How To Make Compliance Training More Relatable To Your eLearning Audience
Compliance training is an essential component of employee onboarding. Knowing what the government regulations are with respect to handling customer data, sharing company secrets, and also knowing what constitutes “conflict of interest” are important to both the employer and their employees. Preparing an eLearning module that engages your audience on these topics can be tricky. This is because compliance training can include a whole bunch of topics ranging from anti-bullying, data privacy, ethics to code of conduct. Learners may not equally relate to each of these topics and the eLearning programs thus end up being academic documents that one simply has to “get done with”. Here is how to make compliance training more relatable to your employees and offer them a more interesting, as well as more effective, eLearning experience.
The 4 Principles Of Compliance Training
Training your learners to assess a situation and make their own judgment about possible compliance violations can be broadly described as the 4 principles of compliance training:
1. Don’t Focus On Wrong Doing.
A good chunk of non-compliance issues at the workplace are those that lie in the “gray area”. For instance, a recent compliance issue at a financial institution cropped up because an employee, whose work computer was in for repair, copied work data in a pen-drive in order to be able to work from home. While this is a clear case of non-compliance, employees do not realize this because such situations do not explicitly come up during compliance training. Compliance eLearning modules should stress less on wrong doing, but instead let learners go through everyday situations and let them independently assess “What could go wrong?”.
2. Assess Own Risk Profile.
Every employee is unique and their risk levels are different, based on their demographic and job description. It is more likely for a System Administrator to violate data privacy when compared to a marketing analyst (who may not have equal access to such confidential data). Build a compliance eLearning module that can uniquely study the risk levels of your learners and thus build a package that is customized for them.
3. Test It Out.
A lot of learning material in compliance training is common sense. What matters is how employees apply their learning out in the real world. The best way to impart compliance training is by letting learners “test it out” with real life case studies and “What would you do” questionnaires. The eLearning module must contain a comprehensive list of real life case studies; especially those that are in the gray area, to help learners understand the real-life implications of what they learn and test their instinctual behavior under similar circumstances.
4. Access To Systems.
Government regulations keep changing all the time. From a business’ perspective, this means a need for continuous learning for both existing employees and new recruits. This can hinder productivity to a great extent if unchecked. One of the core essentials of a compliance training eLearning module is to help the learners know how and where to access the tools and materials regarding the latest compliance related regulations. By training them to teach themselves, businesses are in a better position to ensure continued compliance as well as make sure that such eLearning programs do not hinder workplace productivity.
Segmenting The Compliance Training Module
Compliance sessions can be boring, unless the learners can relate to what they are being taught. One way to make compliance training more relatable to the learner is by segmenting the package into sub-modules based on topic. This way, a module on data privacy could be imparted as part of information management onboarding. Similarly, a compliance training module on anti-bribery or anti-money laundering could be imparted as part of a class on Ethics.
Such a strategy serves two purposes: Firstly, it helps the learners get the bigger picture as part of their compliance training lessons. Learners are in a better position to understand how their compliance training lessons help them at work. Also, since there is likely to be a lot of overlap between a lesson on say, deal negotiation strategies and compliance training on anti-bribery, it is much more efficient to impart all these related lessons in one package rather than duplicate the efforts through multiple modules.
