Effective communication between an organization and its employees has been shown to improve productivity, morale, engagement, problem-solving, and safety. Investing in a system that enhances communication can have a comprehensive positive impact on an organization’s efficiency.
The right LMS enhances a business’s communication by using its existing infrastructure, improving the relationship between its admins and employees by using the learning and development materials that match your brand.
Benefits of Effective Communication on Learning and Development
Many organizations mistake frequent communication for effective communication, but frequency alone does not define productive learning. Effective communication not only conveys information but ensures that the information understood by the employee matches the administrator’s intention.
Organizations invested in improving communication should focus on their employees’ engagement with their learning and development materials. In the right learning environment, engagement will lead to collaboration, which encourages consistent productivity in a space that matches the organization’s mission and intended brand culture.
Enhancing Learning and Development with Communication
Effective communication creates a two-way dialogue that enhances a business’s learning and development strategies in many ways, including:
- Allowing learners to share their feedback, which gives them a voice in a time when that is an increasingly significant motivator in employee productivity and retention
- Motivating employees to continue engaging with the organization’s materials, improving their understanding of the brand, its mission, and the specific tasks relevant to their position, including safety procedures
- Helping admins understand and engage with the learning styles of different employees to keep engagement high and misunderstandings low
- Facilitating a continuous learning environment, which allows employees to keep developing new skills while reinforcing their employer’s business goals
An LMS with communication capabilities is a platform that can encourage these benefits by enhancing a business’s existing communication structure with features such as 1-on-1 private chats, course surveys, and custom banners and announcements.
This feature supports learners with a private communication space. This helps employees connect with their course instructors while helping admins choose whether to enable or disable private chat functions on the marketplace.
By giving learners a private communication channel, admins can support shared courses with customers, partners, or other organizations. If the business chooses to enable this function, it would have access to direct two-way communication that facilitates an effective relationship between learners and instructors.
Course surveys provide learners with the ability to leave feedback on their courses. This helps organizations measure the effectiveness of their learning and development programs, conduct enhanced analyses of the results, and identify areas of improvement using real-time data generated by their learners.
An LMS that enables course surveys can provide authoring tools that allow admins to create surveys in different formats for different learning groups, use learner feedback to verify whether the training material is producing the intended impact, and export the survey results to other teams to review them with more detailed analytics.
Custom Banners and Announcements
Custom Banners and Announcements allow administrators to deliver important information with mass updates when 1-on-1 communication is not needed. An announcement system keeps the entire organization up-to-date while allowing custom updates to specific groups if needed.
Announcements that match an organization’s intended vision promote the selected new courses and instructors while maintaining the brand. Features such as a scrollable banner allow admins to send updates with customized headers, sub-headers, and call-to-action buttons within the entire organization at once while tailored messages can target specific workspaces or learner groups with only the information relevant to them.
The Takeaway for Businesses
As Bookboon observes, “Open channels of communication and collaboration between employees inspire new ideas and actively listening to feedback and suggestions both internally and externally from clients or customers, leads to opportunities for innovations and improvements.” An LMS can incorporate effective communication within an organization’s learning and development systems to encourage these opportunities, which are increasingly important metrics for a business’s morale, engagement, and productivity in 2023 and beyond.
