Building Your Compliance Training Program From The Ground Up
Once you understand the importance of compliance training and know what types apply to your employees, the next step is making it happen. Off-the-shelf compliance training may be a good option for you in some areas, but you may want to look at creating custom training to best fit your company’s specific needs.
If you’re ready to build your own training, there are three things you’ll want to take into consideration:
- What to include in your training
- How to deliver your training
- How to measure its effectiveness
What To Include In Compliance training
Some of what you put into training will be obvious. There are rules and regulations as well as best practices dictated by compliance laws. But in addition to the required content, you’ll want to include elements that help employees learn and retain information. Consider the following:
Context
Give context to help learners understand how and why the content affects their jobs. For example:
- Draw from true-to-life examples to demonstrate policies and procedures
- Illustrate principles with case studies or scenarios that will be familiar to learners
- Have employees practice recognizing and responding to issues around regulations by role-playing situations they might actually find themselves in
This kind of context helps solidify the importance of the content. It also makes the concepts more memorable by helping learners see them in specific use cases.
Specifics
Employees need to be motivated to comply with regulations. But they also need to know how to do so. Context is a good foundation to get people invested in your training. But you also need to provide the nitty-gritty. Cover the basics by answering questions like:
- What are the rules?
- What do violations look like?
- How should employees respond if they see one?
Let people know how to correct problems and properly report them.
Examples
Often, difficult concepts can be more easily taught when you adhere to the “show don’t tell” principle of good writing. Spelling out the processes around safely handling hazardous materials or running machinery in-text can leave room for interpretation or misunderstanding. Consider showing the procedures in a helpful video instead.
Similarly, difficult concepts like responding to data breaches or navigating HR systems can feel flat or unclear in writing. But if you bring them to life with a video or instructive animation, learners can make relevant connections.
Practice
Putting skills and concepts into action has been proven to help learners understand and retain training content. Give employees the chance to really dig into the content by providing opportunities to test their understanding.
Compliance training often requires some sort of assessment to show completion. But you can go beyond the basic highlights that test recall. Try offering assessments or role-play exercises that test application, as well. For example, “A client just contacted you with concerns that their account data has been breached. You check and see that a login has occurred that wasn’t the client. What do you do next?”
When employees respond to specific scenarios with the correct information, they’re using more than just recall. They’re using deeper thinking skills that trigger memory and a more comprehensive understanding.
How To Deliver Compliance Training
Online training is an efficient and effective way to roll out and maintain your learning strategy consistently. The frequency of training - including regular courses and new hire onboarding - and the convenience of any time, any place learning for large or remote teams have made it a standard.
Online delivery requires a robust learning management system (LMS) to support delivery, assessment, tracking, and follow-up. Find a system that can enroll your employees, register their interactions, and assess their learning. Aside from hosting your training content, a good LMS can help you:
Schedule Training
As mentioned, compliance training is not a one-time occurrence. You want a system that can offer regular schedules for annual training sessions, and incorporate required training outside the schedule for new hires. Many learning management systems can create schedules and share them with learners. Use this feature to send employees reminders to enroll or nudges to finish a course.
Assess And Improve The Learning Experience
You can also use LMS functionality to send out follow-up tests and surveys once a participant has completed a course. Following up will let you know what’s working in your training and what’s not, and allow you to make adjustments as needed.
Document Compliance Completion
Tracking progress is crucial to compliance training. You’re required to log that employees have completed certain courses. You want to know that employees are going through their training when they’re supposed to. But you also want to know that they’re understanding and applying new knowledge.
The metrics you can gather from your LMS are invaluable to building your training program. And that brings us to the final concept of this chapter: how do you ensure the training is having the desired effect?
How To Measure Training Effectiveness
A survey conducted in 2018 around ethics and compliance showed that 32% of organizations don’t measure how well their compliance programs are working. Failing to do so leaves a big part of your organization’s success to chance. Your training should benefit your employees and organization. To make sure it does, you need to be aware of how your training efforts are going. You can get a good picture of what’s happening by using your LMS to track some useful metrics. Look beyond completion rates and assessment scores.
Check on things like how quickly employees are completing their training and what content is most popular. You can also get a sense of how well the content is transferring to actual on-the-job behavior. Provide surveys to gauge whether employees find their training valuable. Reach out to managers and colleagues with surveys about performance they’re seeing that aligns with the content.
Conclusion
The first step toward building a great training program is to know what to put into it. Make content clear by providing context and specific direction. Make it relevant by giving employees true-to-life examples and chances to practice.
And if you really want employees to enact behavior change, you’ll want to explore your LMS functionality and instructional design a little more. Using your resources to make your training engaging is a sure-fire way to get people on board with compliance efforts.
Download the eBook Compliance Training Guide: How To Make It Work to learn why compliance training is so crucial for your organization and how to leave a lasting impression on your team, even if they're working remotely.
Further Reading:
- Practice for Knowledge Acquisition (Not Drill and Kill)
- 7 Ways To Use LMS Metrics To Create More Targeted eLearning Resources
- The LMS built for success
