How To Make Employee Compliance Training Work

How To Make Employee Compliance Training Work
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Summary: Compliance training can be more challenging than regular corporate training. For one, the content is usually determined externally, by state or industry bodies. What’s worse, compliance slips can often result in hefty fines. Here are 7 tips to help you craft an effective compliance training program.

7 Tips For An Effective Employee Compliance Training Program

Compliance training takes many forms. It can refer to legally required training (e.g., set by the state or by industry bodies). It can also refer to company mandated training in the company's policies and codes of conduct. Whichever the case, getting compliance training right can help a business avoid many issues and misfortunes—not to mention dodge some hefty fines.

Fortunately, it's not hard to build an effective compliance training program. Just follow our 7 actionable tips, and you'll be on the right track in no time.

1. Focus On What's Required

A critical insight for crafting effective compliance training courses is that you don't have to exhaust the subject matter. Focus on what's actually required (by the law or by the company) for employees to know.

After all, your learners don't need to become experts. They just need to pass their compliance exams—and that's much easier when all extraneous material has been left out.

2. Make It Engaging

Compliance training is a serious matter, but this doesn't mean your training content can't be entertaining. A little humor, for example, will make your learners pay attention, and it might even get them to enjoy taking the course instead of viewing it as a chore. Video, audio, and interactive elements are also great attention grabbers. Use them as primary or supplementary material to engage learners, and to better illustrate the abstract concepts covered in your courses.

Last, but not least, gamification elements (available in the more capable compliance training LMS platforms), will have your learners competing in who will complete their compliance training first.

3. Make It Relevant

People learn better when they can see the relevance (or applicability, if you prefer) of what they're taught. That's doubly important in a business setting, where anything not directly related with an employee's job is considered a useless diversion.

To combat this, try to show your learners the ways in which what they're learning in their compliance training courses applies to their everyday workflows. Give examples of potential compliance slips, and of how costly (and damaging to the company's reputation) they can be. Explain to your employees how they can take advantage of their compliance training knowledge in job-related scenarios—this will help them understand their relevance and pay more attention.

4. Go Hands-On

Another way to make employees understand the relevance of their compliance training is to move beyond examples, into actual real-world use cases.

Instructor-Led Training, whether in a classroom or through a teleconference session, is an excellent fit for this, as it allows the instructor to interact with the learners directly and physically demonstrate the relevant techniques.

5. Keep It Small

We already talked about the need to make your compliance training content focused and succinct. Serving your employee compliance training program in bite-sized chunks, and taking advantage of microlearning is a good way to achieve this.

Microlearning will allow your learners to study whenever they have a little spare time, without having to plan ahead or devote whole chunks of their day to studying. You'll also need to make sure that your content is accessible on their smartphones so that they can study from wherever they are as well.

6. Check Out What's Already Available

When it comes to state or industry-mandated compliance training, the study material is usually common for all businesses. Because of this, there's a good chance that it's also already available for sale as a commercial training unit. Commercial courses are an excellent way to get professional-grade compliance training material that can be immediately put to use. Have a look at your LMS' embedded content marketplace (if it features one), or at other places where you can buy courses (if your LMS allows importing third-party content―if not, throw it away).

7. Measure It Thoroughly

You can't improve what you can't measure. To make your employee compliance training program work, and more importantly, to make it work well, you need to measure every critical aspect of your compliance training program.

For this, you'll need an LMS with a strong reporting engine, and preferably one with customizable reports, like TalentLMS. By tracking metrics such as learner grades and test scores, daily participation, course and unit completion times, and so on, you will be able to quickly identify any pain points your learners have and fix them.

Conclusion

And this concludes 7 tips for improving your employee compliance training program. These tips are based on an extensive experience with enabling employee compliance training program for businesses big and small.

If you're looking for compliance training software to try these tips out, meet TalentLMS, and get your compliance training game on.

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