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3 Perks of using an LMS for training remote workers

Remote work has never looked more appealing than it does these days. It had been on the rise for some time but current, unprecedented events have made working from home a necessity rather than a trend. It’s probably for the first time in history when employees (especially those who have young children) worry about productivity more than their employers.

It’s clear that home offices will be increasingly popular in the future and that the rise in remote working employees will only go higher. While the logistics for efficiently performing the tasks have been put into place with amazing speed in the face of impending need, there still is one very important aspect to be considered: the way people will learn in these new circumstances.

3 Perks of using an LMS for training remote workers

When the team is scattered in different locations and employees work mainly on their own hours, you need something to mitigate all these differences and ensure continuous learning for your learners.

A business LMS can do just that – overcome all the logistical obstacles and turn them into real opportunities. Here are three perks of using an LMS for training remote employees:

An LMS is great for onboarding

When I started working for a corporation back in 2006, onboarding was done by a specially trained person in the HR department. The Induction Day was filled with so much information and no small amount of enthusiasm that by the end of it one was left with a good feeling and a lot of questions.

Since moving that one person around meant having some costs, the idea was to get as many new employees as possible in one room at one time – that, of course, only drove costs up. Not to mention that there were situations when new hires were ‘introduced’ to the company one or two months after they started working there.

Organizations today have multiple locations spanning across various time zones and even continents. Even with people working from home in the same area, online onboarding works best.


Read more: Exploring the onboarding process


The modern LMS offers great options to tailor an onboarding program for any necessity. New employees will get all the information they need, as well as the possibility to go back and check again if they missed something. For questions during the program, an effective chatbot will surely work.

Onboarding new hires this way is convenient, reliable and very useful at present.

Learning is readily available and easy to track

With people working from home, it would seem more difficult for team leaders and L&D professionals to notice learning gaps, propose training solutions and monitor results. However, just because physical supervision is not possible, it doesn’t mean that the learning needs of the employees won’t’ be as apparent.


Read more: Why L&D should prepare for training global virtual teams


With a learning management system, it’s easy to have regular surveys and quizzes to see both what people are interested in and what skills they need to brush up on. Furthermore, an automized learning system will offer precious data not only concerning the progress of formal courses but also about a lot of the informal learning going on as well.

People can enroll in the recommended programs as well as choose from an available library of modules. This way they will get a sense of autonomy that is very important when it comes to their engagement with the organization.

By using a cloud-based LMS, learning specialists will have no trouble themselves with completing all of their tasks and reaching their goals and KPIs by working from home. Having most of the learning done online by remote participants is actually a great way of bringing everyone together, encouraging experience sharing and collaboration.

Using an LMS promotes effective communication

One of the most frequent jokes I see online these days is about corporate people realizing that a lot of their ‘compulsory’ past meetings could really have just been e-mails. Not even very long ones.

The truth of the matter is that when it comes to classroom training a lot of time was also wasted in unnecessary talk. People have various questions (in my personal experience a lot of those are about breaks, ending times and lunches) and it often happens that the differences in knowledge levels and perspectives leads to long and tedious discussions that are informative only to a small portion of the audience.

Since e-learning is done individually, each participant can select the pace, skip over subjects that are not relevant to them and spend more time on topics of interest. At the end of the module, a lot more information will have passed to the learner and the whole endeavor will feel more useful.

Furthermore, it’s infinitely easier to post updates in online materials and simply inform people to look it up when they have the time and disposition. After all, when someone gets a piece of information just when they need it, they have better chances of remembering it and even applying it right away.

Closing thoughts

The business LMS has evolved from being simply a useful tool for managing organizational learning into an essential corporate commodity. In the context of extended remote work, global teams, and a growing need for brevity, flexibility and efficiency, having a good Learning Management System will make the difference between companies who navigate changes successfully and those who struggle.

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