Benefits of compliance training

Compliance courses have the potential to change the way your staff act more than any other type of training.

Unfortunately compliance learning has a reputation for being dull and irrelevant with many of the people who are required to take it.

Here we offer our best practices for compliance training and elearning so you can make sure your courses gain the positive reputation they deserve.

Comply with legislation

The underlying aim of compliance learning is avoiding mistakes that could lead to breaches in the law. Every business and every member of staff needs to be aware of the legal requirements for their role.

Keeping track of your employee’s completion of the relevant training is necessary in order to comply with most industry regulations.

Meeting the legal obligations to provide the correct training for your staff is the primary motivator for people seeking compliance learning. You have a responsibility to ensure all staff take the required compliance training, but there’s no reason it can’t also offer a real benefit to your business.

Make it real

There are many ways to make people aware of the regulations and legal frameworks that they operate in at work. Some compliance training will consist of a basic run through of the laws involved with an assessment to test understanding at the end.

Good compliance learning uses scenarios that bring the legislation to life. If you want your course to be more than a tick box exercise and offer real benefits to your staff you should incorporate the real situations they will encounter.

Bringing regulations into the working world of your staff means using realistic examples that are specific to your business. Staff who can relate to the scenarios in training will be more likely to follow the correct procedure in a similar real life situation.

Targeted training

Blanket compliance training can be blamed for much of its negative reputation. Any compulsory regulations or companywide policy changes are going to affect a high proportion of employees. How can you make sure no-one is taking training that they don’t need?

Even within a department there might be a wide variety of job roles that each operate within different legal frameworks. It’s common for a company to employ many staff in very similar roles who don’t all work in one place or at one time.

Grouping your staff for compliance training based on the place or time that staff are available could result in wasted resources and man hours.

The answer is to target compliance training based on a job role. It’s possible to create an elearning course that allows a learner to select their role and be led through a path of modules which are tailored to their needs.

By routing each learner appropriately you end up with employees who are less bored, quicker back to work and more easily tracked for completion.

Keep it simple

Long drawn out compliance courses mean less engagement from your staff and more frustration all round. Keeping the individual modules short and on subject allows you to target specific regulations and keep your learners interested.

Combining short, focused modules with good targeting of staff roles gives you the best chance of getting the training that’s required to the people who need it.

There’s another big advantage to keeping compliance training segments brief; it allows them to be updated much more easily. It’s inevitable that new regulations and legislation will come into effect and make your compliance training outdated.

You can avoid re-creating a whole compliance course by breaking it up into components that can be individually updated when necessary.

Creating simple compliance training that can be easily delivered on many platforms is also going to offer an advantage when updating.

Consistent culture

Keeping all employees on the same page when it comes to their actions helps create a consistent culture across the organisation. Compliance can be an important part of this process, by laying out the official ways of performing a particular role.

There are not too many opportunities as clear cut as compliance training for setting your expectations of employee’s behaviour. If everyone has the same training and can refer to it in the future it gives them the confidence to act, especially in situations which are not immediately black and white.

Reinforcing the seriousness of staff’s legal obligations is much easier within a formal training environment. Setting the right tone and making sure it’s consistent is very important and online delivery can help make this possible.

Elearning makes compliance easier

Failing to keep up with the latest legal requirements of all your employees can quickly result in serious problems for your business. Compliance elearning offers many benefits for your L&D department to help ensure you’re able to stay compliant.

Here are five clear benefits to using an elearning model for your compliance training program:

• Comply with legislation – elearning allows you to track completion within an LMS and ensure all staff are up to date on compliance and policy
• Make it real – bringing the legislation to life with actual examples that are realistic and relevant to all your staff is much easier with multimedia content like video
• Target – no-one wants to sit through compliance learning that is irrelevant, by using elearning you can build one course with many modules that takes learners through the training they require and nothing more
• Simple and quick – creating bit sized modules and allowing learners to log on any time to complete the compliance course means less time away from their work, more knowledge retention and allows you to update them more easily
• Consistent culture – compliance gives you the opportunity to impress your values onto your staff and ensure a uniform response to some of the common legal problems, offering the same training every time to anyone in the same role is a crucial part of the process

Moving your compliance training on line in whole or as part of a blended solution can have a big impact on your employees. Creating a bespoke compliance course will allow you to take advantage of all the benefits we've outlined and give your staff the best chance of completing their training.