Using your LMS to encourage wellbeing among your remote learners

Some ideas of how to use your LMS to promote wellbeing among your remote team.

The move towards remote working since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic has brought a fresh set of challenges for organisations. At the very top of the list of those challenges is ensuring the wellbeing of your people without the benefit of daily face-to-face contact.

Given that a learning management system might be the only system that is used consistently by everyone in your organisation, it is a useful tool to have at your disposal when encouraging wellbeing throughout your team.

There are a number of ways of harnessing the power of your LMS to monitor and promote wellbeing among your remote learners. Let’s have a look at some of those.

Deliver wellbeing training

The most direct way in which your LMS can be used to promote wellbeing is to use it as intended: create, manage and deploy wellbeing training. Use your LMS to deliver a course that helps your people to look after themselves. Encourage them to create a healthy work-life balance, to take regular breaks and to maintain the usual boundaries between their work and their personal life.

The beauty of your LMS is that, with the infrastructure in place, it’s easy and cost-effective to quickly deliver training on wellbeing or any other topics that arise. And it doesn’t have to be theory-based: you could run a virtual exercise class via your LMS or use gamification features to create some friendly competition around exercise challenges.

Encourage collaboration

Use the tools within your LMS to encourage collaboration between members of your remote team. One of the most successful ways of doing this we’ve seen in action is by using Totara Engage’s workspaces feature. This allows you to create a workspace around a specific business area, IT system, training topic, or any other subject that makes sense for your organisation. Your remote team can ask questions, discuss best practices, spread knowledge and share resources that benefit everyone.

The outcome is not only a regular flow of valuable information, but also increased communication between individuals with shared interests (even if they would have had no reason for regular contact in the days before remote working).

Peer-to-peer interactions are thought to account for around 70% of all workplace learning, so being able to replicate those water cooler conversations and innocent cross-office eavesdropping is invaluable.

Monitor engagement

Powerful reporting systems within Totara Learn and Moodle LMS have long been an important way to check on engagement and course completions. In the remote working landscape, inactivity or withdrawal from courses could be a red flag for wellbeing issues. Your LMS reports could be a useful tool for gauging when an intervention or at least a conversation is required.

Similarly, Totara Engage’s detailed analytics detail engagement around particular topics on the platform. While designed to help you spot experts and advocates for specific business areas, as well as those who are not engaging, you can use the same analytics tools to keep an eye out for those who have withdrawn from community activities and engagement.

Check-in regularly and in various formats

It goes without saying that you need to check-in regularly with every member of your team to mitigate your reduced contact with them in the workplace. Yes, group and one-to-one calls via Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Google Meet or similar video call software definitely have their place, but don’t forget more focused and maybe even more formal conversations.

Totara Perform automatically schedules check-ins with individual team members at specified intervals between appraisals. These check-ins can be used to generate actionable feedback for each team member.

Totara Perform’s performance management tools also integrate with appraisals to create an evidence-based context for your discussions. These performance insights can be particularly helpful when you’re not seeing the person in question every day.

Got another idea to encourage wellbeing?

If you’ve got an idea for using your LMS to encourage wellbeing among your learners, fill in the form below for a chat about how we could make it happen.

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