How to Leverage an LMS During the COVID-19 Global Pandemic
There have been all kinds disease outbreaks since the turn of the new millennium—the SARS coronavirus (2002-2004), the MERS coronavirus (starting in 2012), and the Ebola epidemic (2013-2016), just to name a few. What’s unprecedented about the COVID-19 coronavirus global pandemic is how fast it’s spreading all over the world. Although most people can get through having the virus and the disease it causes without any issues, the real problem is with the elderly and those with underlying medical conditions.
Get our free course ‘Protecting Yourself Against COVID-19 and Other Contagious Illnesses‘ to help protect you, your team or your loved ones.
How to leverage an LMS for remote work
But stopping a virus that spreads as fast as the COVID-19 coronavirus requires taking drastic measures. Schools are shutting down at an alarming rate, public gatherings and events of all kinds are being cancelled, and many workplaces are having as many employees as possible work from home. For companies everywhere, now is the time to creatively leverage a learning management system (LMS) like eLeaP to keep help keep your business operating.
An LMS is Uniquely Suited to Help During the COVID-19 Pandemic
Of course your company has email for communicating with employees working from home, and all kinds of video conference apps for having live meetings, but both of those technologies have their limitations. Your workers need to see their leaders and managers, not just read messages from them, but video conferencing isn’t a good solution for large-scale communication given the challenges of having everyone participate at the same time. This is when you could leverage the power of an easy-to-use LMS like eLeaP to get business-critical messaging across to your employees without everyone having to be online at the same moment.
eLeaP’s comprehensive features were designed to be a simple yet powerful solution that makes uploading and distributing video content extremely fast and easy. The company CEO, other C-suite executives, managers, and team leaders can quickly record videos, get them uploaded into the LMS, and designate who needs to be notified the content is there and ready to be watched.
Let an LMS be Your HR Tool During the Pandemic
Your company’s HR professionals are going to be among the most hard-pressed staff during the COVID-19 pandemic. Workers are going to have all kinds of questions about how remote working is going to happen, how their pay may or may not be affected, what the expectations are in terms of hours and availability, and all sorts of other questions. What’s the best way to begin assembling resources, guides, and messaging to address all these HR issues? Once again it’s an LMS that has capability to quickly house and distribute all this information. Whether it’s video content recorded by HR staff, PDFs, PowerPoint slide decks, or even just audio recordings, a well-designed LMS can handle all these different types of content and make them immediately available to everyone or to designated users as needed.
During a Business Slow-Down, Use an LMS for Training and Upskilling
How the COVID-19 global pandemic affects any given business is going to vary widely from company to company, and even by different types of workers and employees within companies. In some cases, whether working from home or not, some employees may not see any change at all in the volume of work they do on a day-to-day basis. In other cases, however, a slow-down in the business may mean there’s simply not as much to do for some workers.
This is when you can engage in additional eLearning through an LMS for the training programs there previously never seemed to be time for doing. For employees who have less to do, this could be the time when they can engage in significant upskilling and additional training. When the COVID-19 pandemic ends and businesses get back to normal operations, you’ll have a workforce that’s ready to do more to get the company back on track and moving forward.
Keeping the COVID-19 Pandemic in Perspective
Everyone is feeling anxious about the huge disruption to life and work being caused by the drastic measures that must be taken to slow the spread of the COVID-19 coronavirus. After all, we were experiencing the longest post-recession economic recovery in history. There can be no doubt that this global pandemic is going to push the economy into a recession. Businesses are going to be impacted, some more than others, but no business will go unscathed during this crisis.
What’s important to keep in mind is this: Everyone, and I do mean everyone—every single business and every single employee with in every business—has a responsibility to do everything we can to protect the most vulnerable people in society, meaning the ones who will be killed by COVID-19 if they become infected. Keep this in mind when you’re feeling the negative business impacts of the pandemic. There are lives at stake if we don’t handle this right, and that means prioritizing people’s lives over and above the business, as difficult as that is. We are literally all in this together, and we will get through this crisis together!
If your company hasn’t yet adopted an LMS, now is the time to get it done. While we normally recommend a thorough process for assessing your company’s needs before selecting an LMS vendor, time is of the essence in the midst of a global pandemic. What we can tell you with confidence is this: The eLeaP LMS is extremely user-friendly. In fact, it’s been ranked #9 on Capterra’s Top 20 Most User-Friendly LMS Software list for several years in a row. And it’s incredibly easy to get up and running with eLeaP—literally in a matter of minutes.
eLeaP is a cloud-based LMS, which means there’s no software to download and install. All you need is your favorite electronic device (desktop, laptop, tablet, smartphone) with an internet connection and a web browser. We offer a free trial where you can start using eLeaP right away to see for yourself, and at the end of the free trial, you’ll appreciate the very affordable monthly pricing based on the number of users.