Webinar: Accelerate Employee Development with Learn & Grow

Jeff Plakans | President & Founder, CommPayHR

Jeff Plakans founded CommPayHR in 2006, for a better, holistic solution for SMB payroll and HR. He is passionate about improving employment practices and compliance to create the best business environment.

Shaun Fowler | Account Manager, isolved

David Braby | Solution Consultant, isolved

Shaun and David join CommPayHR to share their knowledge and expertise in Learn & Grow.

Jeff Plakans: Good afternoon, everyone. I’m Jeff Plakans. I’m the founder and president of Commonwealth Payroll & HR. Thank you for joining us today for today’s lunch and learn session on isolved Learn and Grow. Now, I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again. To me, this is an extremely important topic. Employers today [00:00:30] are wondering and worried about the loss of employees and the retention of employees. Employees today, particularly those from the youngest generations, seek a lot more from their employers, which includes career development and of course, learning and the ability to help develop them as an employee.

Not all employers have the chance to be able to do that. We see it every day. [00:01:00] We hear from those every day who are challenged by this. We feel like we have a really good solution to that, and that’s what today’s session is. I’m joined by Shaun Fowler, our longtime friend from iSolved, and of course, David Braby, who’s also going to help us with getting into the benefits of isolved, Learn and Grow, how it can help you, how it can help your employees. And again, thank you for devoting your lunch hour to us today. We’ll do [00:01:30] our best to devote our lunch hour to you and helping you get better with your employees.

So with that, Shaun, why don’t you go ahead and take the floor?

Shaun Fowler: Perfect. Thank you Jeff. And as Jeff had mentioned, this is on the topic of Learn and Grow, our solution here, learning management system here, and we’ll walk through the features and benefits and really explore what it can do for you. First, we’ll go through [00:02:00] some introductions, as far as the agenda here. So we’ll meet the presenters. Jeff did a good job introducing us. Just put faces to names on the next slide there. We’ll go through the Learn and Grow overview. So I’ll give you some features, benefits, the situation that most find themselves in nowadays and why they seek a solution like this to bridge that gap between their employee’s knowledge and also obviously, retention and employee satisfaction.

David will bring us through [00:02:30] the solution demonstration so you’ll be able to see the user interface, the functionality and what it looks like and how it could benefit you and your employees. And then of course, we’ll have time at the end of the session for answers to your questions. So as you go along, if you have questions, go ahead and put them in the Q & A section and we’ll grab them at the end. And without further ado, we’ll move on to our panel today. You all know Jeff Plakans, [00:03:00] founder, president, Commonwealth Payroll. My name again, is Shaun Fowler. I’m the account manager over on the isolved side. I work with Commonwealth with delivering these types of solutions to their clients. And of course, we got David Braby, who is the solution consultant here, that will be walking us through the demonstration and responsible for the meat of the webinar as we walk through that demonstration.

So, looking at the situation, [00:03:30] a lot of employees out there, they continue to want to grow and learn different skills. And so it continues to be a growing benefit as skilled credentials are increasingly valued, from training to course completion, certificates to industry or professional certifications. We’ll discuss a little bit more what that kind of looks like and what that means on a different slide.

But we do a lot of surveys here. We have a lot of employees under our belt. [00:04:00] And so some of the key surveys that we’ve done in response to a learning management system, about two thirds of what the respondents say, they would be more likely to stay with their current employer if they had some upskilling opportunities that were provided. Upskilling, I’m sure, if you’re on this webinar, you’ve probably heard of that term before, as you’re looking at a learning management system. But it’s really just getting additional skills for their current job, [00:04:30] expanding on those current skills that they’re currently responsible for.

Another two thirds of employees out there say that it’s important for them to have some learning and development. They rank it in their top five of major employee benefits. So alongside of 401k, health benefits, we find that a learning management solution is top of mind for a lot of employees out there to get better skills.

[00:05:00] So when we expand on what that looks like, what type of support their employer is providing for their career growth and their professional development, 46% of them say that they have opportunities to expand on their current skillset. So that’s the upskilling that we had mentioned just a minute ago. 45% say that they have a learning management system in place and 35% [00:05:30] say that opportunities to learn a new skill set, so reskilling. So maybe their position’s going away or they just have a different interest in the company and they look to expand on that. Reskilling is more preferable, obviously, retaining that employee, keeping the engagement there, as opposed to going out to the labor market and finding somebody new.

26% say that they have mentoring opportunities. [00:06:00] 14% say they have job shadowing out there, that is a benefit to them. And then 13% have professional coaching. So mentors to help them build their career path.

So organizations that invest in employee experience have more than four times the profit and two times the revenue. Makes sense, right? Because as you are engaging [00:06:30] your employees and they are learning new skills within your organization, they’re more likely to stick around, therefore, the turnover is going to be minimal, not adding to the cost of hiring new individuals. And it’s interesting, as well as employees, they experience higher engagement levels that outperform their peers about 147% in net employee [00:07:00] promoter scores. So very important to be able to engage your employees. Helps the business, helps the employees as well.

So what’s the solution out there and what does our solution look like? So we’re going to help you streamline employee learning to boost productivity and engagement within isolved. Our learning management system is housed within isolved People Cloud, so there’s not [00:07:30] a very far distance that you have to go between looking at your paycheck and learning a new skill. So isolved Learn and Grow will make learning a lot more accessible to everyone on your team, especially as we see in a remote society that we work in now, a lot of disparate groups of individuals, employees all over the US. So being able to bring them together in one LMS platform, learning management system platform, that is part of your HCM solution, is [00:08:00] paramount to streamlining your operations and getting your employees back to doing what they do best.

All right. So some features and benefits that we’ll see on paper here, David will show us some of these features in the demonstration. But you’ll be able to source, create and deliver these educational content and training programs to your employees, wherever they work. As mentioned before, with the [00:08:30] remote being so prominent in today’s workforce. So some of the capabilities that you’ll have at your fingertips is a comprehensive dashboard and reporting. So it’s good to offer this to them. Employees go in there, take courses, but it’s also good for you to understand what courses they’ve taken, what they’ve completed, what they’ve not completed, scores they got, and having all that information at your fingertips as opposed to looking through a system, searching down [00:09:00] this information, maybe in different systems, will get you back to doing what you do best and running the business.

Personalized and configurable curriculum. So there’s two different levels to our solution. Basic level is the learning management system. Now that is just the learning management system, there’s no additional content loaded into it. So that’s good for companies that have already resources in place that just [00:09:30] need to upload them into the learning management system. Our upgraded version. For those that don’t have those resources, is the content library. So that comes with the learning management system, but in addition, you have 180 prebuilt courses that are some of the most popular courses out there, sexual harassment, cybersecurity, things like that. And then you have, along with those 180 courses, access to 85,000 different courses out there that will [00:10:00] help you be able to build that configurable curriculum, depending on what the employee’s looking to do.

There’s social learning tools and gamification elements in there. Who doesn’t like friendly competition between employees? There’s training recommendations and that’s going to enhance the employee learning experience. So they’ll be able to give recommendations based on what they’re interested in, what courses that they’ve taken to help pull some of those courses out of that 85, [00:10:30] 000 group, so they’d be able to make some suggestions. And then of course, we sort of touched on the robust and inclusive content library. 85,000 courses covering range of topics, industries, even professional or personal development as well. So whether you’re looking to get better at public speaking or leadership skills, you’ll have some courses in there that you can take.

So [00:11:00] with these capabilities of the learning management system, you’re going to have some benefits obviously, to this. So you’ll gain some productivity. You’re going to encourage your employees to grow professionally and personally. You’re going to improve retention, so you’ll be able to keep those employees engaged and happy with continuous learning opportunities. I know I myself, am always looking to expand my knowledge as things change, [00:11:30] companies change, industries change, the world changes. So we need to make sure that we’re on top of those changes and continually growing.

Ensuring compliance, very key in a lot of different states, transforming the way that your employees learn while you’re meeting your regulatory requirements. And then of course, increased engagement with the reward and recognition of employees with digital merit and badges and certificates.

So a lot of good [00:12:00] things out there that is going to help keep your employees engaged while providing you some protection against the regulatory requirements that you’re required to take. So at this point, I am going to turn it over to David and he will be able to take it from here.

David Braby: Very good. [00:12:30] Give me just a second to show my screen. All right. So Shaun has gone through a lot of the benefits of the learning management solution. So now we want to dive into it to actually show you what this looks like from an employee perspective as well as an administrative perspective. I want to start out just by showing you how your employees are going to access that learning management. So Shaun mentioned, the same place that they go to see [00:13:00] their check stub or clock in and look at their timecard, they’re going to be able to access that learning management. So making this accessible to the employee with a single login, making it convenient for them because they’re also going to be able to access this on any device, including their phone. So two key elements there to engaging the employee into the LMS.

So once they come in here and they click on that Learn and Grow, it’s going to launch them into their dashboard. [00:13:30] So as they come into the solution, you’ll notice that it defaults to their assignments. So any courses that you’ve assigned to those employees are going to show on a dashboard. It’s going to show the status here, whether it’s incomplete, past due, because you can set due dates for those courses and even have the system send out reminders to your employees to again, engage them in that learning process. But then it’s also going to show all their completed courses out here on their dashboard. So it’s transparent [00:14:00] to the employee as far as all the courses and paths, and we’ll talk about what a path is in just a minute, that they’ve gone through.

From this dashboard, you’ll notice there’s different sections across the center section here. There’s a My Courses where the employee can download courses from that content library to access those and complete those at their leisure. There’s even onsite registrations. So if you do have onsite trainings, you can use this for the employees to actually come [00:14:30] into the system, pull up a calendar and then register for those different types of courses. There’s a My Favorites list where the employees can favorite courses and paths, and then you can also, as administrators, recommend courses and different paths for them to complete. So right from their dashboard, they’re able to access all that training content that you’ve assigned out to them.

Now Shaun also mentioned the gamification. [00:15:00] A lot of employees are competitive, so they like to earn points and badges and ranks, and you have the ability to configure those within the system. And then of course, there’s always that leaderboard that they have access to so they can see where they’re at, as far as completing the majority of those courses compared to their colleagues.

Back at that dashboard level. They’re also going to be able to access and explore More Content. [00:15:30] So now, if you do opt in for the prebuilt content within the solution, this is where you can give your employees access to be able to go into the system and search for that content. Now, as they come into the search, it’s going to pull up the most popular content. Things around sexual harassment, diversity, unconscious bias are going to be displayed out here for them. But from an employee and from an administrative [00:16:00] perspective, you have the ability to use this AI chat.

So this is very handy, especially for those employees looking to re-skill or up-skill. They can come in and say, just type in a question. Maybe it’s, “How can I improve my leadership skills?” As I enter that [00:16:30] in system’s going to search the database, the content library of over 85,000 courses, come back with some questions. So, “What are you looking to do as far as leadership goes?” They can select one of those or put in a different topic, but it’s going to pull up courses from that library. Now as they click on one of these courses, this is where the system, they can come into the system and see a summary of that course [00:17:00] and also start that right from here. Some of these courses also give them a preview. So as they click on that content, they can just click on the preview and it’s going to go through about a 60 second video of what that content entails. So that way, they can determine which course is going to be most effective for them when it comes to that upskilling or reskilling.

So very valuable tool. As an administrator, of course, you have access to that as [00:17:30] well. So you can come in and you can start downloading courses that you can assign out to your employees.

Now as I come back into this search section, you also notice that in addition to some of the content that displays on here, there’s playlists. This is where, within that content library, those 85,000 courses, we’ve aggregated some of those courses together into what we call playlists. So groups of courses that [00:18:00] can be assigned out to those employees, from new managers to all kinds of content. As you can see, there is 436 different playlists that come prebuilt with the solution.

So that’s just a little bit about what the employee’s going to be able to see, and then, you as an administrator, are going to be able to have access to that content library. Now as an administrator, you’ll also have access [00:18:30] to the classroom admin. So a dashboard as you initially come in here. So you can see total users, how many paths have been completed, and paths are just groups of courses like playlists that you put together. Badges earned, certifications or certificates earned, but this is where you have access to be able to go in, load in your own content and then assign those courses out. So as you come in here, you notice in my [00:19:00] library here, this is all the content that I’ve loaded into the system. To do that, you just create a course, come in and select the different types. So you notice, there’s not just a video training in here, but there’s that onsite training, presentations can be loaded into the system and then tests and quizzes can be built around this content to ensure that your employees are learning from that content.

So very simple to do, even to be able to upload your own videos [00:19:30] and again, sign those out. So that’s where you’re going to build out the courses that you’re going to have the content to load into the system. Same with the paths. And paths, you have the ability to come in here and I’ll just go into my new hire orientation, but this is where you’re going to set those groups of courses together. And that’s where you’re going to add the content and permissions and you’re going to be able to select from your classroom. [00:20:00] So that’s going to be your content or those LMS Pro content courses, the 85,000 courses. So you’ll just group those together and you can assign those out to your employees. New hire orientation is a popular one. You can actually have this automated. So as new hires come into your company, they’re automatically assigned content that they immediately will engage those employees into that learning process and be part of that onboarding [00:20:30] experience for the employees.

You notice there’s a section here for those tests and quizzes, so you can build those out. The content that can come with the system has those tests and quizzes already built in for validation on the learning. But for your content, this is where you’re going to be able to build out those tests and quizzes as well as the gamification, assigning points to those courses and those paths that the employees complete, and [00:21:00] badges and ranks.

Down here in the administrative section, this is where you’re going to be able to build out teams. So in addition to being able to make assignments out to individual employees, you can also assign out at the organizational level. So for example, if someone moves from one department to the next or you want to assign training to an entire department, you’re going to be able to do that through the system [00:21:30] to make it easy and automated to get that training out.

But you can also build out into the system what we call teams. So you might have a group of employees that are across multiple locations or multiple departments where you can build that team out within the system and then assign based off of those teams. And one of the advantages of creating a team in here, is now, all that content can be reported to say team leaders [00:22:00] on a weekly basis. So weekly status reports and a weekly course and path status reports can go out automatically to those team leads. So a lot of reporting that’s built into the system to automate that to again ensure that the employees are engaged in their learning.

Now, the report section is also where you’re going to be able to come in and pull up all kinds of reports based off of certificates that the employees have earned. You’ll notice it’s going [00:22:30] to pull up the last 30 days, the average score, pass rate, fail rate, and you can filter down into individual courses to get that information too. One of the reports that I always like to show is this legal company course status. In here, it’s a complete list, a complete history of all the courses that have been assigned out to the employees as well as the status. If it’s complete, if it’s in progress, [00:23:00] if it hasn’t been started yet, you’re going to be able to access that information.

And because of the way that the isolve solution is intelligently connected, all this information, all the training information, all the content and the courses that the employees have completed, feeds back into their employee profile within the core HR solution. So as you come in as an administrator, [00:23:30] that’s where you’re going to be able to see that information on a training dashboard.

So give me just a second to come in here as the administrator. But right here in the admin tools is where you’ll be able to go into the employee analytics, down to this training dashboard and then again, right on a single dashboard, a listing of all the employees, all the training that they’ve completed. And if there’s expiration dates associated [00:24:00] with those trainings, you’re going to be able to see that too. But these dashboards act just like an Excel spreadsheet. In fact, you can export this dashboard to Excel just by clicking in the upper right-hand corner here. But you can also use this as a filter. So if you wanted to see everyone that’s attended that leadership training and completed it, you’re going to be able to do that with just a few clicks of the mouse.

So the solution enables you to load in all your content, have access to over 85,000 courses in a training [00:24:30] library to ensure that your employees are meeting the compliance for things mandated by the state and the federal government, like sexual harassment training. So not only ensuring that the employees complete that type of training, but now you have an audit trail of all that within the solution in multiple places to be able to access. That’s going to reduce the risk at the company level, ensuring that those employees are doing [00:25:00] those mandated courses.

So that’s what we had planned on showing you today. I’m going to turn this back over to Shaun to wrap it up for us.

Shaun Fowler: All right, perfect. Thank you, David. All right. Just get my screen here. Okay, so as we wrap up, I’ll let Jeff look [00:25:30] to see if we have any questions. In the meantime, I’ll go through what we do for future proofing our solution here. We all know that finding a learning management system and moving forward on that, we obviously don’t want to do this every year, so we want to make sure that our solution is keeping in touch with competitive updates, industry, market and compliance updates. We’re doing continuous product development on it to make sure that it is [00:26:00] streamlined, doing what it’s supposed to do, and including any features and functionality that the market is now including. We have biweekly release schedules, modern responsive web design, and a true multi-tenant database. So we’re always working on our solutions here to make sure that it’s the cream of the crop, the best of the best solution that we offer to our clients. And so with that, [00:26:30] turn it over to Jeff. Do we have any questions?

Jeff Plakans: We have plenty of questions.

Shaun Fowler: Great.

Jeff Plakans: So David, thank you so much for your presentation. This actually went a lot deeper than I think the last time we did this together, which means that there’s been some considerable improvements in Learn and Grow and its capabilities, specifically, the course. The new additional courses that are available really opened things up for a lot [00:27:00] of different companies. And one of the things why that’s worth mentioning is, there was a question here about what types of businesses or industries does this work really, really well for, and which ones doesn’t it work really, really well for? So maybe you could talk a little bit about your experience with that and that would be great.

David Braby: Yeah, so because of that learning, that content library [00:27:30] that has been opened up, it really spans all different types of industries within the solution. Where before, we were limited as to the content we could offer to different clients, now with that, it can really cover just about any industry, from health to hospitality to manufacturing, where you’ve got a lot of OSHA type courses that are [00:28:00] as part of the library that are accessible now. So really, it covers the full gamut, is what we’re hearing from our clients. And that’s the biggest thing that’s come down the pipe in the last couple of months, is that content library and being able to offer those different types of trainings to everyone.

Jeff Plakans: So I think it’s a related question here and it’s, [00:28:30] can an employee do all their learning from their phones or does it only work for those with computers?

David Braby: No, all this can be done from their phones. In fact, I have personal experience with that. All the training that I get from Learn and Grow, I do on my phone. Makes it very convenient, I’m sitting on my couch doing the training, I can do it anywhere. So that’s again, part of that engagement factor with the employees. Instead of them having to sit in [00:29:00] front of a computer and do this, they can pull it up on their phone when it’s convenient for them and they have the time to do it.

Jeff Plakans: So it’s worth mentioning as well, we’ve heard from employers before that they’re like, “Well, my employees don’t sit in front of computers so they could never do this.” So that’s off the table now with this and because of the expanded number of classes that are available, again, if your employees are in a warehouse [00:29:30] and they need to learn about safety and they need to learn about driving forklifts and things like that, they’re capable of doing all of that. They don’t need a computer to do it. It makes it super easy. So thanks for the answers to that one.

Now somebody asked for course paths, can I include them for only certain people? I think that means, can you assign them? How does that work? Would you create it [00:30:00] for everybody?

David Braby: Yeah, once you’ve created that path, it can be assigned to anyone. So individuals, entire departments, locations, you determine who you want that assigned to. So it’s very dynamic and flexible that way. It’s not, you develop a course path and then that has to be assigned to everyone. That’s not the case.

Jeff Plakans: Okay. There’s another one here. It says, [00:30:30] can you repeat what you said about our options? Do we have to make our own courses or are they created for us? So can you go through all that again, the detail around that, David?

David Braby: Yeah, so there’s two different levels of the learning management system. So there’s just the Learn and Grow, which is where we give you access to that administrative side to be able to load in your [00:31:00] own content. So if you have content already, you’ve got videos that you’ve made or presentations, that can be loaded into the system and then assigned out. The second level is where we also offer the 85,000 courses. So if you go down that path, you already have that content library, you can still load in your training and you can even combine that, your training and the pre-configured courses, into paths. [00:31:30] So you have the ability, again, to be very flexible as far as getting that training out to the employees. So two different levels, just the LMS itself and then the LMS with the course content.

Jeff Plakans: Somebody asked on the video training, do you have to upload the video or can you just put a link in there?

David Braby: You can do either. So you could actually upload that video [00:32:00] and so it’s embedded into that course training or if you want to just put a link out there, you can do that too. And we’ve had clients do both. So for example, let me give you an example there, they might have a training that’s out on YouTube, so they can’t just load that into there as one of their videos. They will just place a link out there as part of that training course. And then when it’s assigned to the employee, they just give them [00:32:30] instructions to click on the link that takes them out to YouTube and then they can come back in and take a test on that training.

Jeff Plakans: Okay, that makes a ton of sense. We get this one almost every time we do this. What does LMS stand for?

David Braby: Stands for Learning Management System.

Jeff Plakans: Okay, awesome. I knew the answer to that, but thank you. That wasn’t [00:33:00] for me. All right, excellent. Okay guys, anything that you want our audience to take away from our session? If it could be only one thing, what thing would it be? David, go.

David Braby: I would say, this is a great way to engage your employees in learning because it’s so convenient for them to be able to access all that on their phone. And engaged employees are more productive employees and they’re going to stay with you longer.

Jeff Plakans: [00:33:30] Shaun, how about you?

Shaun Fowler: Yeah, David stole mine, but that’s a good one. But I think just creating the different workflows within the isolved system, having it joined into the system itself adds a lot of convenience to the employers out there streamlining their process. And as David had showed, there’s a lot of different reports out there that could just be automate a lot of the workflow for you so that you’re not wasting your time [00:34:00] running these different courses down. You get it all at your fingertips. So I think, it being embedded within the system and having those dashboards and reports at your fingertips will help engage your employees as well.

Jeff Plakans: And I’m going to finally lead off with the following, and that is, for all of you business owners out there or operators, it is far more valuable and you’ll get far more benefit from upskilling [00:34:30] an existing employee than from going and finding a new one with the skills that you want and it’ll also be significantly less expensive. And don’t we all love that? So with that, Shaun, let’s take us home and finish this off.

Shaun Fowler: Yeah, so we appreciate you joining us today for the Learn and Grow webinar. Hope you found some valuable information here. If you have further questions, ’cause I know, [00:35:00] in Commonwealth, they’ll be putting this on their website so you’ll be able to go back and view it. We all know that sometimes it takes a little bit to digest and if you have questions after the fact, reach out to your service rep over at Commonwealth, they’ll be able to help you out with any questions regarding the benefits or the service itself as well as pricing. So with that, Jeff, thank you so much for the time and putting it together today. David, thank you for walking [00:35:30] us through the demonstration and showing us exactly what this solution could do. And thank you, everyone for joining us today.

Jeff Plakans: Really appreciate your time. Absolutely. Thank you for giving us your lunch hour. A recording will be coming, to those of you who’ve attended or even those who signed up and did not attend. We do look forward to hearing from you, your customer service and support specialists and account managers. Look forward from hearing you. Have a great rest of the day. Thank you very much.