5 Steps To Employee Compliance Training Success
Everybody knows that a corporate training program focused on employee skills development is one of the most important investments in a company's future.
There is, however, a kind of training that's perhaps even more important ― can you guess what is it? We are talking, of course, about compliance training.
The Importance Of Compliance Training
So, what makes compliance training so important?
For starters, compliance training is often not a choice, but a necessity. In many sectors, from the healthcare industry and aviation to construction, maritime and manufacturing, several forms of compliance training are mandated by industry bodies and required by state and/or international laws.
Even when employee compliance training is left to the discretion of the employer, neglecting it can be costly. This can be because of fines imposed due to employee errors (such as not following waste disposal guidelines) or from lawsuits originating from employees themselves (for example, when they blame a workplace accident on a lack of workplace compliance training).
In this article, we're going to give you 5 tips on how to plan your compliance training program, with an emphasis on facilitating compliance training for busy employees that might already be juggling several work-related projects.
1. The KISS Principle
The KISS principle is a decades-old design guideline which has oft been used in all kinds of fields, from aviation and software development to online training.
It simply suggests that we "Keep It Small and Simple" (KISS, get it?). Employee compliance training is all about giving your learners the gist of what they need to know ― not about blathering on about each and every subtlety of the subject matter.
Following the KISS principle makes your job easier: you get to write less content, and only focus on what's important. It also makes your busy employees' job easier; they have less material to study, and it more closely matches the tests they need to pass.
2. Don't Forget The Why
While keeping things simple (as per our #1 tip), you should still take the time to explain to your learners the reasoning behind what you teach them.
Depending on the industry, compliance training can often look like a long list of rules to be memorized. And while these might be enough to have your employees pass their compliance tests, they're not enough for them to understand why they should follow them.
So, if you're unsure about how to ensure employees comply with policies and procedures, this is the big secret. Spending some time to cover the logic behind compliance rules will result in employees that not only better remember said rules, but are also less likely to ignore them in practice (because they understand their importance).
3. Time Is Of The Essence
Your employees have a lot on their plates. When work is at its peak and deadlines are looming, the last thing they want is some big distraction ― which is how employee compliance training is often seen as.
It's your responsibility as the designer of their compliance training program to respect their limited time, and plan your training program around it.
Let them study at their own pace and on their own chosen time. In other words, opt for asynchronous online training over classroom-based lectures and webinars/teleconference sessions.
If your subject matter forces you to include some instructor-led training sessions as part of your compliance program, schedule them for when work is low, or for when there is some free time.
Don't have employees stay after work for your training sessions ― not only will they hate that, but they'll also be tired and unfocused.
4. Make It Engaging
Compliance training is often seen as unrelated to your employees everyday tasks, and thus a necessary evil. Explaining them the reasoning behind it (as per tip #2) will go a long way towards having them understand its importance, but that doesn't mean they won't still find it boring.
Your next challenge, then, is to make your content more engaging, and there are many tools you can use for this purpose, including but not limited to: storytelling (weave your compliance content into a series of narratives), video (we are visual creatures), humor (throw in some jokes), and interactivity.
Modern learning environments also offer so-called "gamification" tools, game-inspired behaviors and mechanics that allow you to turn your compliance study content into a light competition between your learners for being the best on the leaderboard.
5. Use A Real LMS
You could try to do your compliance training with PowerPoints and printed handouts. Or by having one or more instructors teach classes of 20 or 50 people bored out of their minds.
Or you could join the rest of us in the 21st century and use a real, robust LMS.
Using a Cloud LMS, such as TalentLMS, means that you will be able to deploy your employee compliance training program in a couple of minutes, with no installation and no maintenance hassles. What's best, your employee compliance training will be accessible to your learners from whether device they use, whether desktop or mobile and even when offline, so that they can truly study at their own time and pace.
A proper LMS like TalentLMS also has many other advantages over classroom-based courses or some generic "Document Management" system. For one, it's specially designed for online training and will let you easily incorporate all kinds of existing material, from PDFs and PowerPoints to images and multimedia.
What's best, something like TalentLMS will also be useful for all kinds of training duty, above and beyond compliance training, from employee onboarding to skills development, and even commercial eLearning. Add features such as Reporting, Course, User and Branch management, Gamification, and Testing, to the above, and you got yourself a complete training solution that you can introduce all-at-once or piecemeal to your organization.
Conclusion
As the global economy raises in complexity, breadth, and scope, compliance training needs will only go up. And while some of those compliance requirements can often be bureaucratic, others cover important areas of doing business that a modern enterprise can't afford to neglect.
In this article, we've given you 5 general tips that can be applied to all kinds of compliance training content. Use these, along with an investment in the right training tools, to build a comprehensive compliance training strategy and enforce the right employee compliance policy at your business.
