Compliance training is supposed to be an important part of business operations. However, compliance topics are content-heavy and monotonous so employees hardly want to join these training. You’re searching for a basic understanding of what is compliance training and how to make it engaged? So this article is the one to go for. Let’s get started.
What is compliance training?
Compliance training equips your employees with the knowledge of company procedures, policies, and laws required for their working responsibility. This helps to provide a safe and legitimate workplace for employees, which prevents them from any serious violation at work.
Your compliance training program might include a wide range of related topics, depending on your field, activist and location. We divide them into five groups
- Company regulations and regulatory compliance training topics, for example, HIPAA, Dodd-Frank Act, or the General Data Protection Regulation.
- HR compliance training topics, such as Workplace Safety, Equal Employment Opportunity, Fair Labor Standards Act.
- OSHA compliance training topics for safety and health, The Occupational Safety and Health Administration.
- Cybersecurity and Privacy compliance topics, PCI-DSS for payment security, GDPR for general data protection, etc.
- Business Ethics topics, including Diversity & Inclusion, anti-harassment & violence, corruption.
Learn more details about these compliance training topics at
How is compliance training different from other corporate training types?
Compliance training focuses much on rules and regulations which need to be provided and followed in business operation.
On the other hand, most other training types focus on employee development. In other words, they’re always learner-centered. For instance, frequent skill training helps employees improve their personal skills. While onboarding training aims at welcoming newcomers and guiding them to understand the company culture.
What are the goals of compliance training?
Businesses approach compliance training as a crucial part of the risk management strategy. In other words, when all employees properly follow the regulations and laws, there is little chance for mistakes or accidents. As a result, your business can:
1. Strengthen the legal accountability of the company
Following the laws is undoubtedly a must-done. Furthermore, some governments or industry organizations also mandate related compliance training programs. For example, OSHA requires manufacturing businesses to certify that their workers have provided safety and health compliance training courses. They also request companies to keep records available for any outside audit. Obeying the law will prevent you from illegitimate actions or penalties like temporarily losing your operating license.
2. Maintain the company’s reputation and bottom-line
Effective compliance training can reduce mistakes or accidents of employees, while the products or services quality is also guaranteed. If not, situations such as confidential data breaches or safety incidents can seriously damage a company’s reputation. It also costs thousands for financial penalties or settlements.
3. Enhance the employees’ well-being with a better work environment
The most important goal of any regulation is to create a better workplace for employees, both physically and psychologically. Compliance training programs are the way to provide employees with what they need to know to work legally. This also encourages a better business culture, which engages employees and enhances their productivity.
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How to make compliance training more engaging?
Even bringing certain benefits for your business, compliance training is still not interesting enough to grab employees’ attention. It’s because almost all regulations or laws training is content-heavy, dry, and uninspiring. Their lack of interest and motivation for the compliance topics might finally result in an ineffective training outcome.
So how to create a fully appealing and engaging compliance training program to leverage your employees’ learning experience? Here are some suggestions by F.Learning experts that successfully work for our partners.
#1 Select relevant content
Only when the content is relevant to employees’ responsibilities, do they pay more attention and commit to the training. As they can easily visualize a situation or scenario in which they can apply what they are learning. This helps to encourage their enthusiasm which maximizes engagement.
For all compliance training topics, ensure employees can get the most relevant part of those policies. For example, you can deliver different training sessions on a topic for several groups of employees.
#2 Use microlearning strategies
An entire compliance training course seems to be too long for busy employees they’re likely to rush through everything. They also hardly spend hours completing the course at one time.
But several short parts of 5 minutes long can make the difference. Shorter sessions can be more specific, which helps learners feel easy to retain. Employees can use their time during breaks, daily commutes, or whenever at convenient to learn one by one. It’s even greater that they can access the training materials using mobile devices such as tablets or smartphones.
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#3 Interactive training
People usually suppose compliance training is quite passive as employees just read documents and listen to the lecture. However, you can encourage them to do some more things like discuss, create, practice, or reflect to complete the training. In other words, you can apply interactive training to make employees participate actively in your class.
Branching scenarios or simulation modules in interactive training programs help employees know exactly how to put that knowledge into practice. The tests or quizzes can be reformed into more engaged tasks like drag-and-drop, sequence quizzes, or fill-in-the-blank. For funny and enjoyable training, you can try using gamification techniques that motivate them to get better performance.
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#4 Combine different types of materials
Each individual has different learning style. Some learn better with words, while some enjoy visuals like images or videos. Some require doing things rather than hearing things. So by varying the content formats, you can cater to various styles. In this way, you will deeply embed knowledge more easily.
Providing content in various formats also helps to make the compliance training course not flat and monotonous. Note that you need to choose the proper format suitable for each content. For example, use e-documents of the policy so that employees can save them for reference later. Or use animation videos to provide scenarios or situation demonstrations for better visualization with lower costs than live-action.
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To sum up
Compliance training is always a high-prioritized part of your corporate training strategy. We know engaging employees in uninteresting compliance topics is hard, but not impossible. Follow our recommendations to get a refreshing compliance training program that your employees can fully enjoy to the end.
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