Using An LMS For Compliance Training
For regulated and other high-risk sectors, compliance matters. With financial, legal, and reputational damage at stake, it is important to eliminate the risks posed by noncompliance. Using an LMS for compliance training is perhaps the easiest way for any organization to fulfill its regulatory and legal obligations. But the best organizations go beyond ease-of-use and use their LMS to create a compliance culture that actively prevents risk. The risk in question could be to someone's health and safety, to achieving a regulator's requirements, or to the organization's financial standing. Whatever the risk, the power of an LMS-enabled compliance culture can be harnessed to mitigate or even eliminate it.
9 Steps To Create An LMS-Enabled Compliance Culture
1. Overhaul Your Approach To Mandatory Training
The starting point for instilling a compliance culture within your organization is to make the move from mandatory to meaningful learning [1]. Compliance training is by its very nature a piece of mandatory training — but it needn't feel that way.
Deliver compliance training via your LMS in a personalized, flexible, interactive, and purposeful way. Help learners feel they're getting something out of the training, not just fulfilling a box-ticking exercise. This could include:
- Personalized compliance pathways based on each learner's role.
- Simulations and scenario-based learning to embed staff compliance training in real-world situations.
- Gamified compliance content that encourages teams or departments to compete for perks or prizes by maintaining high levels of compliance.
- Removing irrelevant training to increase focus and engagement.
2. Centralize Your Compliance Training
Your LMS needs to become the hub of every aspect of your compliance training. This will ensure it acts as a single source of truth for compliance. All courses, policies, certifications, and data relating to compliance should be stored on your LMS. If anyone in your organization has a query about compliance, they should know they will find the information they need on your LMS.
3. Create Consistent Compliance Training
Personalizing compliance training for employees increases its effectiveness. But the underlying training needs to create consistency across all teams, departments, and locations. Ensuring all your people get the same message increases the likelihood of your organization meeting its compliance responsibilities.
4. Automatically Assign Training
An LMS removes a large chunk of the administrative burden of overseeing compliance. Platforms can make it simple to automate key aspects of compliance training. This includes:
- Assigning compliance training to relevant learners.
- Automating reminders to learners who haven't completed a particular course.
- Automatically assigning refresher courses for the required period after a learner last completed a specific course.
5. Start Compliance During Onboarding
LMS onboarding processes make it easy for new starters to hit the ground running — and that includes embracing your compliance culture. Share your mandatory onboarding training in the personalized, role-specific, and scenario-based style we've discussed to get those joining the organization engaging with compliance from the outset. You could even deliver training that sets out why compliance matters for your organization and the people in it.
6. Track Your Learners
Powerful LMS reporting systems make it easy to monitor which learners have or haven't completed a piece of mandatory training. This helps to streamline processes for:
- Tracking and addressing noncompliance risks.
- Identifying individuals, teams, and departments creating risk.
- Generating compliance reports for regulators and auditors.
7. Stay Agile
A truly effective compliance culture needs to be responsive to changing requirements. An LMS helps to introduce new policies and initiatives to all areas of your organization almost instantly. Finance is one of the most highly regulated industries and regulations are often updated or changed at relatively short notice. With that in mind, an LMS for financial services must be equipped to roll out new policies quickly and efficiently to maintain compliance. Western Union ensures its LMS can deliver compliance training to 500,000 agents simultaneously, enabling it to meet new regulatory requirements swiftly.
8. Make Compliance A KPI
Using either the gamification elements we previously discussed or LMS reporting data as your foundation, make compliance an important part of team and individual performance reviews.
9. Nurture Your Compliance Culture
Use case studies, messages from senior leadership, and social proof to show the importance of compliance within your LMS. Create LMS forums where your people can exchange compliance best practices and ideas [2].
Conclusion
An LMS-enabled compliance culture gives you greater control, better insights, and more effective technology to mitigate risks facing your organization. While an LMS supports and streamlines risk prevention, the technology needs to be backed up by a commitment to compliance that comes from the top of the organization and learning content that is tailored to support these goals.
References:
[1] Moving from mandatory to meaningful learning
[2] 8 tips to drive learner engagement in LMS forums
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