By Vowel - October 03, 2019
At Vowel, we recently onboarded one of India’s top NBFC (Non-Banking Financial Company) on the LMS. With over 2000 employees spread across several branches at several locations with different regional languages, one of the key challenges they were facing was making learning part of their organizational culture.
They were keen to move towards a pull-based learning strategy than having to resort to pushes all the time.
Getting a person to learn is a challenge in itself. In a corporate situation, this problem is compounded by the time & budget availability as well as geographical limitations. Transforming an entire organization to realize that it needs to learn is an even bigger challenge. For this particular organization, the lack of a central platform to centralize their learning activity and allow the various people in the L&D & HR Departments to coordinate their activities easily was an additional challenge.
While the management could find vendors to provide a platform, none were equipped with the ability or willingness to solve the real trouble of breaking the mental block and enabling a learning culture. We decided to take on the challenge.
At Vowel we strongly believe in our tagline – make learning happen and that doesn’t stop at just providing software!
Discovering the Problem
In order to come up with a comprehensive strategy we started with some deep dive calls with the client to understand the key challenges they face in the organization with respect to learning. Time was also invested in profiling the audience to ensure that any solutions we came up with had a higher chance of success. We realized that breaking the mental block to learning among employees and igniting the need to learn was going to be key challenges that we needed to tackle.
Centralizing the learning initiative on Vowel
In addition to the softer aspects an interesting part of the discovery involved connecting with various departments to find out how they were currently conducting learning & training in their organization. This forms a critical step of our implementation plan and allows us to configure the platform that is best suited to the customer’s requirements. The next steps involve designing the information architecture, the access control matrices, and the overall user experience. But those are topics on their own which we will cover in-depth in future blogs!
Vowel’s ability as a platform to allow hosting On Demand Elearning, Scheduled Classroom training & Webinars as well as deliver blended learning meant that we had a head start to getting things together in one place. Plus integrating with their customized Single Sign-on (SSO) solution & in-house mobile app meant that the employees could have an integrated learning experience.
Content is King
Content forms the core of any learning initiative. You can’t get much without it! The availability of contextual good quality content is one of the key challenges why many learning initiatives fail to get off the ground or lose steam post-implementation process.
We’ve tried to solve this problem in Vowel by allowing delivery and tracking of a wide variety of content formats ranging from YouTube videos to readily available document formats like Powerpoints and PDFs. This allowed us to plan for an accelerated launch schedule. Vowel’s features to leverage YouTube content (with our own curated library pre-fed into the platform) meant that they could hit the ground running with ready-to-use content. Plus we empowered them with additional micro-learning videos from our partner video gallery further enriching the content offering.
This along with their already available Powerpoints, in-house videos & SCORM content meant that at launch we were starting with a decent amount of content that appeal to a large volume of their diverse audience.
Delivering Learning but changing the context with Gamification
We’d taken on the challenge to make the launch of the LMS a big success and get the maximum number of users to sign up in the first 2 weeks and consume content. We knew from our discovery sessions with the client stakeholders that the general reception to a launch like this would be lukewarm. Vowel’s learning catalyst team decided to tackle this challenge by designing the Launch as a Sports themed gamification.
A detailed game plan was put together on how the teams would be formed, how the scoring would work, and what kind of internal marketing & promotion activities would be conducted along with rewards and penalties. The gamification was planned over a period of 4 weeks from launch with daily and weekly prizes. Vowel’s gamification and reporting engine made it easy to manage the competition via reports & leaderboards.
The positioning of the launch as a Sports event coupled with a rewards and recognition system allowed us to break the learning barrier in the minds of the users. When they saw it as a game they enjoyed participating in it. The launch event was a great success with a 150% more engagement than expected by the client.
At Vowel, we love such challenges. They give us an on the ground real-world insight and allow us to rapidly iterate and build a platform that solves real challenges to make learning happen!
Have you faced challenges implementing an LMS at your organization? Do share them and what you did to tackle them in the comments below!
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