How E-Learning Can Positively Impact Your Organisation’s Growth Strategy
Whether it is training on products, processes, compliance topics, or skills, e-learning does more than make the training function in your business more efficient and cost-effective. Training efficiency and effectiveness are important, of course, but E-learning can also help your organisation’s growth strategy.
It does this by providing your team with the skills, knowledge, and support they need to deliver on expectations, exceed targets, and achieve objectives.
Here are the main areas where e-learning can help drive business growth, particularly in competitive markets.
Improves the Recruitment Process
Having an effective recruitment process has never been more important than it is today. This especially applies to industries in Saudi Arabia and the UAE where there are skills shortages.
Finding the right people to fill vacancies is important, but it is also essential to hold onto those people during the onboarding process and in the early weeks and months of their employment. Therefore, you need an efficient and consistent onboarding process.
The realities of business make this challenging, however. The onboarding experience will be different in different locations, and there can even be differences within the same location.
As a result, some people will have a good onboarding experience while others might not. Those that don’t have a good experience can end up feeling lost, frustrated, unsupported, and unsure of expectations. This can lead to them deciding the job isn’t for them, setting back your recruitment strategy.
Incorporating e-learning elements into your onboarding process will significantly improve the experience for everyone joining your company. E-learning ensures consistency while also making sure new employees have the information and access to support they need.
This will help ensure the talent you recruit stays with your company in those crucial early stages.
Helps to Retain Talent
E-learning can also help you keep existing talent. It does this by providing current employees with opportunities to grow, develop, and improve. This helps to prevent employees from falling into a rut or feeling like they are not reaching their full potential.
E-learning also empowers employees and gives them more control over their professional development. This will also help you keep the talent you need to achieve your organisation’s growth targets and objectives.
Raises Overall Standards
Increasing customer demands, high levels of competition, dealing with industry disruption, and taking advantage of the benefits offered by digital transformation, are just some of the realities of modern business. Get them right, and your organisation will grow and thrive. Get them wrong, though, and you will struggle even to maintain your current position.
Raising standards across your entire business is essential in each of the areas above. Take the last one as an example – digital transformation. Digital transformation will make your business more productive and efficient, but it involves changing processes and doing things differently.
Some tasks will become non-existent, while new requirements will arise. Providing e-learning content to your team will ensure your company has the skills it needs, when it needs them.
We are not just talking about hard skills, either, as e-learning is very effective at enhancing soft skills.
Improves Productivity
There are many ways that e-learning can enhance productivity in your business, not least by ensuring each member of your team has the skills they need to properly do the job. E-learning can also make sure they are performing tasks effectively and efficiently, and it can help to reduce error rates.
Reduces Exposure to Risk
Your business has to comply with health and safety legislation as well as other laws and regulations that apply to your industry.
Training is a key part of compliance to ensure you meet the standards required by regulators.
Effective training, however, offers something more. It can help reduce risks in your business by ensuring your team fully understands and follows the processes and procedures you have put in place.
Improves Customer Services
It is very difficult to achieve growth in business when you don’t provide a good service to your customers. Therefore, improving standards of customer service is always important.
It’s even more important if you have competitors who are strong on the customer service front.
E-learning is a powerful way of raising customer service standards. For example, you can create e-learning courses with highly relevant, detailed, and realistic branching scenarios that put customer-facing employees in challenging situations, teaching them how to deal with the issue.
Breaks Knowledge Out of Content Silos
It is a common occurrence in organisations to have individuals with detailed knowledge and experience in their subject area. When there is a requirement for that skill or knowledge, the main subject matter expert is called on.
This is okay when everything runs smoothly, but what if the main subject matter expert leaves, retires, or gets sick? What if they are operating at full capacity and can’t do more than they are currently doing? All these things can limit the growth potential of your business.
A viable solution to the above option is to spread skills and knowledge in your organisation more widely, so there are others you can fall back on when required. E-learning fits perfectly with this knowledge-sharing approach to information, experience, and skills.
The Bottom Line
Most discussions around the benefits of e-learning focus on how you can save time and money by moving elements of classroom-based training online. The main benefit is an improved return on investment for your training strategy.
Of course, maximising return on investment is something we all strive for.
The positive impacts of e-learning go much further than getting bang-for-your-buck from the training function in your business. Specifically, e-learning can significantly contribute to your company’s growth strategy.
