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There are a lot of learning management systems out there, and it can be difficult choosing the right one for you.  The difficult thing is, really, most of them have all the same features, but only differentiate themselves through targeting a specific market.  Unfortunately, that means a company can end up with anywhere from three to six different learning management systems, complicating the company’s licensing management.  

Company policy should always be to simplify your platforms.  Use what you can for as many applications as possible before you invest in something new, and be willing to change platforms when your needs evolve.  Your LMS needs change as your company grows, so a good investment at the beginning will keep up with your internal, partner, and customer training needs while preparing you for a more enterprise solution in the future.  

Your goal with Learning Management should be to simplify and consolidate as much as possible

Primary Learning Management Needs

The primary use of a Learning Management System is to

• Provide a central repository for all training content for knowledge transfer
• Record completed training for future reference
• Track quiz/exam results as proof of learned concepts

Now, there are a lot of features that help you build, share, and record training sessions, as well as features that will help engage learners in their training that appeal to specific departments or teams, but the end goal is to keep a central repository can be realized by just about every LMS out there.  The real concern you should have is how much LMS you need to get for the size of your organization, and when you should consider migrating/upgrading your LMS.  

Primary LMS Considerations

When you look for an LMS, it’s not about the features, it’s about whether or not you are going to cover your primary target audience correctly, and simplify your platform.  Learning features are fun and exciting, though here’s a little secret:  people can and will learn best if they have the information they need and can get to it quickly.  Fancy features, testing types, etc. only add a “wow” factor for those who go through the content.  

NOTE:  Learning is different than engagement.  Learning is absorbing and internalizing knowledge for application, engagement is making the process more fun.  Engagement can be accomplished in simple forms and does not necessarily need fancy software or tools to accomplish.  If your training content has a good story, the engagement happens naturally.  

ADDITIONAL NOTE:  Of course, for those who process information differently, engagement can mean catering to a learning style, in which case multiple methods are ideal (i.e., written content, videos, audio clips, etc.). Still, a good story can lead to better engagement in these different mediums without fancy software.  Be smart in how you execute, and any LMS will suit your needs.  

Features You Need

Here’s a list of recommended features for any LMS to be successful for every use, regardless of the department:

1. SCORM Compatibility:  Your LMS will need to be able to contain SCORM files.  This will allow you to use pre-made modules from contractors, licensed content from Large Learning Libraries, and so on. 
   1. Compliance training will use this
   2. Many contractors build content in 3rd party software like Articulate or Adapt, which output in SCORM files
   3. Large learning libraries will allow the use of their SCORM training files for annual compliance training (ethics, sexual harassment, etc)
2. Video Submission/Recording:  The ability to submit a video recording for evaluation will be invaluable to your Sales and Customer Success teams.  Fortunately, just about every LMS out there supports this type of submission, either as a file or as a link from Zoom.  Some LMS features that target Sales teams directly have fancy features around this (notes at video timings, etc) but these are not required for the goal of evaluating a presentation from a team member, and not worth having an additional LMS for this one feature.  
   1. Sales teams will use this method to test Pitch readiness
   2. Customer Success Managers use it for the same thing
3. WYSIWYG Course Creation:  Not every course or module will be created and delivered through third-party software, and often it’s easier to jump in and get the course done than paying for additional tools.  While standard HTML course content will often not have the same flashy presentation styles as SCORM tools will, the training can be just as engaging as long as there is a good story.  You will also have a lot of standard HTML capabilities, such as formatting, embedding images and videos, and some interactive links to documents for additional reference.  Don’t be fooled by the allure of fancy features:  people can learn just as well with a good video and a transcript.  
4. Live Training Management:  A good LMS worth its salt will be able to manage live training sessions.  This means managing instructors, calendars, schedules, etc.  Fortunately, just about every LMS out there, even free, WordPress LMS systems, do this.  
5. Cater to Internal and Customer Training:  This is often the clincher when it comes to features.  You may have the top-of-the-market, in-demand, and popular LMS for a specific department, but it doesn’t cater to Customer training.  Or, you might have an excellent Customer training platform but it doesn’t allow for internal training sessions.  If your LMS can’t do both with reasonable licensing, then find another LMS.  

The Nice to Haves

If I were building my own LMS, or looking for an LMS to grow with my business, here are the features that I would love to see but could live without until they were needed.

1. Integration with a Knowledge Base:  This seems so simple, and yet it is so incredibly foreign.  LMS systems are built for training, Knowledge Management systems are built for documentation, and they can only be connected through URLs that are hard-coded and difficult to maintain.  Both are knowledge containment systems, and both provide information, yet they have to be separate.  It’s mind-numbing to me, but that’s the reality of most systems.  Integrate them somehow, and make the content from both searchable.  
2. AI-Generated Learning Paths:  Learning paths are incredibly time-consuming to build, particularly when you are building them for every persona in the company and beyond.  AI, on the other hand, can quickly build out learning paths based on training content, skills being taught, and skills needed for your roles.  With a good skills analysis (which you should do for every role for which you hire if you want to hire the right people), AI can make an onboarding and continuing education program that will have them growing within their role immediately.  Forget GenAI for content creation, analytical AI for learning path creation is the killer AI app for the L&D team!  
3. Social Learning:  Allowing experts and SMEs to share their knowledge with the wider team through the LMS is invaluable.  Quick videos, AI-generated transcripts, and uploading step-by-step instructions to complete tasks/subtasks will make all the difference for your company, and your community.  

Final Words

Your business is only as successful as your people, and your people are only as successful as the knowledge, skills, and attitudes they have will allow.  Developing your people should be a priority, regardless if you are a stealth startup of one or a multi-national conglomerate of over 500,000 employees.  Your investment in your people will have a massive impact.

Your choice of an LMS, and more importantly, your choice to simplify your LMS landscape, will make a difference.  I know it seems odd to say this, but investing in one good global LMS will be better and more responsible to the business than investing in several excellent, but siloed, LMS platforms that increase management and regulatory compliance problems.  

For the business and your people, make your single LMS investment a good one.  

Optimize Your Learning Experience

• Pick one learning platform that works for everyone, and stick with it
• Set up collaboration events between specialized teams to discuss and share learning content
• Reuse content that can be reused, modify content if needed.
• Avoid silos: they drain resources and team agility

Have You Optimized Your Knowledge Share?

How Fragmented Is Your Knowledge?

At just about every mature company I’ve worked in, there have been at least 3 major training teams, with 3 different platforms for training.  

• HR general onboarding is usually done through the HR app, and used for both general onboarding and compliance training
• Sales onboarding and enablement are done through a separate environment because of the need for constant training development for new and updated products, competitive discussion points, and certification on new presentations (usually submitting recordings for evaluation)
• Customer onboarding and enablement are done with a customer-facing training platform, sometimes paired with a knowledge base and community for discussion.  

You may have others in your company, depending on leadership needs, how centralized training and onboarding teams are, and whether or not you have a leadership structure dedicated to training and enablement within your organization. 

Fragmentation Is Inefficient and Expensive

Fragmented systems without a supporting structure are greatly inefficient and economically unstable.  Work is often duplicated, training content is largely the same, and yet multiple teams are developing, polishing, and publishing the content to their respective base.  On top of that, there’s the administration of those platforms.  It’s difficult, inefficient, and often the result of new organizations bringing in experienced leaders who are often only comfortable with one platform.  This leads to technical debt and employee headcount to manage the technical debt.  

Centralizing Training Is Also Risky

What if you were to centralize around one platform, one team, and have them develop all the training content for everyone?  On paper, this looks ideal, but in practice it’s impractical.  Every organization that requires training has specific needs, often requiring specialized, audience-specific training that requires specific skills—centralizing your training teams into one single team that caters to everyone runs afoul of the value of specialization.  It’s not enough, even though the economics make it attractive.  You need to think in a different direction.  

 

Centralized Platform, Decentralized Development

When looking at the viability of a Shared Services Model within a company, Marijn Janssen at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands identified a clear pattern emerging:  there was a need for some decentralization within those services, and the structure needed to accommodate both centralized and decentralized components (Janssen, 2005).  In other words, a centralized platform for services that can accommodate the decentralized nature of your services is the best method of managing a shared services-style training program.  So what does that look like in practice?

One Platform, Many Uses

Not every LMS is going to be able to manage this type of work, because they are built with the needs of one silo in mind.  Why?  Well, back in the day when Learning Management Systems were new and online learning was spoken of with mocking laughter, platforms were generally home-grown and built to solve one problem.  If you were a University, the LMS would be built to deliver courses over several weeks, each gated to release at the necessary week, and past-due content was locked.  If you were a corporation, the initial need was compliance training.  Sales found it more efficient and scalable to publish Sales Training through an online LMS and evaluate presentations asynchronously through recorded and uploaded videos.  Finally, corporate customer training was built to track completion and, as gamification was built and (initially) misunderstood, provide a badge on completion.  

The point is, that each specific need was met with a specific set of requirements, and those requirements were met by a specific LMS.  Eventually, you would get some bleeding over as learning management systems tried to cater to new markets, but that bleed-over was often half-hearted at best.  Fundamentally, they would remain true to their original purpose while providing some under-developed services that cater to potential new markets.  

Enter AI And The Hype

Since the announcement of AI, there has been a lot of scrambling by existing LMS platforms to figure out how they are going to utilize it.  The majority of them, from what I could tell at Devlearn, applied AI in two ways: 

• Generative AI to evaluate or rewrite content as it was being added to the platform.  While this seems great at first, it is easily ignored (perhaps saving the LMS money) and doesn’t apply to those companies that develop training using SCORM systems.  While Generative AI has its place, it’s not going to replace real development.  
• Generative AI for translation/video/Avatar creation was all over the place at Devlearn, and that was fascinating. Video is expensive, and translation is even more so.  AI has done some amazing things with translation in the last few years, with fewer grammatical errors.  AI video and AI avatars are still early, in my opinion, making it obvious that the AI is speaking (because words are often mispronounced) and avatars only moving their mouths, making it somewhat creepy (again, my opinion).  Still, there’s some interesting stuff here.  

What’s missing from most of these LMS systems is the analysis that AI can do, as well as some structural development.  There I only found one platform that looks like it could handle it all:  Fuse Universal.  

Siloed training programs are an economic drain on any organization.

Based on the social learning updated, knowledge documents assigned to the team, and already assigned training, the AI can create a learning path for every role.

Centralize Your Learning Using Fuse

Fuse Universal impressed me.  They unify the Learning Management System, the Knowledge Base, and the Learning Experience Platform into one AI-driven platform that not only tracks learning but provides learning on demand when you need it.  Experienced learners can share their knowledge through social learning, meaning teams can share tribal knowledge without having to post it to the L&D team, get manager sign-off, and wait 6 months for content to be available.  

The killer feature that impressed me the most:  AI-generated learning paths for every role within your company.  If you are in HR, this is your killer feature.  When going through my MBA, it was understood that HR should have skills analysis for every role in the company so they can

1. Hire people with the right skills needed for the role
2. Train people through employee onboarding systems that teach all skills, so all bases are covered

I’ve worked at a few organizations where they tried to do this (eBay comes to mind immediately), but not many.  Most HR departments have team managers write up their skills requirements (because managers are skilled at skills analysis, I suppose), and leave it to the hiring team (silo) to do their onboarding and training.  Hiring teams then struggle to complete this, because they generally lack the expertise and resources to accomplish these tasks.  

AI Skills Analysis And Learning Paths:  The Killer Feature!

Enter Fuse Universal’s AI analysis feature:  Based on the social learning uploaded, knowledge documents assigned to the team, and already assigned training, the AI can create a learning path for every role.  Think about that for a second.  Every role in your company will have a learning path.  That means every employee looking to advance into a different role has a development path to follow.  Every struggling employee has a development path to help them refine their skills.  And no one had to run a skills analysis.  AI took care of all of it.  

 There are several other reasons why you would want to use Fuse as your learning platform of choice, as it can cater to all your typical silos (Onboarding, Compliance, Sales, Customer Enablement, etc).  If you haven’t heard of them before, check them out.  If you have heard of them before but are not using them, reevaluate that decision.  

Collaboration Events

The centralized platform provides the structure and stability for your learning development teams, but that’s just the foundation.  You will need to move into a polycentralized organization or an organization that has multiple collaborating teams that specialize in their respective fields, yet work with the same centralized content.  This will require collaboration events.  An example of this would be new product launch prep meetings:  different development teams will work together in their relative spheres of expertise, but share the content.  

• The Product Development team would provide the technical documentation and expertise to make sure all training content is correct, relevant, and accurate.  
• The Product Marketing team takes that content and provides customer talking points, marketing guidance, and messaging to be shared with customers by internal teams.
• The Sales Enablement will take the content from the Development and marketing teams to put together the sales campaign training and enablement, shared with both Sales and Customer Success teams.
• Learning and Development works with all teams to create similar content (reusing what they can from Sales) and conducts internal training for
  • Support
  • Professional Services
  • Employee product onboarding
  • Customer onboarding and enablement

The content may not differ much, just enough to make a difference in the structure and audience.  Specialist development teams are invaluable for your organizations, and collaboration can cut down time-to-value on training significantly:  much of the analysis work would be done by another team.  

Specialist development teams are invaluable, and cross-departmental collaboration Tiger Teams can share resources and increase the time-to-value of training.

By polycentralizing your Training and Development team, you can take advantage of the natural bridging between silos and increase cross-departmental collaboration

Reuse Content When Possible

I’ve worked for teams where they work through the whole ADDIE process with in-depth analysis, thoughtful design, and conduct hours of development and when it gets to implementation, their work is almost the same thing as another team’s for their silo.  The good news:  everyone’s working hard and producing similar content.  The bad news is that there are a lot of people working to produce similar content.  

I’m a huge supporter of the write once, use often mindset.  When using UNIX-based platforms, I try to automate tasks as much as possible.  Creating training, I reuse assets all the time (you might have noticed some similar images ^_^).  If I can shave off some time without sacrificing quality, I will.  If I work for hours creating the essentially same thing that someone else created, a little part of me dies inside.  When I can, I reuse content.  It might mean re-recording existing written work or editing some existing video, it doesn’t matter.  Anything that takes less time to qualitatively repurpose is more valuable to me than “reinventing the wheel.”  

Avoiding Silos

As I started my career, I thought that siloed teams were a fact of life or an entity that was necessary for the corporate world to run.  I was a cog in the great machinery of the office, and if I did my work and handed it off to the right people, the machinery would turn and the business would flourish. It wasn’t until I joined leadership that I realized the truth:  silos were a natural withdrawing process, and it builds distrust within organizations.  They are inefficient, rarely effective, and require more work to reconcile the work done than, well, the work done.  

The thing is, it’s really difficult to break down silos within an organization, even if you are building that organization anew.  Silos naturally happen, and yet they also have natural extensions into other teams, and Training and Development is one such natural extension.  By polycentralizing your Training and Development team, you can take advantage of the natural bridging between silos and increase cross-departmental collaboration.  

Culture of Kindness

• Define your Values
• Give Earned Credit
• Address Conflicts Constructively
• Focus on Lessons Learned, Not Blame
• Measure Individual Success
• Show Gratitude

What Socially Motivates You?

Being Kind:  Why Kindness Matters

I see this same theme showing up every weekend in my feed on LinkedIn:  Be Kind.  I don’t know if it’s a reminder being sent out to teams after an awesome week, or a cry for help, but it’s always there.  During the week the feed changes to various exciting things happening in the world of business, before shifting back to the same theme:  be kind.  

Why?  Why is it important to even think about kindness?  It’s an interesting question, and as we talk about social motivators it’s the first one I want to bring up.   More than any other individual social condition, a culture built around kindness can increase your teams’ productivity and create a sense of belonging that will translate into more productive, successful teams (Vo, 2022).  I know that’s quite a claim to make, so let’s go over it.  

Social Motivators and Research

In 2022, Vo and team conducted a massive data research project to explore the effects of social conditions meeting individual needs as it relates to work motivation.  There were four motivating conditions that were explored:

• Religious Affiliation
• Political Participation
• Humane Orientation through Kindness and Altruism
• In-Group Collectivism as expressed by pride and loyalty for the organization

The research then focused on six key hypotheses tested as it relates to work motivation: 

1. Competence:  How one’s mastery at the tasks at hand impact their motivation to do the job. 
2. Autonomy:  The ability to do their job, make their own decisions, and take accountability for their own actions. 
3. Social Relatedness:  Feeling secure with their teammates through social connections.  
4. Motivating Conditions Impact Competence:  The impact of each of the four motivating conditions are expected to enhance one’s motivation at each level of competence.  
5. Motivating Conditions Impact Autonomy:  The impact of each of the four motivating conditions are expected to positively effect one’s motivation at each level of autonomy.
6. Motivating Conditions Impact Social Relatedness:  The impact of each of the four motivating conditions are expected to enhance social connection motivation.  

So there’s a lot to unpack here, and if you want the full details of the research project, check the link below.  The primary goal is to explore the impacts of Competence, Autonomy, and Social Relatedness on work motivation.  Each are powerful influencers, and should not be ignored.  I’ll dig into each in future articles.  What’s really impressive, though, is the follow-up:  How social conditions can mitigate or enhance the impact of competence, autonomy, and social relatedness.  

The Competence Exception and Motivation

It seems pretty intuitive that someone more comfortable with a job will feel more motivated to complete the job, and to a certain extent that is true.  What was interesting is that the more competent someone was at a role, the less motivated they were to complete the role (Vo, 2022, p.9).  There wasn’t a conclusion as to this result, though it’s hypothesized that, once a task become routine, there is less desire to do the tasks.  Challenges appear to directly impact motivation.  What’s really interesting is that both Autonomy and Social Relatedness behaved as expected:  The more of each one has, the more motivated the team gets. 

The Impact of Kindness 

As researchers reviewed the differing impacts of motivating conditions on competence, autonomy, and social relatedness.  The results were very interesting: 

• Competence  
  • Positive Impact Observed
    • A strong culture of  Kindness had a positive impact, statistically increasing motivation for those at every level of competence, even as motivation dropped with higher competence.  
    • High Company Loyalty also increased motivation significantly, though it still dropped significantly with higher competence.  
  • Interesting Insight:  Religious affiliation had a very interesting impact on motivation with competence, effectively evening out the difference between high and low competence on motivation.  
• Autonomy
  • Positive Impact Observed
    • Higher political participation had a slightly higher positive impact with increased autonomy, though only when high levels of autonomy was granted.  
    • A strong culture of Kindness very significant increase in motivation for those with autonomy, even when low levels of autonomy were observed. 
• Social Relatedness
  • Positive Impact Observed
    • A strong culture of Kindness was the only statistically significant motivational factor that increased motivation with regards to social relatedness, and it was significant.  I found this particularly enlightening, and once pointed out I could see how this same concept could be rubber-stamped across all social environments.  

As outlined above, kindness was the one social motivator that could impact an individual’s work motivation, regardless of one’s level of competence, how much autonomy they have been given, and how much one relates to their team.  

Building a Culture of Kindness

We know that Kindness makes a huge impact on a team’s motivation, but how do you build a culture of kindness?  Here are some key steps you can use to shift your company culture, regardless of who you are in the company.  

• Define Your Values:  Company values are great, and every company has a list of values they like to highlight.  These should be communicated, reiterated, and focus on the importance of kindness and compassion while working with one another, and then act on them.  Writing your values is a great step, but you, as leadership, employees, and as teams, need to live them.  
• Give Earned Credit:  Recognize those who have great ideas, and give credit to those who deserve it.  This means recognizing a great idea from the janitor if they are overheard and the idea is used, not the guy who implemented it.  Be willing to recognize those who make a difference, and don’t take credit for someone else’s work.  This seems obvious, but it’s amazing to see how often this is not done.  
• Address Conflicts Constructively:  Conflict is going to happen, and believe it or not, it’s healthy if approached constructively.  Everyone should have a chance to have a say, every perspective should be listened to with the desire to understand (not respond), and then move forward with the understanding that all concerns where heard, understood, and considered.  
• Focus On Lessons Learned, Not Blame:  It’s human nature to find someone or something to blame, and feel like a bad situation was completely out of your control.  The honest truth:  you can always do something to mitigate all risk, even if you didn’t know you could at the time.  That’s part of learning, growing, and becoming better.  When you run into issues, focus on the lessons you are learning and how to avoid the problem in future, rather than who is to blame.  When folks feel like they are allowed to make honest mistakes, they will be more willing to put all their effort into making something happen.  And you will earn their trust. 
• Measure Individual Success:  Not everyone is going to be at the same level, and often it can feel like they continue to struggle while others who have more seniority get all the recognition.  As a leader, meet people where they are and recognize their individual growth.  
• Show Gratitude:  As a teammate, show appreciation for the contributions of your peers, however small it might be at the time.  Gratitude can go a long way in building social bonds.  

Research has shown that a culture of kindness, above all else, can have a more of an impact than any other factor in your organization.  By building a culture where everyone is kind and compassionate, you will increase your teams motivation at a social level, engaging them as a team to complete tasks and accomplish more than you could at any other cultural level.  Treat people with respect, listen to understand, and show gratitude at all levels, and you will have a truly great place to work.  

 

For more information on the research, check out the referenced link below. 

Vo, Thuy Thi Diem, Kristine Velasquez Tuliao, and Chung-Wen Chen. “Work motivation: The roles of individual needs and social conditions.” Behavioral Sciences 12.2 (2022): 49.