Organizations need to comply with a highly regulated world and assure standard operating procedures (SOPs) across a broad range of areas such as operations, finance, safety processes, information technology (IT), and risk management. Whether you have a dedicated compliance team or not, the challenge remains to manage the compliance training and requirement process in a faster and effective manner.
Most compliance training is tedious, and employees try to avoid it as long as they can. Much of it has to do with how the training material is presented and interactions at various touchpoints throughout the training process. Let’s look at some non-typical ways you can deliver your compliance training and what features your learning management system (LMS) must have.
- Get creative with your learning material: Your learning material does not have to be a lengthy reading or a never-ending Q&A session. You can get creative by providing a real-life example story through a video or visual messages right at the start of the training course. You also can use these when you are sending the notification and reminder mails to employees. You can develop simulations for employees to participate in compliance meetings and discussions. Make your content as interactive as you can, which will help your employees to learn it in an easy and fun way. Place a quiz or a game where employees can go to the next level only if they answer a set of compliance questions correctly. To enable these, your LMS should support a variety of content types with an easy access and interface. It also should have an easy mechanism to upload, transfer, and create various content types from the backend.
- Provide segmented learning material: Providing right segmentation to the training courses will break the monotony for the employees. Lengthy mandatory training courses are difficult to be absorbed all at once, and employees are interested in finishing the course as soon as possible rather than understanding it. Breaking down the content into digestible modules will allow your employees to pick the order of modules that best fits their schedule. Here again, the LMS should have features to display all the modules and details without much navigation. For example, an employee should be able to see his or her finished courses and remaining courses, along with the timeline to complete a particular training program on a single page.
- Reduce unnecessary steps: Taking mandatory training courses at regular intervals is a task in itself. Why load them with multi-navigations and information to finish a task? Give them the best user experience with minimal navigations and steps to compete a particular task. Also, remove unnecessary information from their dashboard. For, example manager-level employees should not be seeing the training courses required for management trainees. This is only possible if your LMS has a clean interface, as well as filtering and blocking capability. An LMS interface should be self-explanatory and guide the users for their next steps.
- Provide clear and concise notifications and reminders: Sending clear reminders, along with due dates, at the right time is the only way to get employees take a notice and be up-to-date with all the compliance requirements. A lot of training related to licensing, certification, etc., needs to be retaken at regular intervals. For example, OSHA training for all employees is compulsory on a yearly basis, and training for new joiners must be completed within 10 days of hire. The LMS should be able to send the notifications and reminders automatically, as well as enroll new members as required. Due date completion rules configuration to support fixed dates and dynamic dates (within 15 days of joining) is another important feature to keep in mind for compliance training.
- Develop a roadmap of compliance to competency: Maintaining high levels of regulatory compliance does not directly measures the individual or organizational competency. Organizations tend to focus on meeting minimum compliance requirements and stop their efforts there. If compliance practices are looked from a competency-building perspective, employees will see it as their own Individual Development Plan versus a regulatory training required for the organization. Combining data analytics, compliance training, and an employee’s skills-gap analysis can transform the way compliance training is perceived and executed. The workforce will become highly skilled and technology advanced in addition to being compliant. An LMS with skills-based learning capability and high-end analytic features can be useful for this approach.
Viren Kapadia is president and CEO of Gyrus Systems, a 29-year LMS vendor, that has provided hosted learning management system software and e-learning solutions to more than 425 organizations in 15-plus countries.
