Curse of the Compliance Course

In most organisations, the rollout of compliance courses usually elicits a collective sigh from employees and leaders alike. Compliance training is typically seen by everyone other than course stakeholders and SMEs as a tick-the-box exercise that pulls people away from their roles and gives leaders yet another task to chase up. 

Have we forgotten the purpose of compliance training?

It’s not to tick a box. It’s to ensure that our people know what is expected of them, helping to prevent risk and giving people the knowledge and confidence to do their roles safely and responsibly. It’s essentially an insurance policy to do business, protecting organisations from legal and reputational risk. 

Loading up a new employee with a series of compliance courses to complete on their first day (or even their first week) might check the box, however it also overwhelms the employee with information during a time where they’re already adapting to new change. This results in cognitive overload, disengagement, and poor knowledge transfer which renders the learning experience ineffective. 

Wheeling out an annual compliance course every other month that’s simply a carbon copy of what was rolled out last year has the same effect on existing employees. People begin to dread compliance training because it feels repetitive and disrupts their day, and what often results is a disengaged learner blindly clicking through course information to get to the inevitable quiz at the end. 

How do you better engage people in compliance training? 

It starts with having a strategy. Some key questions to consider:

Who is your audience?
A one-size fits all approach rarely works, particularly where you have a diverse mix of employees such as organisations with professional, operational and field-based roles. 

What analysis has been done to determine who and why employees should be trained? Sure, training everyone in everything is easier for those designing the learning, however, it’s not an impactful experience for those on the receiving end of it. What do they need to know, what challenges might they face, and what does being compliant look like for each of these roles?

Having a compliance experience that is vastly different from the way your people work each day, or that includes scenarios and examples far removed from what they experience in their working environment, is the fastest way to create a lack of buy-in and engagement.   

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What does your learning landscape look like?
The size of your business and the type of roles and resources that exist can play into this, however there are plenty of large-scale heavily resourced organisations doing compliance poorly and smaller bespoke businesses doing it well. 

Do you have an LMS/LXP, or are you relying on facilitated or leader-led training? If you’re using technology, how are your people absorbing learning, as a mobile learning experience requires a different strategy to traditional desktop-based learning. 

Do you have an in-house learning team or are you outsourcing / using off the shelf content?
If using off the shelf content, has it been developed for your market and industry, and is the content able to be customised (not just white labelled with your logo)? There are some great bespoke course providers out there (including OBSIDEA) who specialise in targeted and specific compliance content that has the ability to be modified to suit your needs, which provides a much more targeted learning experience than a stock standard out-of-the-box compliance solution. 

Has capacity for learning been created as part of your learning strategy, or are people expected to find time to complete the training amongst their daily duties? Creating space to complete learning initiatives helps alleviate some of the frustration employees feel when it comes to compliance training and sets the tone for a positive learning culture.

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What’s your ROI?

‍If you take into account that the average compliance course is approximately 30 minutes in duration, then consider the number of employees you have, the spend in resourcing the build/acquiring the content, rolling it out, delivering the comms, time spent resourcing the follow up etc., what are you measuring it against?

How is the success of the content being tested? Are you tracking breach and non-compliance trends to measure training effectiveness? Your stakeholders and legal function should be working hand in hand with your learning team/agency to address the issues or breaches that exist in your organisation, not just rolling out an annualised refresher that captures the latest updates to legislation and regulations. Rarely, if ever, do we see organisations go this far down the rabbit hole of ROI. Instead, success is often measured against the course completion rate, which is a false metric of success and is not an indicator of knowledge transfer, behavioural change or performance.  

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So what’s the solution? 

Although it seems to be the norm, there is no one size fits all approach. 

Each organisation and workforce is different and although it might be appealing to go with an out-of-the-box solution in a time where many of us are operating lean on budget, resourcing and capacity, organisations looking to create engaging compliance training would do well to look past what’s easy and realign themselves with the purpose of compliance training – what do our people need? 

Compliance is to ensure that your people know what is expected of them, helping to prevent risk and giving people the knowledge and confidence to do their roles safely and responsibly. If you reflect on your current compliance courses, is that what's happening in your organisation, or have you fallen victim to that box-ticking culture?

Interested in hearing how OBSIDEA can transform the way your organisation learns? Reach out for an obligation-free chat.  

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