Compliance plays an essential role in the ability of every business to operate within the confines of the law. Providing the right skills training ensures your people stay compliant with industry regulations and that your business can avoid thorny legal issues and loss of reputation. That’s why you should know how to improve compliance training in your business.
Employee skills training of all kinds is necessary for businesses to succeed. You can’t always count on applicants or new hires having the exact combination of skills and qualifications you require. Even if they do, shifting tech standards are changing modern workplaces at an alarming rate.
One of the main obstacles limiting employee learning and development is low engagement. Gartner research from the past couple of years shows that only 31% of employees are engaged at work. This matches Gallup’s findings on US engagement almost exactly.
Of course, workplace learning can be a great antidote to disengagement. The demand is certainly there, as further findings from Gartner show that less than half of employees are satisfied with their career development.
Why traditional compliance training fails
What makes it difficult to improve compliance training is that the subject matter is usually about as dry and boring as it gets. Things like health and safety, data handling, or anti-discrimination training. Vital for the workplace, but not exactly thrilling. That’s why modern security and compliance training software often includes features to keep learners motivated and engaged.
The widespread engagement issues highlighted by organizations like Gartner and Gallup mean that average employee buy-in is probably low. This means they’re likely to be less receptive to dull, mandatory training.
Drawbacks of compliance training for employees
That said, if boring course content was the only obstacle, it wouldn’t be so much of a problem. Other drawbacks of a traditional approach to compliance training include:
- Ineffective box-ticking: Training quality can vary widely by organization. When compliance training isn’t fit for purpose, your certification process basically becomes a box-ticking exercise. The paper trail may suggest you’ve met your commitments, but poorly trained workers are liable to keep making costly compliance mistakes.
- Manual course management: Older compliance training systems lack the automation and streamlining of modern software. This means every new batch of trainees is a direct increase in workload for your L&D admins.
- Lack of continuous learning: Compliance requirements can change over time, which is why it’s essential to keep training updated. Traditional approaches fail to support continuous learning, which means training certifications can’t guarantee employee skills are up to date.
- Inconsistent documentation: Older methods of compliance training management required HR to fully document things like sign-ups and certifications. This can create a lengthy turnaround time for small teams supporting large numbers of staff, and cause gaps in documentation due to human error.
Navex Global’s 2023 State of Risk and Compliance report showed that less than half (42%) of compliance and risk professionals rated training employees as a top challenge, and 38% said the same of aligning policies to changing regulations. While this is a good thing overall, it does mean there may still be many organizations grappling with these issues.
Best practices for how to improve compliance training
Now it’s time for some practical advice on how to improve compliance training for your business. We’ve segmented our advice into sections, starting with a couple of general tips. Then we’ll go over the role of AI in modern compliance training software, and finish by looking at how our LMS, Learn365, can help you deliver effective change. Let’s dive in!
1. Take a multimedia approach
One of the most important steps in creating provable ROI for corporate training is to build a more effective set of course materials. Boring text documents and dull tests won’t engage employees, and without engagement, they won’t retain the information.
That’s why you need multimedia elements, so that employees have more interesting and even interactive ways to engage with course content. These include:
- Video content: Video content is a more effective way of condensing complex regulatory information into bite-sized learning resources. It offers some of what an employee might get from attending an expert lecture, but in a format that can be consumed asynchronously.
- Interactive elements: While quizzes are a simple and effective tool for testing learning, interactive elements can help people stay engaged by mixing things up with more interesting exercises. You could have employees highlight all the health and safety violations in a kitchen diagram, or have them practice compliant personal info collection with a bot.
- Gamification elements: Gamification is a simple but surprisingly effective motivator for learning. Things like points, profile levels, achievement badges, leaderboards and reward systems provide novel, extrinsic motivation to help compensate for the inherent dullness of a lot of compliance training.
2. Flow-of-work learning with real-life scenarios
Some learning management systems operate completely walled off from the virtual workspaces employees actually use. This can make it harder for employees to transfer and apply learned skills to their role because they were learned in an artificial environment.
Other systems, like Learn365, break down these walls by making courses accessible through tools your people already use, such as Microsoft Teams. If you want to meaningfully improve compliance training, however, then you need to embrace flow-of-work learning.
On top of that, it’s important for L&D admins to create virtual exercises that reflect employees’ actual work setup, with challenges based on the kinds of issues they’ll regularly encounter. While plenty of providers offer out-of-the-box exercise content, going the extra mile by tailoring it for your workplace can really make a difference.
Using AI to transform compliance training
Our next couple of points concern how AI can help you improve compliance training for employees. Assessing the quality of a potential vendor’s AI features is an important part of evaluating compliance training software. If you’re not sure where to start, these tips might help:
3. Powered up course creation
The best software options have AI tools to assist with course creation. One thing AI is very good at is scanning the documents you give it and turning them into functional course materials. It can even generate quizzes based on subject matter, so you’ve always got fresh exercises.
AI course creation tools make it much easier to generate content on the fly, so you can cater to different types of compliance training. It also helps you sustain ongoing learning with fresh materials, beyond initial certification, so employees are encouraged to keep themselves up to date.
4. Learning path personalization
One of the biggest reasons to use AI in learning management is its potential for custom personal development. Without AI or modern software, HR would have to have fixed training tracks or find ways to support learning path personalization manually.
The latter isn’t sustainable, especially for growing companies with hundreds (or thousands) of employees. As for the former, it’s just not enough to keep people engaged. But AI can leverage your content libraries and make recommendations based on things like role type, performance data, and the kinds of skills and content they’ve shown interest in over time.
How Learn365 enhances compliance training
If you’re looking for the right tool to improve compliance training for your business, then look no further. To finish up, let’s look at what Learn365 has to offer.
Powerful AI features
Zensai’s Human Success Platform has embraced AI, and Learn365 is no exception, with features such as:
- AI-powered course builder: Learn365 makes course creation and management easy. Find suitable content from any of your libraries and our Content365 add-on, then mix and match for quickly put-together custom courses. AI can assist with content recommendations to give you the best blend of compliance materials.
- Learning path customization: Our algorithm uses bespoke recommendations to enable continuous learning in your business. As mentioned earlier, recommendations are based on employee roles, existing strengths and weaknesses, performance data and areas of personal interest. These recommendations encourage people to keep going beyond the mandatory modules you assign them.
- Document transformation: An important feature provided by Orbie, or AI virtual assistant, allows L&D admins to upload documents and quickly turn them into usable course materials. This allows you to take an active role in growing your own internal content libraries over time.
User-friendly design
Overly complicated software can cause more delays than it removes. That’s why Learn365 and the rest of our Human Success Platform rely on simple, intuitive user interfaces. Our platform is easy to use for end-users and administrators alike. Employees get personalized profiles, while admins can use dashboards to review critical L&D metrics.
This level of user-friendliness means employees won’t struggle to learn their way around the platform or find their compliance training courses. That way, there’s no need for extensive training just so that they can… well, train.
Streamlining and automation
One way we provide user-friendliness for L&D admins is by giving them the ability to automate regular workflows. These include:
- Enrollment (including automatic, mandatory sign-ups)
- Progress tracking
- Completion tracking
- Skill certification
Organizations like the insurance company Youi have taken advantage of these features to great success. They allow HR to effectively manage a much wider array of courses than they’d otherwise be able to. As such, it’s important to allow you to give employees a wide variety of additional, optional compliance content to explore.
Built for Microsoft Teams
As you know, we place a strong emphasis on learning in the flow of work. That’s one of the reasons we built the Human Success Platform from the ground up to work with Microsoft 365. One of the main results of this is that Learn365 and our other modules are fully accessible within Microsoft Teams.
This helps prevent app fatigue, as employees don’t have to keep navigating back and forth between training programs and their work apps. Accessing training in the flow of work means they’ll be better able to apply compliance knowledge in a real setting.
Whereas other providers may have Teams integrations of varying quality, Zensai’s integration is arguably the best on the market. Through it, employees can truly access everything Learn365 has to offer.
Platform scalability
Learn365 has options available to support businesses of any size. That way, you can be sure we’ll continue supporting compliance training as your business grows. For individual teams and small businesses, we offer a Freemium version of Learn365 that’s popular with businesses like Anjuna Airline Solutions.
For enterprise businesses, our platform’s workflow automation allows even a small HR team to manage compliance training for huge numbers of end-users. On top of that, our Success Premium support plan gives you access to our dedicated expert support team, able to help with queries on any custom setup or support needs.
A modern approach to compliance training
Ultimately, our tips on how to improve compliance training boil down to this:
Employees need training that’s less repetitive and more engaging. Luckily, you’ve got plenty of tools to tackle this, like multimedia content and gamification elements. Beyond that, the best way to engage employees is to let them control their own development. And, finally, AI can be critical for delivering bespoke learning support to the largest number of people.
If we had to leave you with one piece of advice, let it be this: Stagnant learning is the enemy. Besides leading to outdated knowledge and skills, it’s a quick recipe to bore and disengage your people. Innovation not only helps you keep up with new developments but keeps continuous learning exciting and fresh.
If you want to learn more about how Learn365 can enable better compliance training for you, we offer live demo appointments guided by a member of our support team. So, reach out and book your demo appointment today!
