Compliance training is essential to keep your teams updated with ever-changing rules, regulations, company policies, and procedures. Staying on top of compliance presents a significant challenge for most human resources (HR) teams and organizations, mainly because of the evolving legislation. What may have been compliant yesterday could be outdated with new laws or regulations today. These changes can lead to legal risks, financial penalties, and even damage an organization’s reputation.
Organizations must stay vigilant and promptly adapt to changes to ensure ongoing compliance and protect their interests. Thus, it is essential to enhance compliance training for increased effectiveness.
What is compliance training?
Workplace compliance training ensures that team members know all of the essential rules, regulations, and policies that dictate how they do their jobs. Some courses are primarily delivered during onboarding, while others may require annual or biannual retraining.
You can deliver most compliance training in-house and customize it to meet your company’s specific needs. For example, you will need tailored training to teach employees about your organization’s DEI or security policies. Other topics may need to be certified through outside providers.
Workplace compliance training protects your employees and your organization by ensuring your team members understand the rules surrounding how they do their jobs.
Why do we need to make workplace compliance training more engaging?
There are two main reasons you should focus on making your workplace compliance training more appealing to your team members: the low motivation for employees to take part and the high consequences of team members failing to engage.
Let’s examine the consequences of team members failing to successfully engage with your workplace compliance training. If your employees are bored and distracted during training, there’s a high chance that they’ll either misunderstand or fail to remember the rules.
Given that compliance training is designed to protect your organization from legal and ethical minefields, that’s a huge risk. Your organization could suffer a loss of reputation or even face legal action. Finding ways to fully engage employees with compliance training material is in your company’s best interest.
But why wouldn’t they engage anyway? Unfortunately, compliance training is rarely motivating. It’s compulsory, meaning employees often feel like they’re being “forced” to work through it. It can also be relatively dry and prescriptive, often focusing on what not to do.
Compliance training can also sometimes feel like a distraction from “real” work. That’s especially difficult when teams are facing imminent deadlines. Some compliance training can feel irrelevant to employees’ day-to-day experiences, which reinforces the idea that this is a ‘chore to suffer through’.
Ultimately, if we want employees to really understand and remember the rules around how they do their jobs, we need to find a way to make compliance training fun. Luckily, that’s not as difficult as it might sound.
How to make compliance training compelling
We can borrow ideas from lots of different areas and industries to help create engaging compliance training. Here are some of the best strategies from psychology, computer game design, higher education, and more:
1. Make it relevant
One of the easiest ways to improve someone’s motivation is to relate what you’re trying to teach to their personal experiences or show them how it will improve their lives. That’s usually pretty easy with workplace compliance training.
Good compliance training isn’t just about re-stating rules. It involves showing your employees how to apply those rules in their jobs. Include examples that relate what they’re learning back to their regular workday.
You can also emphasize some of the advantages of abiding by the rules. Clarify how safety protocols safeguard individuals or demonstrate how enacting policies can streamline the overall working process of your employees.
2. Try gamification
Learning is always more fun when it’s a game. You can incorporate computer game design strategies into your training material to improve motivation. Gamification can often include elements of competition, such as allocating points for completing training sessions and creating league tables. Recording “streaks” of consecutive days of learning can help develop a habit of regular training. Another gamification tool is conditional release, where employees “unlock” the next level of training. Instead of feeling forced to complete compliance training, new training materials become a reward.
Moodle LMS allows for easy customization with gamification elements, making it an ideal choice for implementing these strategies. Its foundation on social constructivist pedagogy aligns with learner-centric principles and enhances engagement through standard gamification features such as badges, leaderboards, conditional release, and H5P for interactive content.
Built on the feature-rich foundation of Moodle LMS, Moodle Workplace provides additional tools and features tailored for workplace learning. The gamification elements seamlessly integrate into the corporate training environment, allowing organizations to motivate employees, track progress, and foster a collaborative learning culture.
3. Use microlearning
Even with our best efforts, some compliance training materials can be dry and difficult to read. Divide them into bite-sized pieces to make them easier for your staff to swallow.
Microlearning lets staff fit their compliance training into spare time throughout their day or week, making it less likely to interfere with a high workload or pending deadlines. It also makes the material far less daunting. Watching a three-minute video feels more achievable than a half-day seminar.
4. Incorporate quizzes
Making training more interactive boosts information retention and makes sessions more enjoyable and engaging. A simple way to do this is to offer quizzes and small skills checks throughout the process that can provide evidence that an employee understands your workplace compliance training materials and allow you to offer feedback on great performance. The flexibility of Moodle’s Quiz activity allows you to design and set quiz tests that are automatically marked, with feedback and correct answers shown to the participants.
When creating a Quiz, you can either make the questions first and add them to the Quiz or add a Quiz activity and create the questions as you go along. This flexibility ensures the quizzes can be tailored to meet specific training needs and goals.
Just remember to keep quizzes low-stakes and low-key to avoid creating test stress. These should be quick checks of understanding and memory without the need for studying or test prep, making them effective tools for reinforcing learning without adding pressure.
5. Including interactive media
To ensure that compliance training captures employees’ attention and remains relevant, it is essential to incorporate a wide range of real-world scenarios and multimedia elements. This can be achieved by integrating current news stories, drawing from past experiences, and presenting hypothetical job-related situations. By doing so, you can effectively emphasize the tangible benefits of compliance training, allowing staff to better appreciate its significance.
Moreover, considering that individuals have diverse learning preferences, it is important to deliver information using a variety of formats, such as videos, slide shows, images, and other visual aids. This multi-faceted approach not only maintains the interest of the staff but also enriches their overall learning experience. The combination of real-world examples and multimedia content ensures that the training materials are not only informative but also engaging, accommodating different learning styles and ultimately improving the retention of the training content.
Use the right LMS to make compliance training interactive
We’ve seen how important it is for your organization to have a fun and engaging approach to workplace compliance training. You’ve also got a few suggestions for how to adapt your training materials to give your employees the best learning experience.
The next question is, “How can you implement those changes quickly and easily without creating more work for your HR or training departments?”
The right LMS will be flexible enough to support all of these different approaches to making compliance training more fun and engaging for employees. Moodle Workplace allows managers to monitor and assess their employees’ learning and development progress, offering real-time insights and comprehensive reports on their team’s performance. The platform aligns with key trends in compliance, provides optimized resources for comprehensive training purposes, and seamlessly adapts to shifting workforce structures and requirements. You can transform your compliance training into a more engaging and efficient process, ultimately contributing to a safer and more productive work environment.
