5 tips for better compliance training
Compliance is necessary for a lot of industries. Your employees are a key part of meeting compliance requirements so it’s importantto keep them up-to-date on those requirements and how to best meet them. That makes employee compliance training about as mandatory as meeting and reporting on those compliance efforts.
Unfortunately, that doesn’t mean compliance training is something employees look forward to. But that doesn’t have to be the case. Better compliance training leads to better compliance reporting, which has a direct effect on your bottom line.
Here are 5 tips on presenting engaging and enjoyable compliance training for your employees.
Shake it up
It’s well documented that people have all types of different learning styles. While a lecture might work for some employees, a presentation with lots of diagrams might be more useful for others. Instead of doing the same style compliance training every time, try adding in different methods to engage your staff.
Multimedia presentations keep things fresh and add variety between lectures, images, videos, and even demonstrations. Consider outside the box ideas like creating games and interactive sessions. This will help capture the attention of your workforce and help boost retention.
Make it a party
There are a lot of benefits to human social interaction. While it’s not practical to actually throw a party every time there’s compliance training, leveraging the benefits of social interaction can help with your programming. Collaborative learning can seem much less like a task than a mandatory lecture. Provide the opportunity for your employees to work on training tasks together.
In fact, social media facilitates online-only training. This informal setting gives staff members the chance to share and discuss ideas, grow their understanding of the industry and positively engage with others — all without feeling like an obligatory task to be checked off the to-do list.
Break it up
For an expert in compliance regulations, spouting off all the information at one time may seem simple and easy to understand. For an employee who’s still learning the ropes, taking in that information all at one time is nearly impossible. Not only that, the frustration at not being able to keep up with the incoming data can actually shut off the learning center of the brain, making a long compliance training worthless.
Instead of putting all the information out at once, break it up into smaller, actionable segments. Micro-learning opportunities can give a worker some time to digest and understand how what was learned fits into the larger picture. This makes them all the more receptive to future learning sessions and more productive in their daily work.
Modernize the process
Overhead projectors and even powerpoint presentations are not how most people spend their time learning these days. Update the mediums used to meet your employees where they’re at. Modernizing compliance training makes it much more relevant to staff and creates something they’re more likely to engage with.
Consider mobile training as an option. Considering how often an employee is likely to be on their smartphone, it’s much more natural for an employee to absorb and retain information on a handheld device than from a thick handbook. This modernization can be much more simple, however: update pictures, create more relevant graphs, and consider incorporating fun tech gifs to keep people interested.
Take it easy
Compliance training has gotten a bad reputation in the past because it’s been approached as a necessary evil. That doesn’t have to be the case. In fact, it really shouldn’t be the case. Making compliance training fun actually has a multiplying effect. Not only are employees more likely to attend training and remain fully engaged, but they’re more likely to absorb and retain the information presented.
When a compliance training is something that they look forward to, they’ll ultimately be more interested in meeting those compliance regulations and coming up with ways to improve the system. More engaged and aware employees work for the system, not against it, and that boosts productivity and compliance.
Whether you’re providing training on HIPAA, NIST, or other industry regulations, contact an IT company experienced in compliance to help you put together a useful and engaging employee training program.