Article highlights
- Save time and money
- Deliver consistent training to staff
- Simplify your compliance
- Improve employee engagement
- Protect your organization from liability
Training management involves so much more than many people realize. It's not just scheduling training sessions and tracking attendance. Companies require training because of licensing requirements and industry standards, which is how organizations prove compliance and earn accreditation. If staff members fail to renew their licenses or an organization loses its accreditation, the organization itself could suffer to the point of closure or heavy penalties and loss of revenue.
When an organization's very existence depends on its members being licensed and trained on the latest procedures and best practices, training management becomes so much more than scheduling sessions and tracking attendance.
Which is why successful training managers use training management software to keep track of all training events, employee training, and aggregated results. Training management software lets managers and leaders track and analyze data, access training content, and connect with a variety of third-party tools and content.
In this article, we'll discuss the five biggest benefits of using training management software and spell out how and why the digital approach to training management is so much better/faster/easier than using spreadsheets and trying to keep track of content in a variety of locations.
Saves time and money
Imagine this scenario:
Your organization schedules a training session (and hires a trainer) for a new procedure that affects everyone in your organization. There are 600 people in your organization who are required to complete this training. You create a spreadsheet list of all personnel who need this training, and you email all of them, telling them of the time and place for the training.
Once the training is complete, you compile all the attendance sheets, compare it to everyone who missed the training, reschedule a makeup session (with the same trainer), require attendance from everyone who missed it the first time, and repeat the whole process.
Then you add attendance for the make-up training session to the accreditation report. Evaluate the remaining training sessions and repeat the process.
Compare that to this possibility:
You upload a video of a training session for a new policy that affects everyone in your organization. You send out an email notification that the new video is available and everyone needs to watch it and complete a test within six weeks.
As people watch the video and complete the test, their results are recorded in your training management software. With two weeks remaining, you see that one-quarter of the employees have not completed the training, so the system sends out an automatic reminder that everyone needs to complete the training by your specified date. Then, reminders are sent out with one week remaining, five days, three days, etc.
Once the training is complete, you pull up the completion rates on your visual dashboard and see how much closer you are to completing your accreditation training requirements.
The big differences between the first method and the second are the huge savings in time and money:
- No need to juggle schedules to get everyone in the same room at the same time
- No one had to deal with pandemic safety issues
- You didn't have to pay out overtime so people could continue to work their scheduled shifts
- You didn't have to rent a meeting room
- You didn’t have to pay instructors for multiple training sessions and make-up sessions
- Everyone could watch the video at their convenience, including break times and downtime
- Assessments were given online and answers scored and tabulated automatically
- You didn't need to schedule make-up sessions
- Notifications and reminders were sent out automatically
2. Delivers consistent training to staff regardless of shift or location
Another issue with large organizations is ensuring that the training they receive is consistent, if not identical, in the information that gets delivered. If you've ever given any kind of presentation multiple times, you know it's easy to forget something or run out of time before you can complete everything on the agenda. If only you had everyone in the room at one time, you would know they all received identical information at the same time.
But in our multi-session presentation model above, that isn't possible. Too many live sessions make it hard to ensure you're delivering consistent training to your staff.
Again, this is where online training content and testing can make all the difference. If you upload a training video to your training management software, notify employees to watch it, and assign testing, you know they're all engaging with the training content at the same pace and understanding it at the same level. This also helps improve your liability issues, because if there are ever questions about the kinds of training everyone received, and whether it was completed or not, you can demonstrate that everyone had access to the same complete training information and that everyone completed it
Most importantly, even if you run three shifts in your organization or have people working remotely in different time zones, people can watch the training videos anytime and anywhere. They can watch on their work computers, their tablets, or their mobile phones.
And since most training videos will be accessible on a web browser or mobile app, that means they're available to both Windows and Apple users, Android and iPhone, and even Galaxies, iPads, and Kindle Fire tablets.
3. Simplifies your compliance
Maintaining compliance with accreditation and licensing requirements can be a long and arduous process. Depending on the organization and the requirements, you could be looking at a major undertaking that only happens every five years. and involves someone working full-time to make sure it all happens.
Other organizations often have a committee of people who are constantly pulling records, compiling data, and organizing training attendance to ensure that everyone has attended all the appropriate sessions.
With the right training management software, you should be able to map all your training requirements to your accreditation standards so you can do a side-by-side comparison of what has been completed versus what still needs to be finished.
Once the training has been completed, the training management software can update your accreditation software, and you can track your staff's ongoing education and ensure you're meeting all the important accreditation milestones and deadlines.
Your training management software can also notify you and your colleagues when their certifications and licenses are about to expire. You can also receive notifications when they've signed up for the required training and again when they've completed it.
A good training management software solution should also be able to log and store every type of employee training, whether it's watching videos on the training software, attending a conference or seminar and submitting a form afterward, earning CEU credits, or even taking higher education classes. You should be able to track their entire training and education process.
4. Improves employee engagement through regular feedback and surveys
Employees want to feel engaged and appreciated in their work. Unfortunately, the research shows that only 31.5% of employees say they feel engaged, 51% feel "not engaged," and the remaining 17.5% feel "actively disengaged." That's too bad when you consider that companies with highly engaged employees are 21% more profitable than companies with poorly engaged employees.
Not to mention the money lost whenever employees leave. It costs businesses roughly $4,129 to hire a new employee and $986 to onboard them. This means you're losing a roughly $5,100 investment every time an employee leaves and spending that much to replace them.
Education and training are also important. According to CareerBuilder.com, only 37% of employees are satisfied with the training opportunities at their current company. And 58% of workers think their company doesn't offer enough learning opportunities. One way to improve engagement is through training and professional development opportunities.
Even if your organization doesn't require training as a part of any licensing or accreditation process, you can still offer training. And if you do offer accreditation-required training classes, you can still offer additional training that will help your employees learn new skills.
You can even make this extra training available through your training management software, and track its completion. This could be useful information for your employees to have during their evaluations.
Offering regular training sessions can help your staff feel valued, which can increase their motivation, reduce their absenteeism, and increase employee retention organization-wide.
5. Protects your organization from liability and maintains compliance
Some organizations truly work in life-and-death situations, such as healthcare organizations. Other organizations, such as manufacturers and law enforcement organizations, often face lawsuits from people who feel they have been harmed or wrongfully terminated by that particular organization.
We recently wrote about how, in 2019, New York City paid out $175.9 million in civil judgments and claims for NYPD-related lawsuits. In the city of Los Angeles, in FY 2018-19, 43.1% of lawsuits were related to the LAPD.
These lawsuits show why accreditation is so important for law enforcement agencies of all sizes, from the major metropolitan police forces to the departments with fewer than 25 sworn officers. They make up a majority of police departments in the U.S., but fewer than 2% of them are accredited.
As a result, they all carry high liability insurance and have to pay out hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of dollars to settle different lawsuits and legal claims. You can reduce the risk of these kinds of lawsuits by making sure your people have been trained on the latest procedures and best practices related to different medical procedures, manufacturing technology, or new procedures for detention and arrest.
For some organizations, you can actually reduce your liability insurance payments by showing you have a dedicated training program that provides training on important procedures and policies for the appropriate personnel.
Even if you don't choose accreditation, or it's not necessary for your organization, an established training program can help your employees avoid mistakes and errors that can cost millions of dollars. For example, weekly safety training in a manufacturing operation can help reduce the number of on-the-job injuries, as well as workers comp claims and time lost to injuries.
Want to know more?
If you're looking for a training management software solution to help you comply with accreditation, reduce liability, improve employee engagement, simplify your compliance efforts, deliver consistent training, and save you time and money, PowerDMS can help.
