What is Compliance Training? Compliance Examples [2021]
Compliance training is an essential part of training in businesses today. Not only it is mandated by law, but it is also a crucial tool in maintaining a safe, ethical and productive workplace. Enforcing good compliance programs can prevent violations of the rules, poor conduct and ensure effective governance in your organisation. The compliance programs help minimise legal problems, maintain the reputation and foster better employee engagement. According to a Brandon Hall research, 70% of the companies consider compliance training a high priority crucial to their business. Today, enterprises provide online compliance training to their employees as online training becomes a standard for corporate training.
What is Compliance Training?
Compliance training is specific training to educate employees about the company’s policies, procedures and regulations that apply to their day to day job functionalities. Organisations encourage this training to achieve several goals like:
- Preventing violations by employees to avoid legal actions
- Strengthening public relations
- Avoiding all sorts of abuse in the workplace.
- Building a safer and productive work environment
- Maintaining the reputation of a company.
The ultimate goal of any compliance program is to create a secure, healthy and productive work environment. The training help employees understand appropriate behaviour for different situations that might occur. It will always focus on the policies, rules, and laws conveying your organisation’s culture and are always industry-specific. Employees will need to complete the training to proceed with their employment.
Why is Employee Compliance Training important?
Employee Compliance Training is essential because it aims to protect your company’s policies, values and reputation. Non-compliance with these rules, regulations and policies can lead to drastic consequences like financial penalties, loss of productivity and revenue, suspension of licences and reputation crisis. Having proper standards for compliance training ensures that the company is legitimate. Making your employees aware of the critical policies, rules, and laws helps them acknowledge when the situation is violated.
The training safeguards organisations from legal prosecutions and fosters credibility, transparency, productivity, and dignity within the company.
Compliance Training Examples:
The variety of courses that fall under the compliance training is enormous. The training will depend on your job, industry and day to day functioning. Common subjects of the training include:
- Information Security Training (HIPPA)
- Workplace Safety (OSHA)
- Anti-harassment training
- Workplace Substance Abuse
- HR Law
- Diversity Training
- Workplace Violence
- Data Protection & Privacy
6 Best Practices for Engaging Employee Compliance Training
Employee compliance training content is highly technical and formal, seemingly uninterested and pointless to the employees. The ultimate goal of the training is to educate the employees and comprehend the training. Let us look at the key strategies to develop engaging compliance training:
1. Create the Training Content According to your Learners:
Customise our training program’s content following your audience to make your training more useful and exciting. For example, training on diversity is mandatory for all employees, but a course on Information Security may be relevant only for network and IT teams and not other departments.
2. Tell a Story:
Genuinely useful training is believable and relevant. Compliance training is not an abstract concept but is a crucial part of productivity and legal requirement. By telling stories relevant and realistic that your employees are likely to relate, it helps them interpret the situations that might occur. Storytelling will help your employees understand and agree with the content and help in learning retention. Adding real-life situations, scenarios, narratives, and relatable characters can give real meaning to the training content.
3. Use Microlearning:
Microlearning is a bite-sized learning approach of delivering the short bursts of content to your learners, which is manageable and accessed easily. The microlearning theory says that short and repetitive learning increases long term retention rates.
A significant drawback of the compliance training is the timeframe it takes to get through the course. Teaching a lengthy module to busy employees is not an engaging and good practice to complete training. Breaking down the module into smaller chunks can readily be accessed, and employees can fully engage with the content without getting overwhelmed.
4. Use Gamification:
Gamification is the use of game design elements and aesthetics to engage people and promote problem-solving. With gamification, you can increase fun and engagement by alleviating boredom. Gamification will motivate your learners and help them move to the next level of your training module. You can add the milestones and awards in the training resources that recognises the achievement of your employees. These badges can further be displayed in the learning management system.
5. Add Multimedia Content:
Multimedia content is a useful tool in compliance training and can be very crucial in retaining information. Multimedia content is a great way to break down and simplify complicated concepts. You can use videos, illustrations and infographics to demonstrate the consequences of non-compliance.
6. Provide Multi-Device Access:
Make compliance training more accessible on the devices of your learner’s choice (desktops, smartphones, tablets). Mobile learning is an excellent way of motivating your employees to complete the training without disengaging them. Doing so will prevent you from pushing information at your employees and allowing them to access the resources and learn when they need them.
What is HR Compliance?
HR Compliance is the process of describing the policies and procedures about the operational standards of your employer. In simpler terms, it represents the employer-employee relationship that is governed by law. Most of the activities carried by HR like the hiring employees, protecting worker rights and ensuring that employees accept the regulations are bound by law.
Every esteemed organisation will have a complete HR Compliance to ensure that their employees are happy and satisfied. An employee handbook is distributed by HR to outline all the company-related guidelines and policies. It answers all the questions like training programs, employee benefits, overtime pay etc.
Conclusion
Compliance training is an integral part of corporate training programs, and it is different from other types of training. Understanding these differences is the first step to making your training more engaging and effective. Today, compliance issues are among the critical reasons for unhappy employees, unproductivity, and unsafe working conditions. But having a good employee compliance program can help you resolve all the issues, balance priorities and boost your reputation.
