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Tips And Examples To Create Highly Engaging Online Compliance Training

August 22, 2017 | By Asha Pandey

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Online Compliance Training - Tips and Examples to Create Highly Engaging Online Compliance Training - EI Design

While online compliance training is commonly perceived as dull, it possesses the potential for engaging and captivating learning experiences. This article shares actionable tips and real-life examples designed to empower you in enhancing learner engagement within your online compliance training endeavors.

What Is Compliance Training?

Compliance training educates employees about legal, regulatory, and policy requirements relevant to their job functions. In today’s diverse and dynamic workplace environments, especially in hybrid models, it ensures that employees, whether working remotely or in-office, are aligned with the company’s ethical standards, legal obligations, and internal policies. It’s a proactive approach to mitigate risks associated with non-compliance and foster a culture of informed decision-making.

Types of Compliance Training Programs

  1. Data Protection and Privacy Training: Focuses on laws like GDPR, teaching employees about handling personal data responsibly.
  2. Workplace Health and Safety Training: Covers OSHA standards, ensuring employees understand how to maintain a safe work environment.
  3. Anti-harassment and Discrimination Training: Educates employees on identifying and preventing workplace harassment and promoting a culture of diversity and inclusion.
  4. Ethical Conduct and Integrity Training: Addresses corporate ethics, teaching employees about ethical decision-making and behavior.
  5. Financial Compliance Training: Pertains to financial regulations, anti-money laundering laws, and ethical financial practices.
  6. Cybersecurity Training: Instructs employees on protecting company data against cyber threats and understanding cybersecurity policies.
  7. Environmental Compliance Training: Educates about environmental laws and the company’s responsibility towards sustainable practices.
  8. Quality Management Training: Focuses on maintaining and improving product or service quality as per industry standards.
  9. Export Compliance Training: Relevant for companies involved in international trade, covering export laws and regulations.
  10. Industry-specific Compliance Training: Tailored to specific industries, covering regulations and standards unique to each sector, such as healthcare, manufacturing, or finance.

Objectives of Compliance Training

  1. Educational Awareness: To inform employees about laws, regulations, and company policies that pertain to their job functions.
  2. Risk Mitigation: To reduce legal and ethical risks by ensuring employees understand compliance requirements.
  3. Promoting Ethical Work Culture: To instill a culture of integrity and ethical behavior within the organization.
  4. Preventing Workplace Incidents: To minimize incidents of non-compliance, such as breaches of conduct, harassment, or safety violations.
  5. Legal Accountability: To ensure the organization and its employees are compliant with all relevant legal standards, thereby avoiding penalties and legal repercussions.
  6. Empowering Decision-making: To provide employees with the knowledge necessary to make informed and compliant decisions in their day-to-day work.

Significance of Compliance Training in the Modern Workplace

In the modern, increasingly hybrid workplace, compliance training holds significant value, albeit often underappreciated by employees. While many workers may perceive compliance training as a mere box-ticking exercise that doesn’t contribute to their skill enhancement, its importance cannot be overstated.

  1. Adapting to Hybrid Work Models: As workplaces evolve into hybrid models, compliance training ensures that all remote and in-office employees are uniformly informed about company policies, legal obligations, and ethical standards. This uniformity is crucial in maintaining a cohesive and compliant workforce, irrespective of location.
  2. Addressing Misconceptions About Value: There’s a common misconception among employees that compliance training doesn’t add to their skill set. However, this training is vital for creating a safe, ethical, and legally compliant work environment. It equips employees with knowledge crucial for navigating complex regulatory landscapes, which is an invaluable skill in itself.
  3. Ensuring Consistency and Inclusivity: In a diverse workforce, compliance training plays a crucial role in ensuring that all employees, regardless of their work arrangement, have equal understanding and access to essential compliance knowledge. This ensures a level playing field and promotes an inclusive workplace culture.
  4. Mitigating Risks in Digital Environments: The shift towards remote work has increased reliance on digital tools, making data security and privacy training more crucial than ever. Compliance training in these areas is essential for safeguarding sensitive information and maintaining trust in digital work environments.

Benefits of Compliance Training

Compliance training plays a pivotal role in shaping responsible business practices and informed employee behavior. Here are the top benefits of compliance training, showcasing its positive impact on both learners and organizations.

For the Learners

  1. Awareness and Understanding: Enhances the learner’s understanding of legal and ethical standards relevant to their job.
  2. Skill Enhancement: Develops critical thinking and decision-making skills, especially in ethical dilemmas.
  3. Career Development: Familiarity with compliance norms can be a valuable asset in career progression.
  4. Personal Accountability: Encourages a sense of responsibility and accountability for one’s actions within the professional setting.

For the Organization

  1. Risk Mitigation: Reduces the risk of legal penalties and non-compliance issues.
  2. Reputation Management: Helps in maintaining a positive public image by adhering to legal and ethical standards.
  3. Cultural Cohesion: Fosters a workplace culture that values integrity and compliance.
  4. Operational Efficiency: Informed employees make decisions that align with company policies, leading to smoother operations.

Challenges of Compliance Training

While compliance training is essential in the modern workplace, it comes with its own set of challenges that organizations must navigate.

  1. Engagement and Motivation: Keeping employees engaged and motivated throughout the training, especially when the content is perceived as dry or mandatory, can be challenging.
  2. Relevance and Customization: Ensuring the training is relevant and customized to distinct roles within the organization, to make it more applicable and meaningful for each employee.
  3. Consistency Across Diverse Workforce: Providing consistent training across a diverse, possibly global workforce, including remote and hybrid employees, while addressing cultural and language differences.
  4. Measuring Effectiveness: Effectively measuring the impact of the training on employee behavior and compliance standards.
  5. Keeping Content Up to Date: Regularly updating the training material to reflect the latest legal and regulatory changes.
  6. Technological Barriers: Overcoming technological challenges, particularly in ensuring that remote and hybrid employees have equal access to training resources.
  7. Time Constraints: Balancing the need for comprehensive training with employees’ availability, considering their workload and time constraints.

Best Practices for Creating Engaging Compliance Training

Creating an engaging compliance training program is essential to ensure employees are both informed and motivated. The following best practices are designed to enhance the effectiveness of compliance training, making it more interactive, relevant, and impactful for learners.

  1. Interactive and Visual Content: Incorporate interactive elements such as quizzes, polls, and clickable tabs. Utilize visual aids like infographics and videos to break up text-heavy content.
  2. Real-world Scenarios and Case Studies: Use realistic scenarios and case studies to demonstrate the practical application of compliance rules and the consequences of non-compliance.
  3. Regular Updates and Refreshers: Keep the training content fresh and relevant with regular updates. Include refresher courses to reinforce learning.
  4. Feedback Loops: Implement feedback mechanisms to gather input from learners, allowing for continuous improvement of the training program.
  5. Accessible and Flexible Learning: Provide training that is accessible across various devices and platforms, offering flexibility for employees to learn at their own pace and convenience.
  6. Recognition and Rewards: Implement a system of recognition and rewards for completing training modules, which can motivate employees and make the learning process more enjoyable.
  7. Inclusive and Diverse Content: Ensure that training materials are inclusive, considering different learning styles and cultural backgrounds of the workforce.
  8. Tracking and Analytics: Utilize learning management systems to track progress, engagement, and completion rates, helping to identify areas for improvement.

Compliance Training Tips to Encourage and Motivate Employees

We need to have a combination of approaches to ensure that we can eventually see the required behavioral change in employees.

Here’s my list of four tips that can aid you in the process of this transformation:

Tip 1: Change the Tone and Approach

As adult learners, we respond better to an approach that lays down why we should be mindful of certain aspects, as there are associated consequences (for us as well as the organization) if we do not comply.

To enhance engagement, change the learning approach. Begin your online compliance training by explaining:

  • Why do the specific guidelines exist
  • Why is it necessary to conform and what are the implications if we don’t
  • What are the consequences for the employees and the organization

At the learning strategy level:

  • Engage the learner first
  • Share the facts in a format that they can relate to and understand their gravity (and more significantly, their consequences)

Once this is done, then move to:

  • Dos and Don’ts: Avoid jargon and keep it simple and relatable.
  • Reinforcement: Put the learners in situations (dilemmas) to assess if they have truly internalized the learning.
  • Assessment: Push the validation of learning through questions that map to both levels of cognition (Understanding and Application). You can also opt for a series of questions that can be built from the response of the previous question. This threaded approach of assessments not only keeps the learners engaged but also pushes the cognition levels to the desired level.

Tip 2: Give the Control Back to the Learners

All adult learners like to be in control. It doesn’t hurt to provide the required flexibility to the learners through a combination of approaches, including offering courses on multiple devices (including smartphones and tablets) through mobile learning or mLearning.

This enables them to access the training on the device of their choice when they want to (rather than when they are required to).

Tip 3: Use Innovative Formats

Today, you have a wide range of learning strategies to pick from. These approaches create a much higher engagement quotient and will help you see better completion rates within the stipulated time.

Some of the approaches we use include:

  1. Gamification.
  2. Partial gamification.
  3. Microlearning.
  4. Personalization.
  5. Scenario-based learning.
  6. Story-based learning.

Tip 4: Continue the Engagement After Completion of the Formal Training

We need to eventually see the learners undergo the desired behavioral change to sustain the required compliance.

This can be achieved by adding components of Performance Support Tools (just-in-time learning aids or job aids) to your online compliance training to reinforce the learning.

These learning aids support the primary training and can be made available to the learners within their workflow. They work very effectively in reinforcing the message of primary training. Additionally, they can be used to push the learners to take the required action.

What Can Be Done to Make Compliance Training Engaging for the Learners?

Before getting on to examples that showcase the techniques to step up the engagement quotient of online compliance trainings, it is important to watch out for what should not be done:

  1. Avoid making compliance training a bitter pill that everyone must swallow.
  2. Avoid preachy and prescriptive content as adult learners don’t like it.
  3. Avoid presenting information in a boring or predictable eLearning format.

Now let us look at two examples that feature the key aspects outlined so far:

  • How can you achieve a high engagement quotient with the learners?
  • How can you increase the stickiness of learning through immersive strategies?

Example 1: Compliance Course on Data Security

Background: “A Date with Data Dave” is an informal microlearning nugget on the Compliance subject of Data Security. It is part of a larger suite of courses on compliance that EI has developed. The information provided is a prequel to a comprehensive module on Data Security and provides preliminary information about the subject.

The Solution: The nugget is in a responsive web-based training format called Interactive parallax-based scrolling that is extremely popular on websites and is now being used as a microlearning technique. This design approach creates a compelling view thereby keeping the learners hooked. It also appeals to the millennial workforce.

 

 

The introduction screen has a small video to set the context of the course. We used an “Ethical Hacker” Dave as the anchor for the course.

 

 

Learning aids (as popups) are provided as the learner scrolls down.

 

 

Few learning aids are provided in the form of short videos that create sticky learning.

 

 

Of course, the knowledge wraps up the course.

 

 

The last scene summarizes the key learning points of the course. It also acts as an information highlight to indicate where the learners need to pay attention.

Example 2: Compliance Course on Insider Dealing

Background: This course uses a crime scene investigation approach where the learner investigates a case related to Insider Dealing and needs to identify the perpetrators. The approach applies an immersive learning strategy where we put the learner within the learning path.

This immersive approach forms the core of the enhanced learning experience. It significantly increases the engagement quotient, contributing to improved completion rates within the stipulated time.

The Solution: Gamified Simulation

This course applies a Gamified Simulation in an investigative setting and requires identifying the tipper and tippee as part of the game mission. Rather than getting access to what they must learn, the learners must “investigate” the various facets to meet the learning outcomes. The investigation (or the learning path) features decision-making scenarios that map to real life situations and would drive learners to act appropriately when they face similar dynamics.

The game elements involve picking clues from conversations, documents, and visual cues with a comprehensive dashboard in the User Interface depicting learner progress. The parallax navigation between screens and the avatar selection option for Personalization are unique features that make it more realistic.

 

 

Example 3: Evacuation Awareness Training Program

Background: This company focuses on safety without compromise across all its workspaces. In addition to measures that make the company a safe physical working environment, it is also working to ensure all its employees and contractors, regardless of role or title, feel psychologically safe to speak up if they don’t feel safe or if they see an unsafe practice.

The company has various standards, processes, systems, and programs to manage safe work and engage its employees and contractors, all with the goal of ensuring safe work and eliminating serious injuries and fatalities in the workplace.

Effective emergency management is integral to protecting workers, the environment, and operations. The company follows systems that provide a standardized, enterprise-wide approach to improve effectiveness and efficiency to respond to an incident, as well as aligns to governments, regulators, and peers.

The company Evacuation Awareness training program was a part of the broader vision of the company to achieve this goal. It aimed to provide its employees with clear, effective, step-by-step guidelines to ensure the safety of its people in case of any emergency.

The Solution: EI created an interactive web-based training on Evacuation Awareness. The course included:

  • Audio-based instructions with a blend of static and interactive screens
  • Scenario-based knowledge checks
  • Videos based on real-life situations

We used a design approach that:

  • Enabled self-paced learning and ensured seamless knowledge transfer
  • Converted valuable information into bite-sized content through layering
  • Measured understanding and retention through regular quizzes
  • Provided basic interactivity to enhance the training content
  • Lent context to the content through realistic videos and a visually aesthetic interface

The course was taken by nearly 13,000 learners at the company’s  Energy Center.

 

 

Example 4: Preventing Workplace Violence Module

Background: The company’s safety programs include a zero-tolerance policy for workplace violence. Employees are prohibited from engaging in any act that could cause another individual to feel threatened or unsafe. This includes verbal assaults, threats or any expressions of hostility, intimidation, aggression, or hazing.

 

Whether it’s the US, Europe, Asia-Pacific or Australian geographies, the company decided to formulate site-specific teams to create awareness about this issue. The teams also had the responsibility to outline remedial measures that the employees can access in case they experience workplace violence.

 

The module on Preventing Workplace Violence is part of the compliance training for the company employees across the organization.

The Solution:

The interactive course provided information to identify and prevent workplace violence situations while ensuring that company employees are aware of their responsibilities. The course also identified and discussed active threat situations and recommended protocols and actions.

Specifically, the course is focused on:

  • Realistic Scenarios
  • Diverse Examples
  • Actionable Steps
  • Managing Active Threat

 

 

Parting Thoughts

In conclusion, this article serves as a catalyst for reflection and refinement in your approach to online compliance training. Embracing innovative strategies and best practices can empower you to cultivate a culture of compliance and ethical behavior within your organization, ensuring not only regulatory adherence but also fostering a workplace environment that values integrity and accountability.


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