Compliance training involves employee and customer education programs that cover essential laws, regulations, or policies that can impact an organization’s work.
Compliance training may be regulated by government or industry standards. Alternatively, it may be determined by the company's individual preferences and compliance training best practices.
With a strong compliance training program, you can arm your learners, be they employees, customers, or members, with the knowledge they need to stay up-to-date on critical laws, rules and regulations, and your own companies internal policies.
This does not only ensure you stay compliant, but also fosters a unified culture within your organization. Plus, 3 in 4 companies which practice continuous compliance feel their compliance training program is a business driver.
Whether you need compliance training for regulatory reasons or to teach employees about your company's code of conduct, ethics, and anti-harassment standards, here are some best practices to consider.
1. Make sure you have clear written policies on compliance regulations
Corporate compliance training may include a variety of elements, such as:
- Anti-harassment policies
- External regulations
- Data requirements
- Privacy laws and regulations
- Non-discrimination policies
- Internal standards (which may be higher than government regulations specify)
- Individual industry requirements (for example, HIPAA requirements for healthcare)
If you have not yet created clear, written standards that lay out what is expected of your company's employees, start there.
It can be difficult to craft compliance training that adheres to unknown standards, guidelines, and requirements.
Plus, a lack of a strong corporate policy eventually translates into employees that may not understand the code of conduct, or that do not know how to report a compliance issue.
2. Choose the right tools for your compliance training
Before crafting a compliance training program, ensure you have the right tools in your arsenal.
A learning platform or LMS software solution that will cover your compliance training needs, including helping you break down learning into micro-learning sessions, is essential to your success. Select a system that:
- Integrates well with your existing solutions
- Provides templates that will make it easier for you to put together your training modules
- Allows you to utilize a variety of delivery methods, including different types of media, to maximize learner investment
- Provides ongoing user support so that you can learn how to use it more effectively and avoid many of the snarls created by some learning management solutions
By choosing the right learning platform or learning management system (LMS), you considerably improve your ability to create compelling, memorable compliance training content that will allow you to achieve your goals.
⭐ Related: How to Develop a Compliance Training Program in 9 Steps
3. Set clear training objectives
Before running through compliance training best practices, set clear training objectives. Determine:
- Which standards employees need to know
- What employee requirements are
- What information employees need to be successful in their jobs
With clear training objectives laid out from the beginning, you can shape your training content toward ensuring that employees are able to achieve those goals.
4. Break content down into micro-learning sessions
Breaking down complex topics into smaller modules that employees can digest more quickly and easily can make it much easier for them to take in complex information.
Microlearning removes the strain of digesting large-volume content quickly, which can feel overwhelming for even the fastest and most experienced learner.
And even better, microlearning allows employees to move more quickly through individual sessions or focus on areas where they might be struggling so they can better select the learning solutions that are best for their needs.
5. Utilize a variety of media and delivery methods
Different learners learn in different ways, and robust adherence to compliance training best practices addresses this.
Effective compliance training takes those different learning styles into account. You can deliver content in a way that fits employees' unique learning needs. For example, you might try:
- Incorporating videos
- Using audio content
- Sharing images and infographics
By including those different types of media in addition to standard text-style content, you make the content more engaging and invite learners to connect more deeply with it.
Using different strategies can also improve overall learner retention. This means they're more likely to remember the information presented in your training modules later.
6. Keep training in line with corporate policies
Regulatory compliance and company policies may not be precisely the same thing, especially in cases where your company deliberately goes beyond minimum compliance requirements in order to create the highest possible standard of security, privacy, or protection for your company.
Suppose, for example, that your company's policy requires employees to go far beyond OSHA standards for basic employee safety or that you have cybersecurity policies that require employees to take extra steps in order to protect the company's data.
When you create the material for your compliance training program, it should reflect those differences.
Don't just present or focus on the basic regulatory standards alone. Keep in mind that many of your policies are a result of company culture, expectations, and focus.
So, your training content should reflect what is actually expected of employees.
7. Institute interactive segments that encourage active engagement
As part of your employee training, always try to include interactive segments. These will increase overall engagement and encourage employees to go deeper with the content.
For example, you may want to include:
- Case studies, which will allow employees to directly explore how other people have handled situations and discuss how they might have done differently
- Quizzes, which will provide you with a look at what employees are learning from the content and where you need to improve support for students who might be struggling in specific areas
- Real-life examples, which may allow employees to role-play how they might have handled safety problems, harassment issues, or other problems
When your training courses include those vital interactive segments, it can go a long way toward increasing overall employee learning and providing them with more essential tools to manage potential compliance sessions.
8. Set clear metrics for measuring student learning
In addition to ensuring that employees are able to meet the standards you had in mind for their specific training programs, make sure you have metrics that track the performance of your training sessions.
It’s important to make sure that your training covers all key information for employees, and even customers, whether they're taking on a health and safety training course or going through harassment training.
Your learning platform or LMS may offer tracking options. You can easily keep up with how employees are performing and identify potential areas of weakness.
Then, you can improve the overall learning experience and help employees understand what is expected of them.
9. Emphasize the importance of compliance
Go beyond sharing vital information about compliance expectations, from data protection to OSHA or healthcare standards. If you want to create a culture of compliance, it's important to explain the importance of compliance to your employees.
In addition to compliance training courses, you may want to share:
- Regulatory requirements, including overseeing government organizations
- Fees and financial penalties for failing to comply
- The implications of non-compliance for your company
In addition, make sure that employees know that you take workplace safety and other considerations seriously in your work environment.
10. Create refresher content for employees to come back to later
Sometimes, your employees may need to undergo refresher training to ensure they remember all relevant information.
Sometimes, that is government-mandated.
For example, employees may have to sign off on vital safety information annually. On the other hand, your company may choose to set its own standards for refresher courses.
As part of your compliance training best practices, make sure you have a plan for when employees will need to take repeat compliance courses.
You may also want to set standards for when employees have to retake essential training, from diversity training to occupational safety training after a violation or problem in the workplace.
11. Utilize gamification where possible
Gamification turns the learning process into a game. It may use scoreboards, points, or a series of rewards woven through your training materials.
These elements encourage employees to strive for higher-level understanding of the content.
Gamification can significantly increase employee engagement since they have something to strive for as they go through your course content.
In addition, gamification may help make the content more accessible to many learners with learning disabilities or other challenges since gamified content is frequently easier to engage with and more comprehensive.
Now over to you: Develop more effective compliance training for your organization with the right learning platform
Using the right platform and the right strategies can go a long way toward helping you improve overall compliance training for your organization.
By keeping these compliance training best practices in mind, you can design compliance training that is more engaging, memorable, and digestible for your employees.
The result?
You've given them a stronger understanding of the content created.
At Docebo, our learning platform offers a variety of solutions and support. We can help with onboarding, compliance training, and many of the other essential training elements your employees need to be successful.
Definity, a family of innovative property and casualty insurance companies, trusted Docebo with its compliance training programs given that fewer than 1% of their learners were engaging with their existing LMS, and it took them 10 months to achieve their annual compliance training targets.
With Docebo’s AI-powered learning platform, user adoption went from 1% to over 65%, and most importantly, they were able to cut down total compliance achievement from 10 months to less than two months.
Request a demo to see why Docebo is trusted by over 3,800 businesses worldwide.