Using Technology To Mimic Everyday Work Situations
Compliance may be one of the most important aspects of conducting business, but an area that gets vastly neglected. Let's be honest, it’s easy to get stuck in the thought process of “it's just common sense” when the reality is compliance is much more complicated than that. Rules and regulations within various industries are constantly changing and one misstep can mean millions of dollars out of the window.
With that said, it is not enough to simply push information to your employees or customers. It has to stick, which is no easy feat when rules constantly change and the material is less than interesting. Yet, compliance training content tends to be lengthy and often irrelevant for certain roles. Making compliance training memorable is a challenge when there is a good chance certain employees may never actually have to deal with it, but state or industry requirements often say you need to educate employees regardless.
This is where immersive digital learning can be a godsend, allowing employees the opportunity to test the knowledge they gain in a safe, simulated environment.
Compliance Training Simulation Best Practices
When looking to add simulations to your learning ecosystem, it is important to investigate a few different things. For starters, picking the right subjects is going to be really important due to the time and resources it takes to create these custom eLearning activities. It is also important to consider what parts of your compliance training might be tricky, dangerous, or require some level of skill to accomplish. Simulations are great in those instances because they allow for some “real world” experience without any detriment to your business.
Including branching scenarios is a great way to allow your employees to sharpen their skillsets within your industry in a less stressful environment. The beauty of using branching scenarios is that they can mimic everyday challenges and decisions that have to be made in your particular industry. The more comfortable you can make your employees feel making those decisions in a non-stressful environment, the better they will do when the bullets start flying in real life.
Compliance Training Case Study
HSS Inc was faced with trying to teach healthcare professionals through eLearning how to identify aggressive behavior early on and diffuse potentially volatile situations before they escalate. With that knowledge in mind, HSS needed their program to be interactive, engaging, and informative while also being concise so as to limit the amount of time they took important healthcare professionals out of the field.
AllenComm created five custom eLearning modules that touched on prevention, empathy, and teamwork through gamification and media-type elements in the hopes employees would walk away feeling confident (with some virtual practice) to diffuse these situations in real life.
What AllenComm was able to create for HSS to replicate what healthcare employees face in everyday emergency situations can be applied to your compliance training. Much of compliance, just like emergency situations, is all about how well you can think on your toes and draw upon practiced knowledge.
Some activities that worked in this instance that can be applied to compliance training include immersive video scenarios and gamified knowledge checks, which will allow your employees to practice needed skills and potential consequences of their responses in a safe environment. AllenComm was also able to publish the training in a responsive format that had broad accessibility so that no matter where your employees are they can draw upon and continue to receive necessary compliance training on the go.
Preparing for the Unexpected
Using learning tactics such as immersive video scenarios like HSS can accurately represent the compliance challenges your employees will face on the job. Moreover, this method can easily illustrate and juxtapose the right and wrong way to deal with daily job situations.
When dealing with compliance that keeps everyone safe and your business out of trouble, there is no sacrifice too great. Investing to make sure your employees are knowledgeable and well-prepared will not only save you money down the road but give you and everyone else peace of mind in the workplace. By making immersive compliance training available, you set up your employees to learn, retain, and practice situations in a safe environment, better preparing them for unexpected challenges.
