What is Compliance Training?

What is Compliance Training?

Compliance training is the bedrock of any successful talent management system.

It’s easy to think of the process as the bare minimum to achieve organizational cohesion and adherence to ethical standards, but it’s so much more than that. Compliance training is the foundation of your company’s culture, a set of essential guideposts necessary to ensure everyone has the same toolkit to interact positively and succeed as a group.

Still, it goes without saying that achieving 100% compliance is no walk in the park. A staggering 23% of organizations lack any formal compliance training plan whatsoever. Even among those with a plan, 40% admit their compliance programs are basic, bare bones, and leave a lot to be desired. In fact, research shows that a full 40% of employees who don’t receive the necessary job training to become effective will also leave their positions within the first year.

But don’t worry! There are solutions out there.

You can’t avoid compliance — nor should you — so it’s crucial to revolutionize attitudes towards it and track it well. We’ll help you get an up-close and personal look at:

• The essence of what compliance training is
• The importance of compliance in the workplace
• How you can confront compliance problems head on
• And what it takes to craft just the right compliance training program for your organization’s unique needs

Let’s dive in!

The essence of compliance training

Compliance training is employee training you have to engage in. Why? Well, because it’s mandated by either official legislation, government regulations, or other forms of legal policy.

There are certain types of compliance training that are common throughout all different workplaces. With that said, some industries will have to engage in more than others. That’s because the training is usually highly applicable to the regulations set by the innate nature of an industry or any given individual employee’s job role. These regulations are set in place to maintain safety, security, and comfort, whether that’s for the employee themselves, their coworkers, or their customers.

Since this training type is mandatory, it’s paramount to achieve 100% adherence to these standards. That may sound like a lofty goal, but it’s just the name of the game. Unless you can prove your workforce is 100% compliant, then you run the risk of breaching the laws and regulations that keep your industry safe and flourishing.

Not only that, but ensuring your employees are compliant with your procedures and processes also means you’re encouraging a positive working environment and minimizing risk. All this benefits long-term productivity and improves morale. Two essentials for any healthy business.

Why is compliance training important?

The main objective of compliance is to get your employees trained up in accordance with the law. In other words, it’s essential for your business to operate in an above-board, legal way. You’ll also need to generate a record of training completion so regulatory boards see you’re doing your part to keep your workplace safe and up to standards.

The main issue with compliance training is that many employees will treat it like a chore. It’s generally seen as a ‘click and tick’ endeavor with low engagement and low retention.

While checking boxes will indicate you’re adhering to the letter of the law, it’s quite the opposite when it comes to the spirit of the law. If people treat compliance training as a task they have to get through with as little attention and as much speed as possible, it can result in reduced workplace safety and productivity.

So how do you avoid that? How do you make sure you go against the grain and make your team members excited to engage in compliance training?

The best option is to invest in high-quality compliance training materials that engage and stimulate your employees.

The challenges of compliance training and how to solve them

Even if you have the best compliance training in the world available to your staff, it won’t be worth much if you don’t know how to track it. And it’s very easy to lose your balance with this precarious process, especially when you’re training hundreds or even thousands of team members.

That’s where a powerful, automated, and multifaceted learning management system (LMS) comes in.

Here’s how one of these products can ensure you’re not only hitting all the right metrics, but you’re also keeping track of your success as you do so:

Course completion

If you have 10 employees, then you won’t struggle to see when they’ve completed their courses and you’ll be able to easily communicate the need to complete them. When you’re dealing with triple or even quadruple and quintuple digits’ worth of employees, that task becomes a lot more complicated.

Consider a large and complex healthcare company. With patient safety on the line, it’s vital that each member of your staff have full healthcare compliance. But in large hospitals or care settings, you’re going to have hundreds, if not thousands of members of clinical staff. Plus, each of these staff will have different compliance training to complete.

This is where an LMS can help.

With your LMS, you’ll be able to centralize your data and see who needs to do what course. Plus, you’ll be able to set up audiences to automatically add employees to the right compliance training courses.

Course deadlines

In the context of an expansive organization, your staff will likely all have different deadlines for when their compliance training needs to be completed.

Managing all of these deadlines independent of an LMS would be just shy of impossible for your HR team. With an LMS in place, you can set up automatic reminders and nudges for your employees to complete their training. Plus, you can set up notifications for managers and your own team so that you can flag any employees who are approaching deadline day and yet to complete their training. This allows the relevant people to take action to encourage completion.

Compliance reporting

Many L&D professionals complain that they’re often asked about compliance levels and that they must manually pull the numbers each time. This is a waste of precious time that could be spent ensuring employees complete their training in the first place.

With the right LMS in place, you can get access to easy, real-time reporting on your compliance levels. Plus, you can easily break down these stats into department, team, and even individual numbers to let you target where your organization has the biggest room for improvement.

Time-poor employees

If you work in a high pressure, always-on industry like healthcare, then your employees are going to have a very long to-do list each day. As a result, training quickly falls to the bottom priority.

As such, you need to highlight the value of your compliance training to ensure that users engage and complete it. An LMS allows you to send out reminders to use your content by highlighting the objective of each piece of training.

Tips to improve compliance rate

Totara’s Global Partner of the Year for 2023, Think Learning, supports their customers with everyday learning challenges including increasing compliance rates. Circle Health, saw their compliance rate shoot up to over 95% after going live with their new LMS and learning strategy.

Here are some of their top tips you can try to improve your compliance rate:

Put learning front and centre

Your employees should see your LMS as a hub for their own growth and development. It’s a place they can go to achieve their goals and grow as both people and employees. So, when they log in, put compliance training front and centre by including links to training and compliance dashboards on your homepage.

That way, it will remain front of mind.

After all, user experience and design has a huge impact on how people will engage with your LMS so it’s important to factor this into learning campaigns.

Remind your learners through nudge notifications

It’s easy for learners to get sidetracked by other tasks when they’re going through their compliance training content.

Make use of your learning management system’s ability to send nudge notifications to keep each employee on track. Built-in reminder tools will automatically send emails and texts to your users and help them meet your organization’s compliance goals.

You can use these to remind them to start their training, encourage them to pick up where they left off, or highlight the importance of meeting an upcoming deadline.

Allow your learners to test their knowledge and then refresh

Instead of making all of their staff repeat every course every year, test their knowledge and then subscribe them to training for areas where their knowledge is weak.

There are ways to customize the compliance training process so it doesn’t feel like your employees are doing the same thing over and over again from one way to the next. This allows your learners to take more control of their training and have more incentive to retain learning content.

Make compliance about new legislation

In a similar vein to our previous point, some of our customers only update staff on new legislation as opposed to making them repeat their learning across the board. This helps your learners save time while still remaining compliant.

Of course, doing this depends on your regulatory board and how you can work within their guidelines. It’s worth checking with them before changing your compliance strategy.

Improve your compliance training programme

We hope it’s become apparent that compliance training doesn’t have to be a chore for your employees or an unwieldy set of tasks to keep track of for your HR team. With enough finessing, you can make learning about the bare bones of what it takes to operate a safe and up-to-date workplace as enjoyable as some of your more advanced training.

So what are you waiting for? Are you ready to upgrade your compliance training to the fullest extent of your organization’s potential?

Learn how Totara’s platform can help you and your employees stay compliant and create better learning content regardless of your sector.

Join the Totara Community to keep learning

Ready to keep learning? We’ve barely scratched the surface of Totara’s in-depth learning on compliance training. Join the Totara Community for courses, webinars, quizzes, ebooks, and more on compliance training. The Totara Community course, “Making Compliance Count” includes chapters on:

• The five stages of behavior change in compliance
• How to map your compliance program
• Customer stories and webinars
• Step-by-step courses on how to build a compliance program in Totara

Register for a free Totara Community account to keep learning.