7 Reasons Why You Need a Learning Management System

Every good company needs a good learning management system, or LMS. When you have a large group of employees and you need to manage their training and development, the best approach is through web-based learning.

Why? Glad you asked. Here are the 7 best reasons for launching a learning management system in your business.

1.  Learning Is Done from Anywhere.

You don’t need a classroom, conference room, or boardroom to hold training sessions. You just need the ability to access a training course, class materials, and online agendas. All of this is available within an LMS.

2.  Online Testing Beats Red Ink.

No more grading papers and checking answers. Automated online testing is standard with a web based learning system. Create the testing, report on results, review levels of learning, and include certification where appropriate.

3.  Save Time, Avoid Herding Cats.

An online training and development tool enables broad reaching learning without having to fit large numbers of employees into a tight schedule for classroom training, which can often take enormous amounts of time to prepare, schedule, and complete. Online training with deadlines for completion and automated attendance records lets all of your employees complete the training in a much smaller window of time, without all of the separate work and resources needed to complete the task.

4.  Save Money, Minimize Disruption.

Less human resources needed to complete training means less money spent in getting it done. Virtual classes don’t require overhead, salaries, transportation costs, food and lodging, or time away from job duties. This will save you money while simultaneously speeding your team’s return to productivity.

5.  Customizable Contents Meet Unique Needs.

Customizing courses for different levels in your organization is simple with an LMS, enabling limited access to various tools and requiring prerequisites to access certain classes. It also allows you to create interactive tools with integrated video, audio, text, and images, which all enhance the learning experience. A development tool that’s customizable will make your program more successful by adapting it to the specific needs of your individual employees, your leadership, your teams, and your organization.

6. Employee Retention Rates Climb.

Web learning enables you to impact development and increase opportunities at every level of your organization. Employees who feel like they are getting ongoing training and tools that will help them develop personally and within their job function find more satisfaction in their position than those who don’t. Add to that the sense of independence and autonomy that choosing to learn on your own time and at your own pace gives individuals and you have a tool that not only develops your employees’ learning practices, but also motivates them to excel.

7.  You Get the Best of Both Worlds.

Learning management systems allow you to create courses and learning materials that combine the benefits of personal coaching with the freedom of virtual classrooms. You’re not stuck with the monotony of a classroom environment, nor are your employees stuck staring at static presentations on their screens. When you combine interactive online classes with online interaction between course attendees and trainers, you get higher engagement. Add in online forums for content discussion, and you have a system that is interactive, approachable, and intuitive.

Your company needs the right tool to integrate all of your learning resources to make your training and development program vital, usable, and successful, as well as easy to create, manage, and maintain.

Is it time to consider launching a learning management system from TalentQuest? Click to see what our tools can do for you.

Can using compensation planning software boost your efficiency enough to make next year your most profitable yet?

Does your business have compensation planning software in place? If not, why not? Compensation management can easily be one of the most inefficient functions any company performs. Having the right tools to do the job can not only help improve your compensation program, but can help you build a better business.

Here are 6 benefits you may not have considered:

#1: Get a Virtual Overview of Your Workforce

The right software program gives you a high level view of your workforce, your pay programs, and the performance metrics aligned to them. It can also allow you to zoom in for hyper-detailed views of compensation, right down to the individual. Having this vantage point gives you the ability to identify strengths and weaknesses based on individuals, teams, and overall organizational performance. You can also more effectively evaluate the compensation programs as a whole when it’s all laid out in front of you.

#2: Save Time and Save Money

Manual compensation management is labor intensive and time consuming. Handling manual input of individuals, teams, organizations, and performance metrics, and tracking them along with pay scales, incentives, and bonuses on some gigantic set of spreadsheets is hugely inefficient. Not only that, but the time it takes to manually distribute either hard copies or electronic copies to the right individuals, and ensure they have the most updated version, is an enormous waste of resources.

Performing all of these functions using powerful software will help you balance the workload for your payroll team by integrating compensation with the rest of your talent management tasks. Taking the extra hours spent laboring over compensation documents and putting them back into productive time for your talent management team will save your business money.

#3: Beef Up Error Prevention

Passing a spreadsheet around to managers in medium to large companies is a sure way to get errors. Checking them and re-checking them again is another waste of time and resources. Even if the compensation information is managed at one point of contact, the opportunity for error is great. Software reduces, if not eliminates, these errors in inputting and managing information.

#4: Maintain Confidentiality

Email chains are bound to get misrouted, hard copies of spreadsheets often get left out in the open, and passing information around from manager to manager allows for access to information that should be kept confidential.

Most companies have firm policies about sharing financial and compensation information between employees. Take that risk out of the picture with software that is password protected, granting access and visibility at different levels depending on title and position.

#5: Track Your Pay Programs, Instantly

Not only can you get a high level view of your employees performance and compensation planswith compensation software, but you also get a high level or detailed level view of all of your pay programs. Keep track of merit pay, bonuses, incentives, stock programs, and commissions with one easy to track system.

#6: Boost Employee Retention

Integrating your talent management functions with your compensation management creates transparency into systems, plans, and policies for leadership and employees. It also allows greater alignment between pay and performance, reducing pay discrepancies and making for a more even playing field for all employees, including leadership.

Building your business means embracing the best tools to help you run your business effectively and efficiently. Reducing errors, saving time and money, and creating a compensation process that functions to improve performance and pay packages and how they work together is critical to your long-term success.

Don’t wait to incorporate the right program for your organizations.

Click to take a look at the compensation planning software TalentQuest has to help you build your business.

Who Benefits From Performance Management Software?

If you are in HR, your budget is probably pretty restrictive. You may have a difficult time convincing decision-makers in your company that performance management software is a worthwhile investment. After all, your organization has survived this long with its existing procedures and forms. Why not simply continue with business as usual? The fact is that business as usual isn’t good enough in today’s marketplace. Your organization needs to make its business exceptional.

Can Software Really Make a Difference?

Implementing new technology isn’t just about making administrative tasks easier for HR (although it certainly does that). Performance management software by organizations like TalentQuest actually makes business success easier for your whole company. Here’s a quick look at how each stakeholder group can benefit from an upgrade:

Business Leaders and C-suite Executives – Performance goals can finally be aligned with business goals. Advanced reporting functionality provides a “big picture” view of improvements that are tied to profit outcomes.

Managers and Supervisors – Software tools guide the performance management process, giving it structure and making easier to engage with workers in a consistent way. This boosts motivation and engagement. High performers are rewarded while low performers can be effectively course-corrected.

Employees – Workers have less confusion about expectations and see a clear path to achieving their career objectives. Individualized development plans make employees feel that their contributions and value are recognized.

One additional group that can benefit from the right performance management software choice is IT. An SaaS solution with cloud-based deployment ensures maximum application availability while relieving internal tech teams of the responsibility for administering and maintaining complex HR software.

Talent Management Meets Compensation Management

One of the most important questions on the mind of employees as they go through a much anticipated review process is, “How does this affect my compensation?” That’s a question that many managers struggle to answer if they don’t have the tools that encourage fair and consistent decision-making. Do you increase pay across the board to offset inflation? Do you boost salaries based on tenure? How about performance? Which aspects of performance are weighed in this decision? Do you have a limited budget for compensation that you need to apportion among multiple employees?

The TalentQuest compensation management and talent management software products are designed to work seamlessly together to improve decision-making. Employers can track and measure total compensation increases for each department. Managers can drill down to view compensation information for direct reports at a granular level. Plus, the reporting and analysis functions make it easier to spot discrepancies in pay including:

• Pay raises that don’t track with agreed metrics for salary increases
• Employees who have been passed over for an increase in error
• Trends that indicate an imbalance in compensation practices (e.g. based on gender)

Since this is the aspect of talent management that often comes under the most scrutiny from above and below, it pays to get it right.

Who Should Be in the Loop for Succession Planning?

Succession planning is one of the trickier aspects of management in a large organization. The amount of backstabbing that sometimes goes on when a promotion is on the line can be pretty horrifying. There’s always going to be speculation over who deserves what at work. Even more pernicious is the gossip about who did what to whom to get where they are today. Many a hardworking (but not outstanding) employee has gone from being satisfied with their job to being totally disengaged when they are passed over for advancement. Many a rising star has fallen short when promoted beyond their current level of competence due to an unexpected opening higher up the ladder.

With all this in mind, it can pay to play it fairly close to the vest when it comes to revealing the details of your succession planning strategy to employees. You don’t want to feed into speculation or have an employee think there is an implied contract regarding their career path within your organization. There’s usually no upside to pitting one employee against another if you want to bring out the best rather than the worst in your workforce.

On the other hand, it’s smart to be open about the general competencies and character traits that you are looking for in promotable employees. Confusion and disappointment abound among the rank and file when the determining factors behind succession decisions are too opaque. Some employees take it as a given that they will be taking their boss’s place one day based on any variety of factors from length of tenure to personal friendship. Making it clear that favoritism plays no role in your promotion planning process is critical for minimizing hurt feelings and bitterness.

Using Talent Management Software Effectively Part 1

Talent management software is a hugely beneficial tool for gathering and presenting information that helps inform hiring and promotion decisions. However, it’s important to understand the purpose and appropriate use of this type of program so it is used as a tool rather than a crutch. This is particularly relevant when you are developing a profile of an employee. This initial assessment of personality traits and abilities may follow them through the rest of their professional career (at least within your company). That’s a sobering thought and one reason to make sure you fully understand how to interpret the data in front of you.

A Poor Understanding of Statistics Is a Common Pitfall

Mark Twain is famous for saying, “There are 3 kinds of lies: Lies, damn lies, and statistics!” Too often, statistics can confuse more than they clarify. While it’s easy to understand visually what percentile a job candidate or employee falls into on a graph, it takes wisdom gained through experience to assess the underlying relevance of each score.

For example, it’s best to avoid being obsessively concerned about one “key trait” or a close to “perfect score” when evaluating an employee for advancement in alignment with your succession planning goals. It’s more appropriate to evaluate several related traits that build a more accurate overall picture of a candidate. Ideally, your talent management software will help you do this more easily rather than doing it for you.

If the score on one trait or competency seems higher or lower than it should, you need to look beyond the computer screen. Follow up with in-person interviews, behavioral observation and other good old-fashioned investigative techniques to get a feel for what’s really going on. After all, you want an employee who works well in real life – not just one who looks good on paper!

Are Your Performance Appraisals Overdue

Do you ever get behind on completing performance appraisals for your employees? Do you feel bad when you log in to your performance management software application and see all those “past due” notifications. You should feel a little guilty for letting these important due dates slip by. Missed appraisal dates can create tension in your department.

• Some employees may be biting their nails in dread, just wanting the process to be over. Ironically, these are often your most conscientious workers who take constructive criticism very personally. They’ll breathe a big sigh of relief when the appraisal period is over and they can count up all their coveted “Outstanding” ratings.

• Other employees may be planning how their expected pay bump will affect their budget. They need to know if they’ve qualified for a merit increase so they can make financial decisions. Worst case scenario, they’re mentally (or literally) spending money that they don’t have – and they’ll blame you if it doesn’t materialize.

• Still another group of employees may be plodding along, assuming their performance is fine when they actually need to kick it up a notch. They’ll feel blindsided when you finally get around to doing the appraisal. If there was such a big problem with their performance, why didn’t you make it a priority to address it sooner?

The #1 reason to do performance appraisals on time is that it shows your employees that their performance matters to you and to the organization as a whole. So, why not get started on that backlog of reviews today?