Compliance training courses have a bad reputation. Mention of something as innocuous as data protection training for staff and you’ll be able to hear the groans from miles away. Compliance training is seen as boring, dull and, at best, an opportunity to do something different from your day job for a while. And training that’s viewed as boring is training that isn’t successful – if it’s not engaging then frankly, your learners really won’t learn and they are unlikely to apply the knowledge in their work.
The subject matter of compliance training isn’t the most exciting. That’s fact. FCA compliance courses or refreshing your knowledge of industry regulations, are starting from a point that their subject is somewhat dry, steeped in legal jargon and not exactly the most riveting use of your time.
Is it possible for mandatory staff compliance training to NOT be boring?
How to Make Compliance Training Engaging
It is possible to deliver ethics and compliance training in a way that is engaging and results in genuine learning, rather than a simple tick-box exercise. It’s even possible to do compliance e-learning in this way, now that much of your workforce is remote. Here’s how.
1. Your Learners Are Modern Employees, Not 1950s School Children
Compliance training has typically been classroom-based involving elements of rote learning. All that’s been missing from the 1950s classroom is the strict schoolmaster brandishing a piece of chalk that can whizz through the air and clip pupils who aren’t paying attention.
Wherever possible, compliance courses should be delivered through e-learning. This immediately puts your learner in the role of adult-in-control. With 24/7 connectivity, your learners should be in the position that they can do their training from their smartphone whenever they want, wherever they want.
It’s the first step to a self-motivated learner.
2. Spice It Up
The easiest way to make dull content more interesting is to deliver it in various different ways. If you’re going down the remote compliance training route because of point 1 above, that means multi-media.
Training should be a hotchpotch of videos, text, imagery, audio, animations, gamification, quizzes and anything else you can think of to make the delivery varied.
3. Make It Real
Compliance training is often one of those things that is bought ‘off-the-shelf’ and deposited in front of your employees as a fait accompli. It’s too generic and it isn’t relevant to their everyday working life. Whether it’s Healthy Business (HB) compliance training or a data protection refresher, it should be relevant to your workplace, drawing on believable scenarios through the use of story-telling.
In this way, your employees will see how they can actually implement what they’ve learned in what they do.
4. Use the Personalisation Factor
Compliance training for employees delivered virtually through e-learning on an LMS platform should have no problem with being personalised. From using their name in email delivery to making elements of the individual’s training role-specific, personalisation can really make the learner feel engaged and motivated.
What’s more, personalisation shows the individual that their time is respected. They aren’t being forced to sit through something irrelevant to them.
5. Break It Up
The subject matter is boring. We get that. And how do we manage boring things in our lives? We break them up, smattering them with other things that do interest us. Micro-learning is the ideal approach to compliance training. Space it out and deliver snippets of training here and there followed by ultra-short and fast assessments.
6. Remind, Remind, Remind
Everyone is busy. Compliance training might be mandatory but it won’t be the top of the priority pile for most people. They will always have more pressing things to be doing with their time.
Again, your LMS and automation should be your friends here. Nudges, notifications and reminders need to be engaging and enticing. Think of different ways to do this from tying learning to targets to delivering rewards for training completed.
Fundamentally, it’s time to step away from traditional training when it comes to compliance. Make it fun, integrate it into the everyday, and you’ll have engaged and enthusiastic learners who authentically and meaningfully apply their compliance knowledge to their work.
Check out our 5-Step Compliance Training Checklist.
