In today’s corporate world, there’s so much to accomplish that policy management and employee training can take a backseat to other pressing matters, including customer service, profits, and operating as cheaply and efficiently as possible. Often, supervisors scramble to ensure everything is running smoothly, and many times are unable to find the time, funds, or energy to train their employees and ensure they’ve signed off on (and actually understand) what they need to know.
What’s a supervisor to do? Effective training is a must-have for any organization, but many are hesitant to tackle overflowing file cabinets of paper policies, find the time and people to teach in-person courses, or deal with 10 different programs that all work together to accomplish a common goal – ensuring their personnel are trained properly, safely, accurately, and efficiently. And who can blame them? Training is supposed to make everything run like a well-oiled machine, not stress out its proctors. Signed policies are supposed to guide personnel to make the right choices, not overwhelm or intimidate them. Below, we discuss a few common policy- and training-related problems in the workplace and how the PowerDMS™ suite can help make personnel management an all-in-one-place, affordable, and effective breeze of a task.
Policy Management
Problem: You have a file cabinet (or multitude of file cabinets) overflowing with paperwork, stuffed in multiple folders and in no set order. You aren’t even sure if some of the paperwork is up-to-date, and you don’t even want to think about tackling it. We won’t even mention the paper cuts that undoubtedly ensue on a daily basis!
Solution: PowerDMS™ is IDS’ flagship program. It eliminates the need for paper policies completely, and serves as a virtual, easily navigable file cabinet. Search for needed policies in seconds, and attach the newest policy revisions right within the virtual document. Assign documents to groups and individuals for simple approval and review, allowing users to sign off on documents with electronic signatures.
Aside from saving you the hassle of thumbing through page after page and keeping track of policy revisions, signatures, and certifications, PowerDMS™ is a great way to support a healthy environment! Check out the goGreen section of our website to learn more.
Training
Problem: You simply don’t have the time, people, funds, and/or location(s) to hold on-site training classes regularly, even though it’d be nice to train a bunch of employees at once.
Solution: PowerTRAINING, a program within the PowerDMS™ suite, allows you to create online, self-paced courses using our interactive Course Designer. These hands-off courses save you the stress of proctor payroll, time constraints, and other obstacles that prevent you from certifying and teaching many employees at once. With PowerTRAINING, you can create multiple-sectioned courses consisting of as many students (or “seats”) as you choose. You can attach elements like documents, tests, surveys, videos, and PowerPoint presentations to courses, allowing students to view these items right within the course itself. Grade and certify students individually or collectively. With PowerTRAINING, the possibilities are virtually endless.
Testing
Problem: Your employees are certified, but you feel like they sign off on policies without really reading them and worry that, if the time comes to utilize what they’ve learned, they may be in the dark. You don’t have time to grade tests when there’s work to be done in the real world!
Solution: PowerTEST, part of the PowerDMS™ suite, ensures your personnel truly understand what they’re reading, viewing, or listening to, and gives you the peace of mind in knowing they will know what to do in the times of a crisis. Use PowerTEST to create a test on any subject you choose. Attach the test to a document, course, or assign it as a stand-alone task. With a multitude of test-question types like multiple choice, short answer, and true/false, your employees will never get bored. PowerTEST even grades your tests automatically, allowing you to use the time you’d have otherwise spent grading on more pressing tasks.
Surveying
Problem: You feel like your employees have an opinion and want to make sure you’re making everyone happy by being as fair as possible. Some personnel may not feel comfortable sharing their opinions, but you want their voices to be heard, too.
Solution: PowerSURVEY, another piece of the PowerDMS™ puzzle, lets you elicit feedback from your personnel in a simple-to-use, easily readable format. Create surveys in minutes and assign them to courses, or as stand-alone tasks. Use a variety of test-question types, such as short answer and true/false, to keep things interesting. PowerSURVEY analyzes data automatically, displaying it in an easy-to-read, graphical format. Best of all, you can assign anonymous surveys to ensure confidentiality, giving all your personnel the comfort of knowing their opinions matter.
Miscellaneous Issues
Problem: You have a policy-management and/or training system that requires you to install a program on every computer it’s being used from, or a company server that can’t quite support a local set of policy-management software.
Solution: PowerDMS™ is installed one time on your company’s server, or you can access it remotely from IDS’ servers. You’ll never have to worry about space or tedious installations.
Problem: You use (or would use) countless different programs to accomplish the tasks of certifying, training, testing, and surveying your personnel.
Solution: The PowerDMS™ suite takes care of all your personnel-management tasks. Condense your personnel management by certifying, training, testing, and surveying employees in a single environment, eliminating the need for multiple user accounts and saving you the headache of keeping track of many different programs.
PowerDMS™ 