6 Pitfalls Of Employee Compliance Training (And How A Compliance Training LMS Overcomes Them All)

Employee Compliance Training Pitfalls
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Summary: Maintaining compliance standards is a challenge, in many ways. How can you use an LMS to resolve some of these hot-button matters? In this article, I am highlighting 6 common compliance training pitfalls and how learning technologies can help you overcome them all.

Overcome Challenges With A Compliance LMS

It’s difficult to follow office regulations for 3 main reasons. One, some rules seem silly and not worth following. Two, some are so obtuse you can’t tell when you’ve broken them. And three, it’s not always clear how to stay compliant, especially in gray areas that involve ambiguous regulations or policies. A good online training course should delve into all three. The trouble is that traditional compliance training often falls short. In fact, employees typically dread it like the plague and cannot apply what they’ve learned to practical settings. Fortunately, a compliance training LMS can help you navigate the choppy waters of rules and regulations to improve your employee compliance training program despite the employee training pitfalls.

eBook Release: Mitigating Risks In The Modern Corporate World: Your Guide To Investing In A Compliance Training LMS
eBook Release
Mitigating Risks In The Modern Corporate World: Your Guide To Investing In A Compliance Training LMS
Revamp your compliance training strategy by implementing a compliance training LMS.

6 Pitfalls Of Employee Compliance Training

1. Not Enough Time

Corporate learners are extremely busy. Not just with their family obligations and personal lives, but also with their job duties. And when the online training course focuses on compliance, fear and pressure can make them procrastinate. However, a compliance training LMS gives you the ability to offer shorter units. Divide the employee compliance training into sections they can complete in 5 to 10 minutes. However busy they are, they can always find that small slice of time. Convenience and flexibility improve engagement and participation so that employees feel empowered to train and bridge compliance gaps.

2. Boring And Uninvolving

Can you list 3 compliance requirements off the top of your head? They don't have to be office related. It could be, say, your house rules. Things like always close the windows, turn off all the lights, bring in the pets at night. These aren’t exciting things, but they’re crucial to home living. Employee compliance training courses are like that. They protect you, but they’re still really boring. Bring regulations to life via interactive, immersive online training activities. Being told to put up the proper signs or wear safety gear is dull and tedious. Try a simulation where someone slips and falls because of an unmarked spill to drive the message home more effectively.

3. Lack Of Context

Adults (and precocious children) need to understand why they’re doing—or not doing—something. If employee compliance training doesn’t make sense to them, they won’t cooperate. So, when you’re telling employees their shirts have to be a certain shade of red, explain. Otherwise, they’ll just keep showing up in orange or pink. Provide contextual examples of both compliance and non-compliance. Maybe the color fuchsia was offensive in the company founder’s home town. Give context. They’ll toe the line. A compliance training LMS allows you to put information into a practical context and form an emotional connection, for example, with branching scenarios that show employees the negative consequences of their inaction.

4. Focusing On Legality

Do you believe in the principles you’re teaching? Because if you don’t, your attitude will seep into your online training content and spread to your corporate learners. If you’re simply offering the employee compliance training course to stay within the law, you’ll put in the bare minimum. And it won’t help your corporate learners. Worse, they’ll study with the same coerced mindset, just to get it done. All they want is their renewed license. To solve this, find a way to buy into regulation. This could be through context as mentioned above, or by finding a part of the laws you can get behind. For example, you might not care about the federally mandated height requirements for your doors and windows. But you do care about keeping employees safe and avoiding workplace accidents. So, focus on that. A compliance training LMS can help you transform the jargon and bland regulations into relatable examples and stories such as an interactive demo that tells them the right and wrong way to perform a task according to the rules.

5. Not Enough Exposure

The same dismissive attitude we keep mentioning can make everyone rush through the employee compliance training course. In traditional compliance training, employees attend workshops or presentations to learn about the latest laws or protocols. They retain knowledge long enough to pass their compliance tests and not a second longer. And they’ll repeat the cycle every time a new test comes up. But what you want is an ongoing recall, because it’s a matter of safety. Offer repeated exposure through light games, pop quizzes, and incentivized self-assessment modules. Send notifications reminding staff to review online training material. The more they engage with online training content, the more habitual their compliance.

6. Inability To Pinpoint Gaps

Compliance ILT often involves printed manuals and exams. Not to mention, lengthy lectures that are, for the most part, passive. Therefore, it’s difficult to identify gaps and intervene while there’s still the opportunity. A compliance training LMS offers you the chance to track completion rates, performance issues, and spot employees who fall behind. There are built-in reports to tell you who needs additional help to maintain compliance as well as which online training resources are most beneficial so that you can continually fine-tune your online training strategy.

Many employees dismiss compliance training. They think it’s a perfunctory activity they’ll never actually use. Unfortunately, this attitude sometimes trickles down from the bosses. They rush through online training course design, keeping concepts remote and abstract. They dwell too much on legality and only perform the online training once. To avoid this kind of employee training pitfalls, break online course content into short, convenient chunks. Make it interactive, with realistic examples, case studies, and contextual application. Design the online training course so that it’s an ongoing process, with Just-In-Time modules and gamified refreshers to mitigate risks and improve engagement.

Get your eBook Mitigating Risks In The Modern Corporate World: Your Guide To Investing In A Compliance Training LMS to learn how a compliance training LMS can help you enforce compliance through gamification and stress the importance of safety. It also features tips to set an accurate budget and avoid the most common implementation mistakes, as well as features to look for in employee compliance training software for your remote workforce.

Originally published on October 24, 2020