These days, less is more. With L&D budgets constantly being squeezed, many businesses (or departments) are now thinking about consolidating their tech stacks by switching from lots of platforms to one, offering up a holistic learning and communications experience to employees.
A major pain point during rapid growth is how quickly training materials, HR policies, and operational documents become scattered across systems, leaving employees overwhelmed and unable to find what they need.
And it is natural. As your business grows, you employ more people to meet the needs of your customers, and you feel the need to buy courses, learning content libraries and training materials. This, of course, has its merits - you’re providing your people with richer resources. But the drawback is that this cocktail of content quickly creates a fragmented landscape for the user to navigate and they simply disengage.
In this post, we'll look at how small businesses can benefit from consolidating their employee resources and learning content into a single platform.
The 5app LMS or Hub as our customers commonly refer to it, was built on a founding principle: to offer learners a simple and agile solution that provides a single source of truth at the point of need. From customers like Greystar, we know that having all your resources under one roof dramatically increases productivity, engagement and peer-to-peer knowledge sharing.
But how do we help do this in a really simple, fast and intuitive way?
The Hub allows learning administrators and content creators to drag and drop all of their existing content into one library and organise it into customisable folders in a matter of minutes. Content can come from any source; typically, this is either:
Native files— interactive PDFs or presentations to videos—are stored natively in the Hub. These are commonly documents such as HR policies, operating procedures, and internal communications assets.
Links - for content that lives outside the platform, for example, a learning library or programme, you can embed the content directly in the Hub by simply adding the link (URL)
This creates one home for all of your organisation’s knowledge, meaning users don’t have to jump between platforms to access their learning or communications resources.
Content is one thing, but having it curated in a structured manner is another - and that’s where Playlists come in. Playlists live at the heart of the 5app LMS - allowing curators to organise learning, comms and resources in multiple ways based on the desired outcome. Examples include:
Programmatic—Playlists can be ordered systematically for your cohort for structured training programmes. Create sections to guide the learner to complete X before moving on to Y.
Regulatory - for time-sensitive compliance content, due dates can be assigned to the Playlist to inform and remind the learner when the content needs to be completed.
Intranet - for all your company HR policies, standard operating procedures and handbooks - arranged by type using sections and subsections.
All learning content and Playlists can be labelled and tagged by the author to allow seamless access through our browse and search tools.
With all your learning content neatly organised into Playlists and themed Topics, you have the foundations of a simple learning experience. However, to take it a step further, we can ensure that only role-relevant information is available to the learners when they access the Hub.
We do this via our Smart Teams functionality, which allows you to establish rules based on employee credentials such as location, department, and job role. This is really handy if you’re enrolling a new cohort for their induction or providing your leadership team with specific content.
Having all your resources in one platform is precisely what training company Hemsley Fraser uses 5app for. To this day, the Hub allows Hemsley to drip feed useful information & learning resources to their 300-strong team. Push notifications keep employees in the loop about new and relevant content, keeping them returning to the platform repeatedly to find everything they need without having to go hunting for it.
A holistic approach to learning and comms, underpinned by a single platform, means that everyone in your team (or organisation, depending on the size of your company) gets more exposure to their colleagues, fostering closer, more harmonious relationships. This leads to better collaboration and innovation, more creativity, reduced workplace conflict, and a happier, more productive workforce. What’s not to like?!