Compliance training is important for a number of reasons. It helps your organization adhere to laws and regulations, mitigate the risk of penalties, and promote workplace safety by minimizing mishaps. It also fosters ethical behavior and transparency, which helps protect a company’s reputation. To ensure that your employees actively participate in such training programs and retain the necessary compliance information, must take additional measures.
Effective compliance training is essential for organizations across all industries. Even if your industry is not highly regulated, like healthcare, manufacturing, and food and beverages, you still need to comply with certain government regulations, company laws, and ethical standards. If you have been using traditional training methods like PowerPoint presentations or long lectures, you need to shift to a more personalized approach that focuses on employee engagement and timely completion of courses. Let’s take a closer look at some of the best practices you should follow.
Choose the Right Tools for Compliance Training
Before you develop a compliance training program, it is important to make sure that you have all the necessary tools at your disposal. While you may take advantage of different solutions to strengthen your compliance training program, there is no alternative to an easy learning management system (LMS). These LMS solutions cover the majority of your compliance training needs. From simplifying your training materials to helping with tracking and reporting learners’ progress, this solution can enhance compliance training methods significantly.
While choosing an LMS platform for your training needs, look for the following features:
- Seamless integration with your existing systems (such as HR system, Payroll, and ERP)
- Templates that simplify putting together your training materials
- Option to use different delivery methods, including different types of media, to maximize learner engagement
- Ongoing user support to help your organization use it more effectively and get immediate assistance in case of any maintenance issues
Choosing the right LMS platform for compliance training will help you create compelling, engaging compliance training content that will help you achieve your goals and stay compliant.
Create Role-Specific Training
While developing a compliance training program for your organization, you need to identify who needs what training. It is important to note that the one-size-fits-all approach does not work in compliance training. While there are some basic rules and regulations that everyone in an organization needs to follow, you will find a lot more regulations that are more role-specific. So, instead of creating a general training program for all the employees in your organization, create role-specific training based on the compliance requirements.
You can take the help of the LMS solution to create tailored compliance training for specific roles and responsibilities within the organization. This will help you keep individuals engaged and focused. Also, it ensures that every employee has knowledge of relevant rules and regulations, avoiding complications related to non-compliance.
Set Clear Training Objectives
The next thing you must do is set clear objectives for compliance training in your organization. You can do that by answering some basic questions:
- What standards do your employees need to follow?
- What are the employee requirements?
- What information do your employees need to be efficient at their jobs?
When you have clarity about what you want to achieve with the compliance training, it becomes easier for you to shape your training content accordingly. You can also plan the content delivery in a way that enables your employees to achieve the compliance training goals successfully. You can ask your L&D team to measure the progress of existing training programs to get some crucial insights, which may add more clarity to your strategy.
Make Your Training Modules Interactive
Gone are the days when long lectures and PowerPoint presentations used to be effective. Now, nobody has the time or patience to sit through hours of endless PowerPoint presentations or repetitive lectures. If you want your employees to engage in the training programs and retain the knowledge shared during the training sessions, you need to make the training modules interesting.
Thanks to the LMS solutions, you can now implement gamified eLearning modules that incorporate quizzes, leaderboards, reward points, and more. While you cannot do too much about the rules and regulations that you need to discuss in the compliance training modules, you can definitely work on how the training materials are delivered. You can also take advantage of AR and VR technologies to create immersive learning experiences for your employees.
Incentivize Completion and Ongoing Compliance
You can instruct your learning and development (L&D) team to incentivize the training program. For example, keeping rewards for the first 10 people to complete the compliance training can motivate a lot of your employees to actively participate in the program. The price can be useful things like gift cards, additional paid leaves, or electronic gadgets. If you are running on a tight budget, recognizing the achievements of those employees in company channels can also be motivating.
Gamification is also a great option. You can maintain a leaderboard for the participants and reward badges for completing each hurdle. This practice will help introduce an element of competitiveness in the training program. You should also focus on ongoing compliance and reward teams or individuals who consistently adhere to compliance standards. Just be careful about the company culture and interpersonal relationships before putting too much stress on competition during such training sessions.
Offer Regular Refresher Courses
You must be aware that compliance rules and regulations change with time. Thus, it becomes necessary for organizations to update their training modules as per the compliance requirements. At the same time, the workforce also changes in organizations. While some people leave and new employees are recruited, some climb up the management ladder, where their job roles change. By offering refresher courses, you can keep compliance training in line with their specific roles.
With LMS solutions, you can streamline the process and set deadlines for the courses. This will help you keep track of course completion and which employee needs additional training to update their knowledge. You can also introduce compliance training as a formal part of the onboarding process. Those who have already done the core training can simply participate in a refresher course to get updates. Always try to keep the refresher sessions short and impactful to ensure better retention of knowledge.
Conclusion
Compliance training is not very different from the other forms of learning and development. However, the stakes are higher in this case, as non-compliance can lead to major penalties for the company. With the aforementioned strategies, you can streamline the compliance training process and ensure that every employee is able to retain the compliance knowledge essential to their role.
