Adding or extending a learning management system that writes back to your database can address these risks:
Staff Learning and Compliance
Today organisations need to be “learning organisations” to attract and retain staff while ensuring performance and compliance. Gallup “found that organizations that make strategic investments in employee training and development report 11% greater profitability twice as likely to retain their employees.”
Extending your LMS to cover staff training allows you to create training plans from induction thru to skills enhancement and record the progress against the employee record in iMIS. Providing staff with a development roadmap and training plan sets clear expectations and leads to more employee engagement. It ensures that staff learn processes and procedures consistently and you can measure their competencies. It also protects you and the organisation should performance issues arise.
Funding opportunity
Some LMS platforms allow organisations to extend the LMS as a tool for your members or non-members to use in their businesses. A great example of this is where you might provide workplace relations support. Your LMS - which can be branded as your Organisation – can be provided to paying subscribers for use in their workplace to cover off policy and procedures, inductions, certification etc. By reviewing your inquiry data or changes to legislation you may see common trends or issues emerge that you could prepare a package for training your members or non-members.
This could be a bolt-on to membership or available to non-members for a higher fee while placing your organisation into the day-to-day operations of members and potential members.
There have also been project and grant opportunities to deliver industry and sector-based upskilling on behalf of the Government or industry and being able to roll out a program on an LMS that writes back to your database could be a mine of new connections for your Organisation.
Governance Risk
The AICD acknowledges that “Directors of NFPs face similar legal liabilities as company directors, in spite of many being volunteers. This highlights a number of important matters for NFP boards to consider (such as) the importance of having properly documented procedures, policies and record keeping in place to minimise the risk of performance failure and also to better defend any actions against the organisation”
Apart from a Board of Directors, your organisation may have branches or chapters, committees or other groupings which might be managed by volunteer members such as Branch Chair, Secretary, Treasurer or Committee member and senior executives and directors carry a risk should something go wrong at some level of the organisation – this could be reputational and compliance-based.
A recent emerging issue is the handling of members’ personal data – do your volunteer members with access to data know the rules of the use of such data and do they comply? How do you know?
Extending your LMS out to Directors and other office bearers throughout the organisation is a means to ensure they have been given clear instructions on their roles and responsibilities and the records written back to their iMIS account as proof. Common policies such as events WHS, media spokespeople, grievances, bullying and harassment, handling personal records, meeting conduct and procedure can be put into an online platform so the member can login and complete the modules within the time set by the organisation.
You can even add gamification and award badges or other kudos to the volunteers completing their modules.
When evaluating providers for adding or enhancing a learning management system for your organisation be sure to consider:
- Does it integrate with iMIS
- Can it be rebranded and onsold
- Some providers have premade standard lesson content you can licence to save you creating it from scratch.
Causeis partners with Learning Management Systems including TopClass by WBT Systems and Brightspace by D2L.
Reach out to Causeis to learn about how we can enable your association LMS journey.
Jonathan Tuckfield GAICD, CiA
Transformation Consultant
Causeis