If you want to keep your business growing and thriving, training and development is an obvious solution. But what can you do when your workforce is geographically dispersed? What are your options when your organisation operates in all four corners of the world, or your salespeople live and work in different parts of the country (or continent!)?
Online Learning to the Rescue!
Online learning has a clear advantage in situations like this – you’re able to roll out training and development programmes to all employees at once, no matter where they are based. The New York office can commence their training at the same time (bearing in mind timezones!) as the Australian workforce and the London division. There are no constraints. Compare this to real-world training and imagine the difficulty (and cost!) involved in flying everyone over to one location, or repeating the training days at different locations around the world. It makes us shaky just thinking about it!
But, of course, it’s not as simple as signing all your employees up to their new Learning Management System (LMS) and then setting them free. You may not want to the France team to see what the German team is up to, or maybe you want to segment the European offices from the American offices.
You Need Next Gen
With the Academy LMS, it’s easy as pie to slice up your employees and serve them just what they need access to. Learners can be arranged in groups depending on their language, department, country or role – ensuring that the right content is being delivered to the right people. It makes sense, right?
You might also be worried about how you’ll get your employees to actually log onto their LMS. If there’s no one monitoring them, how can you be sure they’ll go on, take their eLearning courses and improve their skills and knowledge? It’s a valid concern: after all, eLearning has a pretty awful reputation of being more boring than a 3-hour queue at the post office.
Luckily, we have a bit of extra power up our sleeves that makes sure employees are engaged with their learning: gamification. Gamification on Learning Management Systems involves using points, badges, achievements, levels and leaderboards to get learners excited and motivated about their learning. They’ll want to take courses and interact with their Academy LMS in order to gain badges and climb the leaderboard.
Speaking Your Language
So we’ve seen that it’s possible to save money and effort by training your geographically-dispersed workforce – and also that it is most definitely possible to keep them all motivated and engaged with their online learning. But what about one of the main issues of international businesses: language barriers?
Organising training when your employees are dotted all over the world is difficult enough – but when your employees all speak different languages, rolling out eLearning becomes even more challenging! You might be wondering whether you need to purchase different LMSs for each language, or whether all employees will have to access the same language, despite the issues with comprehension this might incur.
Luckily, we recognise the importance of making products accessible to all employees (we have offices scattered around the globe ourselves!), so we’ve made sure the Academy LMS is available in a number of languages, including French, German, Dutch, Spanish and Italian, and we’re adding new languages all the time. In fact, if there’s a standard language you need that we don’t currently support, we’re happy to work on adding it.
And what’s even better is that learners can select their own language, so Academy Admins don’t have to work out which language is right for each person! An Admin simply chooses the default language, and learners can then change to any of our predefined languages themselves.
Final Word
Making sure online learning is accessible to everyone in your organisation, no matter their location or language, is vital in rolling out a truly successful online training plan and securing a great return on investment.
Get all the tips for successfully launching your new LMS by downloading our free white paper!
