Compliance is a term that makes most learning and development (L&D) teams feel anxious. Part of that is because staying on top of compliance can challenge most human resources (HR) teams and organizations, especially with ever-changing legislation. On top of that, getting employees to take and embrace compliance training is a challenging endeavor, often met with resistance or poor learning and understanding.
According to a report by Globalscape, “The True Cost of Compliance With Data Protection Regulations,” the cost of non-compliance for organizations has ballooned to $14.82 million, piling the pressure on L&D and HR teams to find entertaining ways to conduct compliance training and ensure the organization is safe from any damaging consequences.
Some strategies you can use to make compliance training fun and entertaining include gamification, delivering content in bite-sized chunks and creating real-life relevance to the compliance training. In this article, we’ll explore how to make compliance training more engaging to increase skills application and reduce organizational risk.
Why Changing the Mindset on Compliance Training is Critical
Most organizations approach compliance training with the traditional mindset. They invest the bare minimum to meet legal requirements, making the process dull and ineffective for employees. This mindset can prevent employees from engaging with compliance training, interfering with knowledge transfer and learning stickiness. This can lead to increased risk for reputational and financial damages in the future.
L&D teams need to change their outlook on compliance training from a reporting and regulatory requirement to a business-critical skill. Employees should view compliance as an essential skill and knowledge instead of forced training, motivating them to learn and implement the material learned.
Today, online compliance training modalities can be fun and flexible, allowing employees to complete the training at their own pace and schedule. Online training methodologies can also enable employees to track their progress and completion and not worry about falling behind, improving their learning and retention. Moreover, compliance training is only effective when measurement tools are used to allow L&D teams to know who is taking part in the training and how the training is helping them within the workplace.
L&D teams need to change their outlook on compliance training from a reporting and regulatory requirement to a business-critical skill.
How to Make Compliance Training More Engaging
When training is more engaging, employees are more likely to produce better business outcomes. This is very important when it comes to maintaining corporate compliance and mitigating risk. Here are some ways you can make compliance training more engaging for employees.
Use a variety of content elements.
People learn with different methodologies. Instead of having your compliance training material text-heavy, you can consider keeping the texts short and incorporating multimedia such as images and video to make the content more engaging.
Use various content elements to break up long text and appeal to modern employees’ expectations. Consequently, learners can retain new information better, thus reducing the chance of violating any policies in the future. You can also use images to summarize points, while videos can help break down complex subjects into simple concepts.
Deliver the content in bite-sized chunks.
The attention span for most learners and employees is short and is getting shorter. Therefore, it’s essential that you keep your content brief and easy to consume to ensure optimal learning retention. Apart from using short paragraphs and sentences, break the training material into multiple sections that your employees can digest in bits, ensuring they’re not bombarded by a ton of information, preventing information overload.
Use gamification and technology.
Gamification can transform compliance training into an engaging and exciting eLearning activity. Gamified compliance training can include elements such as leaderboards, badges and competitions that help boost completion and engagement rates.
Gamification also can allow employees to interact with each other and foster learning with a sense of healthy competition. Puzzles, quizzes and short answer questions are also good exercises for your compliance training program since they foster participation and interaction.
You can also use technology such as learning management systems (LMSs) and platforms that support gamification to quickly integrate it into your compliance training program, making the process more time- and cost-effective for your organization.
Personalize the training.
Employees may want a unique approach to compliance training different from how the material is presented in other organizations. Therefore, it’s essential that you personalize the compliance training by reaching out to your employees and asking them what works for them.
For instance, despite gamification being a viable option for a fun and engaging compliance training program, your workforce might be more comfortable with multimedia content they can read at their own pace and in their free time.
Others may be more receptive to text-based content over videos. Talk to your employees and let them express what works better for them for a more productive learning experience.
Create real-life relevance.
Learners are often more responsive to training if they understand its relevance to their day-to-day job roles. Otherwise, they’ll have trouble showing interest in learning.
Therefore, ensure that each employee understands the real-life relevance of the compliance training specifically for their role and position. You can go as far as filtering the employees based on role and showing them the compliance training material that is the most relevant to them.
The material can include real-life scenarios the employee will likely encounter to make the information relatable, motivating and engaging.
Keep your training material updated.
You need to update your compliance training material constantly. Laws, job descriptions, work policies and social trends change over time, necessitating that your L&D team stays in touch with the changes and new expectations.
You can use cloud-based tools to stay on top of changing compliance needs and appropriately update your training content to ensure employees are not violating new regulations or policies.
Make Compliance Fun
Compliance will remain a mandatory requirement for all organizations. However, compliance training must evolve to ensure that employees retain and enforce the material and to help the company avoid future reputational and financial damages.
By Jocelyn King