Mandatory compliance training is often seen as boring. Let’s change that.
Forget Boring Compliance Training
Mandatory compliance training has a bad reputation—it’s seen as boring and often nothing more than a tick-box exercise to sit through in a lecture or click “Next” through in static eLearning. Such training is often delivered as part of an employee onboarding process.
There are two significant problems for an organization when this is the case:
- When the emphasis is on just getting through the material and gaining the Pass, the learner may not have been mentally engaged in a way that will ensure retention and truly impact their behavior long-term, helping to manage personal and business risk.
- It sets a scene for training in general to be boring and “unimportant” to the individual, so when a learner has access to learning that can boost their performance and benefit the whole company, they lack the enthusiasm to jump in and engage.
To avoid creating a culture of disinterest when it comes to learning, here we look at how to make compliance training engaging through the use of effective eLearning content and a learning platform that makes it easy and enjoyable to access.
Make It Relevant to the Learner’s Role
Information instantly becomes more boring when you feel that it will never relate to your life. While some training content will be relevant to the entire workforce, try to minimize the use of generic content throughout, where it has limited relevance to specific roles.
Using branching scenarios means that you can deliver globally relevant training at the outset, which then forks down role-specific paths. For example, specific modules may be designated for frontline workers, while managers or supervisors can be taken down a different path.
The greater appreciation of context will mean that the learner sees relevance within their day-to-day role.
Make It Accessible
If you want compliance training to not only be completed but absorbed and really assimilated into working practice, then it’s essential to enable learners to access it in a manner, at a time, and in a place that suits them.
Unless the training needs to be consumed at a desk on day one, then mobile-friendly eLearning enables anytime, anywhere learning. Will your learners potentially want or need to access the materials on the go? A good learning platform will make it easy for learners to access training anywhere and for HR or L&D teams to track progress across individuals and groups.
Make It Brief
Bite-sized learning or microlearning enables learners to access training in chunks that allow for consolidation between sessions.
Numerous studies over the last century, notably Miller’s Law that originated back in the 1950s, have shown that a small number of items (five to nine) can be held in your short-term memory before new information starts to crowd those items out.
Deliver training in small chunks that enable consolidation into long-term memory between sessions, and create a level of testing and repetition to really help training stick.
Make It Visually Appealing
Some color and vibrance will help draw learners into training content and create a better vibe than just black-and-white text. Even the driest and most technical of subjects can be brought to life with some color and movement.
Make It Multimedia
Everyone consumes, absorbs, and retains information differently. Some people are drawn to reading text, while others struggle—regardless of proficiency in their work. Some find that they enjoy more or learn faster with the audio and visual combination of videos, while others find videos annoying or are unable to have the sound on at their desk.
Where possible, provide options within an eLearning course so that every type of learner is catered for.
Make It Fun: Gamify
Even those who display zero signs of competitiveness enjoy games, or at least rewards, now and again. Either games-based learning or the introduction of game-playing elements within a traditional system (gamification) is shown to improve learning outcomes. In fact, gamification has been shown to enhance motivation and improve psychological and behavioral outcomes in multiple arenas.
Some LMS solutions make it easy for you to create gamification elements within the platform, such as badges or other awards for achievements and learning milestones. You can even create a level of competition between individuals or departments to further increase motivation.
By Carlotta Pudelek