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The Importance of HRIS in Employee Learning and Development
Learning and development programs are crucial to keeping your workforce motivated, up-to-date, and productive. In return for this investment, you’ll get a higher employee satisfaction, loyalty, and retention rates – all key elements that help a company thrive and reach their goals and objectives
But setting up an L&D process for your employees can seem overwhelming – it’s a lot of work after all! So what can you do? A HRIS may be the answer.
What is HRIS?
HRIS is an acronym that stands for Human Resource (or Resources) Information System. Essentially, it refers to software tools that support HR teams at the time of gathering, storing, accessing, and analyzing various types of employee data from one single platform and in an automated way.
Understanding HRIS
When considering a HRIS for your company, you’ll need to figure out whether to implement it on-premise or in the cloud. Regardless of the option you choose, most HRIS solutions will include the following features:
- Employee training, learning, and development
- File management
- Record keeping
- Payroll
- Benefits and bonuses
- Time off management
- Performance and engagement
- Hiring and onboarding
Whether you run the human resources department of a financial company, an educational institution, or if you are responsible for healthcare HR, HRIS can support your efforts in creating great-quality learning and development programs.
The Role of HRIS in Employee Learning and Development
Now you know what a HRIS is, let’s look at how it can contribute to your employee’s learning and development with a learning management system (LMS).
Centralized data management and tracking
You don’t need to think about how one single, centralized platform can benefit you and your learners. You get an easily accessible tool to collect, store and track all of your crucial data, while your learners get a streamlined, engaging learning experience.
Automated learning and development processes
Onboarding new employees may often be seen as a time-consuming task, but a HRIS can make it much easier. They can automate certain processes, such as assigning new staff to appropriate training courses and monitoring their progression. Increase efficiency by using a HRIS in conjunction with an LMS where you can automate assigning key training, user creation and access, data synchronization, enrolments, and much more.
Personalized learning experiences
With the right HRIS in place, you can build learning experiences that are tailored to the specific needs, goals, and challenges of the employees that take part in your learning and development programs. If you’re also using an LMS, you can use features like Gamification, social learning and Catalogs to encourage self learning and increased engagement rates.More personalization leads to improved engagement, which in turn, translates into higher satisfaction,productivity and retention
Performance tracking and analytics
Don’t lose out on valuable learner data – make sure you’re tracking and analyzing your participants’ progress. Use a HRIS to keep a close, up-to-date eye on how learners are performing. This makes it easier to proactively take action if you spot any potential issues. Plus, this data can be used to improve your training for the future.
An LMS can further help you to track and analyze your learner’s data and to tie your learning insights back to business impact. LMS reports should showcase data on learner progression, survey responses, exam results, and so on.
Integration with other HR systems and tools
Most HRIS systems can be integrated with a whole host of other platforms and solutions that help you to do your job more efficiently. So, whether you want your HRIS to seamlessly communicate with another HR-specific system or with a tool from a different department, such as your best personal injury case management software, you can!
Best Practices for Implementing HRIS in L&D
While a HRIS can help tremendously with the learning and developing of your staff, you need to know how to use it properly. Here are four best practices to get you started:
Establish clear learning objectives
To begin with, you’ll want to set up a list of learning and development goals for your team. Talk to your employees and get their input as this will enable them to feel more valued and involved in the whole process – plus, they’ll likely have more insight into their day-to-day than you.
Once your objectives are established, share them with learners and leadership in a clear and concise format so that everyone is on the same page.
Involve employees in the process
Direct employee involvement is paramount if you want to make your HRIS a success. There are two main reasons for this. The first one is that keeping employee engagement high has a lot of benefits, including (according to Gallup):
- 81% reduction in absenteeism
- 18% reduction in turnover (for high-turnover companies)
- 43% reduction in turnover (for low-turnover companies)
- 23% increase in profitability
Secondly, ensuring that your employees stay informed throughout the process enables them to learn how to properly use the new tools and technologies that you are implementing. As a result, this allows you to count on a skilled, up-to-date, and truly inspired workforce.
Additionally, you could build a training needs assessment and share this with your employees and those in leadership, to discover internal skill gaps and determine what training is needed to fill these gaps.
Provide ongoing support
Implementing a new system almost always comes with having to switch to different ways of working, and this is particularly true if you are opting for virtual learning programs. This, in turn, can feel like a time-consuming hurdle, especially to those who have long been used to specific and more traditional workflows.
Therefore, it’s paramount that you provide your staff with continuous support during and after your HRIS implementation to your learning solution.
Ensure data accuracy and quality
The insights you gain from your HRIS are only as good, accurate, and valuable as the data they’re based on. It’s extremely important that you keep ensuring the highest standard of data quality by using methods like keeping accurate metadata, avoiding silos, and deleting duplicates.
Stay updated with industry reports and trends, such as airSlate’s HR automation report, which can provide valuable insights into improving data accuracy and optimizing HR processes.
In addition, a key best practice is to build a master schedule within your HRIS to effectively plan and manage learning and development activities. This schedule will help you to coordinate training sessions, allocate resources, and track progress across various programs and initiatives.
Ensuring the success of your human resources is vital to a healthy business. As you’ve seen, a HRIS – Human Resource Information Systems – can have a huge impact on your employees and their learning and development. These digital tools can help you to streamline a huge range of processes and functions including, but not limited to, learning and development programs.
So, if you’re looking to level up your L&D, why not take the first steps today?
