3 LMS Features to Help You Get the Most Out of Your Extended Workforce

When you hire freelance or fractional workers to achieve your corporate business goals, you want to ensure that you’re getting a high return on your investment. Companies often make these hiring decisions because they have short-term talent gaps they need to fill, and the sooner these contingent employees can get started and perform effectively, the better.

The problem is that fractional workers might have the raw skills you’re looking for, but they don’t know your organization’s culture or compliance requirements. They could be the most highly skilled freelancer in their field, but you still need to provide a level of training so they can operate successfully within your organization’s systems and processes.

That’s where a learning management system (LMS) comes in. The right LMS is an affordable solution with robust features that let you efficiently manage onboarding and training for your contingent workforce so they can quickly dive into their tasks and help you achieve your business goals. Below are three LMS features you can leverage to ensure your contingent workers are prepared for success.

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1) Standardized Onboarding and Compliance Training

Contingent workers don’t know the intricacies of your organizational processes. Unlike your full-time and part-time employees, contingent hires don’t spend a significant amount of time with your company. They’re hired to take on specific projects and tasks or temporarily fill gaps. Even if you have ongoing relationships with certain contractors or freelance workers, they’ll never be heavily involved in your organizational culture. They also won’t receive the same mandatory compliance training as your regular workforce. Despite this, any person doing work for your organization needs to have at least a baseline understanding of the processes they’ll need to follow to keep your company compliant with any legal or regulatory requirements.

With swift onboarding and training through your LMS, you can ensure that your fractional workers are set up for success from the start of their contract. When your company makes arrangements with a contingent worker, you can enroll them in an onboarding course that provides all of the essential organizational and compliance training content they need.

LMS analytics and reporting tools help you easily track which contractors have completed their training requirements. You can also configure an LMS to send automatic reminders to contingent workers when they don’t complete their training and onboarding activities, ensuring that nobody slips through the cracks.

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2) Flexible and Accessible Training

Large-scale, in-person training events often aren’t conducive to working effectively with contingent employees. These workers are filling gaps that your regular workforce cannot, and it’s likely that your contingent employees aren’t all working the same schedules. Rather than expecting everyone to attend an in-person event that’s difficult to schedule, you can train everyone with a mobile-ready LMS. Look for a vendor like Open LMS that features offline access to training materials so your extended workforce can gain the essential knowledge they’ll need to thrive.

If you’re training employees who work on site, you can let them access training through tablets or other mobile devices while they’re on the job. Let’s say you’re a retail organization hiring contingent workers to manage the busy holiday shopping season. These workers need to learn effective tools for interacting with customers, but they also have to know your store’s physical layout and how to safely operate store equipment. Rather than having these employees sit at a computer for hours watching training videos on their start date, you can get them on the store floor faster with streamlined training content through a mobile-ready LMS. With a tablet or phone in hand, your contingent employees can work alongside a trainer and learn the ins and outs of the role while completing their training courses.

If your contingent employees work remotely, they can use your LMS to complete their training tasks at a time that’s most convenient for them. In either case, your employees can complete their training activities in the flow of work and at their own pace.

3) Performance Tracking and Feedback Mechanisms

Although your contingent workers aren’t with your organization year-round, it’s still important to be aware of their abilities and encourage them to improve their skills. You might not have a need or budget for these workers full-time, but it’s quite possible that you’ll need their services again for other projects or during peak operational periods. You’ll be much further ahead if you can rehire contingent employees you’ve already worked with instead of sourcing completely new talent. As long as you’re training them with a robust LMS that integrates with your HR systems, you’ll have access to their talent profiles and performance history to help you make efficient hiring decisions.

Additionally, robust analytics and reporting tools can help you track contingent worker performance and make data-backed decisions about which skills need to be developed across your workforce. While this might be less relevant for freelancers who are working on a one-off project, some of your contingent workers could be with your company for a quarter or more. In these cases, it’s important to hone and improve their skills to ensure they’re maximizing their productivity and achieving effective results. You can leverage your LMS to track their performance and assign relevant training content that helps them improve.

Whether you work with contingent employees for a few weeks or a few months, you need to ensure that they have the tools necessary to produce top-quality results for your organization. An LMS lets you quickly get your contingent workforce the essential information they need to hit the ground running and help your company thrive.

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