Imagine you’re the CEO of a ~300-employee business. A global pandemic (which shall remain nameless) has just hit, and suddenly, everyone needs to work remotely for an unspecified amount of time and adapt to new working processes (which change literally every day).
As the CEO, you want to keep your global employees informed and feeling supported every single day with clear, consistent communications. Now, as a busy CEO responsible for hundreds of equally busy employees, you have a challenge: to keep everyone in the loop about what matters to them. But when it comes to a solution, you have options: you can communicate with your people from multiple platforms (most would say TOO many), or just one.
For Hemsley Fraser, 5app was the only learning and communications platform they needed when this exact situation arose. To this day, 5app drip feeds useful information and learning resources to Hemsley Fraser’s employees to help them get what they need, when they need it - sometimes before they even realise they need it. Push notifications keep employees in the loop about new and relevant content, keeping them coming back to the platform time and time again to find everything they need without having to go hunting for it.
So if you’ve found yourself overwhelmed with platforms, how can you simplify your tech stack and make everyone’s life easier? Below, we’re going to take a look at the benefits of a streamlined tech stack, how to get there and how 5app customer Hemsley Fraser did it themselves.
Anyone who’s ever tried to wrangle multiple platforms will know what a nightmare it can be. Does X piece of content live on platform Y or Z? How do you collate a report with data from five different platforms… every month? How do you update all your duplicate content when information changes? For smaller organisations, this may be at the whole company level, whereas for bigger organisations, this challenge often exists within teams or departments.
Naturally, when you face these issues (and with multiple platforms. It’s almost inevitable that you will), you’ve probably found yourself dreaming of a way to streamline everything. With a single platform (whether that’s for your entire company or for a single department), admins, managers and employees alike know exactly where to find everything, saving time, removing barriers to learning and boosting operational efficiency across your business.
For larger audiences or those with more complex use cases, you need a platform that plays nicely with the rest of your stack, rather than a standalone system that doesn’t integrate. In this case, you can remove barriers to learning and knowledge sharing with a simple platform that communicates with your other systems, such as your HR system, performance system or CRM to bring everything into one place.
On top of this, and regardless of your company size, you could save a huge amount of money by whittling down your platforms. Learning platforms are one of the biggest chunks of the L&D budget, so even consolidating two platforms into one can save you thousands (or hundreds of thousands) a year depending on the size and complexity of your implementation.
Instead of having to figure out where the employee handbook lives vs where they can find their yearly compliance training, employees can head to their one platform to find everything they need. This makes it much more likely that your platform will succeed. Instead of asking employees to split their attention between multiple systems (which, let’s face it, is the last thing anyone needs), providing a single platform will keep attention focused in a single place without anyone feeling spread too thin, helping you maintain great engagement with your content and comms.
TOP TIP: Get more bang for your buck from your platform by optimising your search functionality - think tags, filters and recommended content!
Another common workplace challenge is keeping up with version control and resource management. Is the latest version of your employee handbook on your intranet, or on SharePoint, or on Google Drive, or somewhere else entirely? If people don’t know where to find the latest version of a document, will they just pull up an ancient version from their emails?
Having a single source of truth for all company information, knowing where to find it and having it at your fingertips makes life easier for everyone. One platform means only one place for people to go to find the most up-to-date information - that means no time wasted and no inaccuracies or inconsistencies across the business.
Most businesses have some degree of blended learning available to employees, combining face-to-face workshops, elearning, webinars, mentoring, social learning, multimedia microlearning resources and more. Some companies have separate platforms for each element of the blended programme, creating confusion and making it hard to keep track of all the available content.
A simpler, more user-friendly approach is to bring everything onto a single, centralised platform. You’ll get much better results if you can put absolutely everything at your employees’ fingertips, whether that’s signing up for a workshop, registering for a webinar, completing a certification, watching a video or finding the right link to your latest industry regulations.
TOP TIP: Pull resources together into themed playlists for easy access to relevant content depending on location, role, skills or anything else.
These days, more and more organisations are moving away from formal, scheduled training programmes to highly flexible learning in the flow of work with 24/7 access to on-demand learning.
Hosting all your learning, information and communications on a centralised platform means you can mix and match who gets what with ease. For example, before a new starter’s first day, you can give them access to pre-onboarding information on your platform, such as the company history, your handbook and a welcome video from the CEO to help them hit the ground running.
The platform can also gather information about the resources people are accessing and finding useful (via user ratings or likes) and ensure that the algorithm surfaces and prioritises these pieces for the right people, at the right time. If it’s approaching performance review time, the system can recommend that employees review career development materials, or if an employee is engaging with lots of sales materials, the platform can push related resources that they haven’t yet seen to help them improve their sales performance.
Want to streamline your tech stack but don’t know where to start? We’ve got you covered! Book your 5app demo and we’ll show you how easy it can be to unlock access to every single piece of content from one - yes, ONE - platform!
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