Your frontline employees are your competitive edge.
They’re your first impression on your customers, and they’re your brand champions. That’s why enabling them to master their core competencies and reach their full potential is one of the most important things you can do as a manager to advance your business.
Helping them reach their full potential and upskilling isn’t exactly easy. If it were, everyone would do it. But they don’t. And that means an opportunity to get ahead of the competition for managers who are willing to try an innovative and highly effective approach.
We need to talk about the LMS
Learning management systems emerged in the 90s, just as personal computers started to appear in the workplace. The PCs of the 90s were cumbersome unwieldy things, and the learning process built around them is the same. You go to the intranet, log-on to the system, and conduct the training.
That might work for employees who sit behind a desk most of the day but for frontline employees it’s a totally different story. They’re almost always on-the-go, mobile first, and reading a long email, PowerPoint, or Google Doc just isn’t their style.
Also, LMSs are expensive! With set up fees at ~$25,000 and licensing fees at $20,000 per module an LMS can really break the bank.¹ Additionally, most LMSs require managers to hire external vendors to produce the training content that employees ultimately use. And, as we’ve previously noted these materials tend to be low engagement formats that struggle to hold employee’s attention let alone teach them something valuable.
So let’s see why LMSs aren’t meeting the needs of stakeholders across the organization and let’s see what we can do about it.
- Employees have limited access to legacy systems due to deskless nature of work: only 13% visit intranet
- Old systems focus on low-engagement formats which are not mobile friendly (pptx., docx., pdf)
- And for those learning management systems which have adapted for mobile, 2/3 of employees are reluctant to install organizational apps which aren’t directly related to their job scope
On the whole, it’s clear that learning management systems aren’t well suited to the needs of the modern frontline worker. Additionally with the challenge of Covid-19, it’s hard to gather frontline employees on-site to conduct training through the intranet.
Many times LMSs are also not well adapted to the needs of the managers who use them. Some don’t even have a dashboard for managers to track progress and identify knowledge gaps.
So what can you do?
If you are looking to replace your LMS, Bites has created an innovative solution for how to deal with this challenge.
Bites enables you to easily create professional training materials quickly and easily, and share it with your employees via the instant messaging channels they are already using e.g. (MS Teams, WhatsApp, SMS etc.).
This has been found to be a highly effective approach as employees can use the platforms they’re already using on a daily basis to integrate their professional training. Additionally, Bites’ creator app enables managers to create professional units which make up a complete learning cycle for frontline employees, including short videos which are proven to be the most engaging format for mobile employees.
Let’s see how Bites compares to the LMS side by side.
Bites brings a new user experience which meets the needs of both managers and frontline employees. As different as this set of needs are, any training and onboarding solution needs to meet both.
If you’re interested to learn more about how Bites can save you time and money on training all while improving real outcomes, then book a demo here: https://mybites.io.
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