Compliance training. It’s a tough job but somebody’s got to do it. And that somebody is you, if you are a business owner that wants to enter certain markets for which the law mandates it.
So how to encourage your employees to comply with compliance training requirements? Yelling at them would help, but if you want some more sophisticated ideas you could try, read on.
Make it lighter
Just because it’s compliance training doesn’t mean it also has to be boring.
An eLearning platform allows you to spice up a bland compliance training material with presentations, audio, video and even interactive exercises and quizzes. It might also allow for discussions and comments exchange from the learners, in some kind of forum or chat system, which can live up an otherwise dry lesson.
Take advantage of the multimedia and interaction facilities an LMS offers to take your presentations as far away as you can from merely citing rule after rule and guideline after guideline.
Make it heavier
The different aspects of doing business that compliance training covers (legal, ethical, environmental, etc) can have quite heavy repercussions if the rules are not followed properly and the case is taken to court. And that’s not just for your company, but also for the individual employee.
Making your employees understand that paying attention to their compliance training will help them avoid getting sued or fined, can be quite motivational.
Use concrete examples
Compliance training content might seem as something abstract and outside your employees’ regular duties, especially if it’s presented in a dry and formalistic manner.
To make them understand how it connects to them, use concrete, real world, examples of situations in which they’ll get to use the knowledge they gained from their compliance training.
Examples of how someone’s failure to comply with a rule led to a whole production run being discarded (a common issue in factories), or past employees getting in the hot seat for disobeying an ethical rule (e.g. against racial discrimination), will help them understand the day-to-day importance of their training.
Accommodate them
Sometimes the reason employees have issues with compliance training is that it obstructs their daily workflow. People do not like it when their daily routine is disrupted, especially if this means they might get behind on their workload.
Even worse is when compliance training demands some of their free time (e.g. by asking them to stay after work or to study at home).
eLearning helps alleviate this situation, by enabling employees to study from everywhere, and at their own pace Take advantage of this, and give them the choice of how and when they’ll study. This includes giving them the option to study on their commute, e.g. by also providing your compliance course in a mobile friendlyversion (most LMS nowadays support mobile/tablets).
If the compliance training course is too demanding (which can happen depending on the industry), you slightly reduce your employees’ workload for that period so that they can manage better, or even allow them some time off from work for studying.
Compensate them
Employees like to be compensated for their time. This includes their time spent studying for their compliance training.
That doesn’t mean you have to take out your checkbook ― there are several other ways to reward them for their successful completion of their training and motivate them to try harder.
Giving them some time off of work is an obvious reward, and it’s quite fair too, especially if they had to put on longer hours or study from home for their compliance training.
Another approach would be to give them some kind of “points” upon the successful completion of their training, which could be tied to a future bonus or promotion. Taking advantage of the reporting facilities of modern LMS systems, you could even tie those points to their individual performance.
Last, but not least, you could award them some kind of certification upon the completion of their compliance training, something that they could use as an asset in their future career in the industry too.
Conclusion
Those are just a few ways we’ve found to increase participation and minimize employee friction and complaints when doing compliance training.
If you have any related tips to share with our readers from your experience in applying compliance training to your company, please drop us a comment.
And if you’re interested in compliance training and applying eLearning solutions to your enterprise or organization, check out our free online demo or contact our sales department who will answer your every question*.
*= eLearning related, but we’re good at computer and math questions too 🙂
