Melton City Council
Empowering Learning & Development in Local Government: ELMO Software’s impact on Melton City Council.
The Challenges
“There were not enough people to do what we needed to do,” the L&D Officer says. “We were running spreadsheets and old-school registration forms – it was very clunky.”
At the start of each financial year, the L&D Officer and her team develop a yearly corporate training calendar and a leadership training calendar, consisting of numerous learning initiatives that staff can opt-in for across the coming year. In the past, staff were required to select sessions and dates via registration forms, which the People and Culture team had to process manually. “That’s 2,000 registration forms at the start of each year that needed be to be processed manually,” she says. “It was a waste of time and a waste of resources.”
The process was unnecessarily laborious for staff. “As frustrating as it was for us, it was frustrating for our staff to have to go through such a rigorous process just to attend a training session,” she says. The desire for a streamlined and intuitive system was felt by the entire organisation.
The Solution
As Melton City Council expanded to support the increasing needs of the community, it became clear to the People and Culture team that managing learning & development with antiquated processes was inefficient.
Prior to implementing ELMO’s learning suite earlier this year, Melton City Council already had a learning management system in place, but found it wasn’t hitting the mark in terms of what the organisation needed. The decision to move to ELMO involved years of research and conversations with other vendors in the market. In the end, ELMO was the obvious choice. “We wanted a program that was going to be very flexible for our future needs,” the L&D Officer says, adding that ELMO Course Library was a main driver in the decision-making. “It’s an easy-to-use function. We’ve used the existing eLearning modules and have been able to adapt them to the organisation,” she says.
ELMO Course Builder is another solution that excited the L&D Officer back when she was researching vendors. A long-term strategy for Melton City Council is to move all their induction training online, and this process is made easier with Course Builder, which allowed the People and Culture team to create bespoke courses. “In the future, anything might come up – whether it’s in the induction space, the systems space, process changes, change management, etc. – and there are so many things we can use Course Builder for to help us drag that engagement across the organisation,” she says.
The Benefits
The L&D Officer has been incredibly impressed with the difference ELMO has made to her team’s productivity in a short amount of time. Within just two months of implementation, the headache of having to manually process documents has gone, and the team now has more time to work on enhancing training initiatives and driving organisational engagement.
She said having a platform that manages and streamlines learning & development has been a game-changer. “The best thing that we’ve found about ELMO so far, which has honestly changed our lives, is the ability to set up the entire training calendar on ELMO,” she says. “All the courses are created there, people can register online, and we don’t have any manual processing!”
The L&D Officer also praised the automated notifications possible through the ELMO system. “Being able to customise the notifications and getting the system to send out reminders and calendar links is great,” she says. The organisation has also found value in ELMO’s discussion boards, which have helped to create a peer-to-peer learning community.
“Before ELMO, the organisation really lacked internal networking and the sharing of resources and ideas,” she says. “However, with the discussion boards, people can communicate online before and after training sessions and keep that conversation going. We are really enjoying the community aspect we’re able to create.”
She also rated ELMO’s customer service as “top notch”. “When we’ve had a question, the response rate has been a couple of hours, which is unheard of. They’ve gone as far as walking us through an issue by sharing their screen if I’ve had trouble,” she says.
The move to ELMO was a big decision, but for the People and Culture team and everyone at Melton City Council, it has been a huge success.