4 Features and Tips for Fueling Connection and Collaborative Learning With a Digital LMS Platform

The point is for workplaces to be more human, not less. But for many companies, adopting an advanced digital LMS (learning management system) can seem like little more than an impersonal technological investment. (Granted, one that’s key to their competitiveness and profitability.)

Of course, this view isn’t entirely mistaken. But it’s missing what may be the deeper point, which is that it all comes down to people. The technology—and even the profitability—is just the means to the end—the end being value-creation for stakeholders inside and outside your organization: employees, partners, and customers alike.

Value-creation means keeping real-life human beings at the center of all your learning initiatives with digital tools that fuel connection and collaboration. And it’s precisely why adopting advanced digital LMS software is an intrinsically human investment.

How digital collaboration tools pay big dividends.

For those who associate the adoption of digital tools with an exercise in making the workplace less human-connected and less collaborative—the ExpertusONE next-generation LMS turns that notion on its head by:

Breaking down silos
Connecting learners across all levels of the organization
Increasing engagement and commitment
Fostering meaningful and effective collaboration
Creating positive digital experiences
Empowering employees and other stakeholders
Building organizational loyalty
Strengthening teams
Incentivizing high performance
Elevating company culture

Together, these benefits yield significant dividends—both in terms of more effectively harnessing your human capital’s potential and increasing your ROI. And there’s nearly a decade of research backing this up. For instance, a 2013 Deloitte European survey found that employees are up to 20% happier with their company’s work culture when they’re equipped with digital tools that fuel connection and collaboration. Moreover, the adoption of digital collaboration tools is rapidly increasing. A recent Gartner study found a 44% increase in workplace deployment of collaborative tools between 2019 and 2021.

Companies are seeking to gain a digital-first advantage. In this piece, we’ll show you how the ExpertusONE advanced digital LMS plays a crucial role in tangible and intangible value creation. Specifically, we’ll talk about collaborative learning as a whole, explore four of the platform’s features that fuel connection and collaboration, and provide practical tips for revamping your learning initiatives.

4 Practical Tips for Fueling Collaborative Learning

1. Collaboration Hub fuels connection and collaboration—even across distributed organizations.

The ExpertusONE platform supports overarching training strategies that include collaborative learning as a key element, making it a comprehensive solution for delivering self-paced learning content, one-on-one coaching, or group training sessions. But the ExpertusONE platform goes even further with a dedicated feature called Collaboration Hub. As its name suggests, it functions as a hub—a central location where employees from every level and every corner of the organization can connect, collaborate, access shared learning assets, and participate in learning cohorts—even from opposite sides of the world. (This is especially important for companies with remote teams or multiple corporate offices.)

Collaboration Hub facilitates one-on-one coaching and team engagement by enabling managers to easily identify, designate, and invite specific employees to specific training, all from within the ExpertusONE platform. (And from the employee side, learners seeking support can easily reach out to their peers or managers.)

If a company rolls out new products, announces new policies, or launches new initiatives on which select cohorts of employees need to be trained, Collaboration Hub provides instant visibility and AI-driven course-matching and personalization. This means that the right learners are matched with the right courses and with the right collaborative learning cohorts, ensuring that courses are always relevant, engaging, and timely.

The benefits of ExpertusONE Collaboration Hub extend beyond value creation for internal teams. Companies can also use Collaboration Hub and ExpertusONE’s Learning Record Store to identify opportunities for upselling clients and customers.

Tip: Create value for internal and external stakeholders alike by using the Learning Record Store to determine which courses are most popular or in the highest demand. Turn insights into opportunities based on the investment allocated for new training assets, products, or services.

2. Gamification brings team members together in incredibly enjoyable ways.

Collaborative learning can be competitive—and a ton of fun. If you look at a significant percentage of team-building and culture-enhancement exercises, you’ll find that they tend to be based on game-playing—opportunities to work as an individual or team toward a common goal with tangible or intangible incentives for high performance.

The ExpertusONE platform’s LMS gamification feature brings team members together in incredibly enjoyable ways. It fuels connection and collaboration by rewarding individuals and teams for completing a training course, receiving or renewing a certification, or successfully navigating other forms of upskilling or professional development.

These rewards can take the form of badges, point systems, and other incentives, making gamification one of the most powerful ways to create positive digital experiences, strengthen teams, incentivize high performance, and elevate company culture.

Tip: Establish a clear tie between gamification activities and rewards to organizational goals, business objectives, and corporate branding. This helps employees better understand the why behind the what of their training and ensures they feel recognized and appreciated for their contribution to the broader company mission. (Now, that’s what we call a human-centric approach to value creation.)

3. Integrated, on-demand video conferencing makes for instant, cost-effective collaboration.

ExpertusONE’s Meetings provides an on-demand LMS video conferencing feature. Meetings are super simple to set up, host, and join from anywhere within the platform. Use of this feature is the easiest and most cost-effective way to connect employees, managers, and other stakeholders for strategy sessions, daily scrums, check-ins with employees, partners, customers, and sales teams, and other collaborative work sessions. Its wide range of functionality lets managers automate admin activities and roster management, auto-capture attendance and completion data, and auto-sync content. And because the Meetings feature is built into the platform, companies can skip the expense and hassle of relying on an external conferencing platform.

Tip: Use the data-capture Meetings function to turn successful one-on-one coaching sessions or small group training into repurposable learning assets that can be dispersed to a wide range of stakeholders.

4. Extensible mobile apps bring coaching and collaboration to learners’ home base.

If you’re familiar with the hair-raising stats on context switching (the technical word for the game of digital hopscotch that employees are forced to play by constantly needing to jump from one digital platform to another), you know that it zaps productivity.

But the ExpertusONE LMS platform puts an end to this productivity-sucking, headache-inducing activity with extensible apps that make the complete ExpertusONE platform seamlessly available on mobile, meeting employees at their home base. (On the platform they typically spend the most time using during the workday.)

Whether that’s Salesforce LMS, Slack LMS, or Microsoft Teams (or some combination), ExpertusONE’s extensible apps integrate coaching and training into the natural rhythms of employees’ everyday workflows—no platform jumping required.

With extensible apps, collaborative training and development activities become streamlined and organic, freeing up learners’ time and cognitive bandwidth, so they can focus on learning rather than on navigating yet another platform. And for companies looking to deliver value by simplifying and streamlining their training processes for sales teams, customer service divisions, partners, and customers, ExpertusONE’s extensible apps are the answer.

Tip: Use ExpertusONE’s apps to extend value across the larger ecosystem by simplifying and streamlining training processes for sales teams, customer service divisions, partners, and customers.

Want to see what a human-centric approach to value creation looks like through the lens of a next-generation digital LMS?

The ExpertusONE enterprise LMS platform is about so much more than a critical technological investment that’s key to companies’ competitiveness and profitability. It’s also a powerful way to create value by keeping real-life human beings at the center of all your learning initiatives by fueling connection and collaboration.

If you’d like to learn more about how ExpertusONE can help you harness the potential of your human capital and increase ROI, schedule your free demo of our award-winning digital learning platform.