your margins and drive a more powerful ROI with an LMS by using it to increase retention, increase new hire productivity, , align company goals with employee career aspirations, and complete compliance training.