15 ways to revamp compliance training in 2024

Hands up: do learners just see your compliance training as a box-ticking exercise? If so, you’re really, really not alone.

Compliance training has a terrible reputation. It’s seen as dry, boring and unnecessary. Who really remembers which fire extinguisher should be used on which type of fire? We may know we should keep drinks away from our computers, but how many of us actually do it?

But compliance training is extremely important for your organisation, employees and customers, whether you’re in a high-consequence industry like healthcare, manufacturing or finance or not. It’s your opportunity to keep everyone safe and informed about the latest rules, regulations and standards, as well as instilling real behaviour change.

Why does compliance training fail?

EY’s Global Integrity Report 2022 flagged up some alarming figures. While compliance programmes have grown in scale, it appears that more business leaders than ever before have become more tolerant of unethical behaviour. 

For instance, 15% admit they would falsify financial records and 18% would mislead auditors or regulators (both up from 3% in 2020), and 42% of board members agree that unethical behaviour in senior roles is tolerated in their organisations.

So how on earth did we get here? Two main reasons compliance training fails are:

1. The use of generic training. If content doesn’t relate to role-specific issues, it’s not going to feel relevant enough, and will fall flat.
2. Training is disconnected from risk-causing events. It can be difficult to join the dots between the hypothetical challenges raised in compliance training and the real-world consequences, meaning the message loses its impact.
   
   

How to boost compliance beyond training

Compliance training is only one piece of the puzzle when you’re looking to change behaviours and mindsets - especially where ethical matters are concerned. While compliance training will provide employees with the right foundations and the accurate information, this is unlikely to be carried through into their actions without additional support. This could look like:

• Encouraging compliant behaviour through positive reinforcement or incentives
• Leading by example from the senior leadership team
• Prioritising employee fairness and ‘doing the right thing’ in your corporate strategy

These should all take place in tandem with formal and on-demand compliance training. For instance, most organisations will expect employees to complete annual compliance courses, but then what? Ensure your compliance materials are always available on-demand so employees can refer back to your policies, processes and protocols, and take a look at the wider learning culture in your organisation to ensure it supports and champions compliance.

15 ways to revamp compliance training

It’s impossible to transform tired compliance training overnight, but if you’re struggling to maintain engagement or drive real behaviour change in your organisation, the good news is that there’s plenty you can start doing right now to revitalise your compliance training. 

Read on to discover our top 15 ideas…

#1 Create consumer-grade learning experiences

5app provides a Netflix-style learning experience. It reflects the consumer technology experience employees are used to, making it more enjoyable and intuitive and lowering barriers to learning. So much digital compliance training is based on poor quality, overly long PowerPoint-based content, whereas 5app’s interface is designed for ease of use and quick access, which is essential for boosting engagement with your compliance training programme.

#2 Show the real-world applications

If you see a story in the news that relates to compliance, this is a great learning opportunity! Add a link to the article in your learning platform and create a quick quiz off the back of it to help employees keep their compliance knowledge sharp. 

#3 Nudge employees to complete their training

If you have compliance deadlines to hit, it can be frustrating having to track down the stragglers and remind them to complete their training. With 5app’s nudges, the process is automated, as the platform lets people know when they’re behind on their compliance training, freeing your learning team up to focus on other tasks.

#4 Make it easy for subject matter experts to share content

SMEs may be experts in their own fields, but that doesn’t mean they’re experts in building a great compliance training experience. Breaking content into playlists means you can deliver content in a way that makes sense to employees without overwhelming them. For instance, your playlist could provide a step-by-step guide, or tell a story as the employee works through the content.

#5 Lock in line manager support

Managers play a key role in the success of compliance training. They can ensure everyone sets aside time to complete mandatory training and create a culture where everyone understands the importance of completing learning on time. With 5app, they can promote compliance resources to their teams and assess the impact through our handy manager dashboard.

#6 Get up and running in hours

The beauty of a simple learning and comms platform is that it can be set up and ready to use within hours. If you don’t already have a compliance solution, a browser-based learning platform can be branded, customised, populated with content and launched within a day, giving you a brand-new compliance training experience at speed.

#7 Make time for compliance training

Many businesses try to cram every last scrap of compliance training into a single, giant elearning course, leaving employees struggling to fit it into their busy schedules. Breaking it down into bite-sized activities, all packaged neatly in a playlist, means you can target individuals and teams with easily accessible, easily digestible compliance content that they can chip away at when it suits them.

#8 Cover all topics on one platform

Even if your compliance training covers 10 completely different topics, from health and safety to anti-bribery to behaviour policies, you can still deliver them all from a single platform for ease of access. Consider creating a dedicated compliance academy to keep compliance training organised, while breaking specific topics down into playlists to make sure it all stays neat and tidy.

#9 Measure the effectiveness of your compliance training

Every L&D team needs a way to measure the impact of its compliance training. A data dashboard provides the insights you need to see who is engaging with compliance content, who’s running behind and how employees are engaging with training. You can see which teams are the most proactive and which employees might need a little nudge to meet the compliance deadline, helping you keep things moving.

#10 Do more with less

Even businesses with tight budgets can deliver great compliance training experiences by getting smart about their content. Conduct a content audit to see which existing content is still relevant, what gaps exist and what needs to be updated. If you’re on a tight budget, consider working with SMEs to create cost-effective in-house learning resources, such as quick self-recorded videos, checklists and PDFs.

#11 Focus on real behaviour change

The best compliance training on the planet can’t be solely responsible for changing attitudes and behaviours in the long term. To do that, you first need to ensure that your learning culture supports the desired behaviours, and then reinforce them through leadership role modelling and a drip-feed of useful content to keep everyone compliant and alert to risks through spaced practice.

#12 Change perceptions of compliance training

Nobody enjoys click-next elearning… so why is it so common for content as dry as compliance training? While you can’t make standard health and safety training the most fun part of the year, you can at least make it look and feel more engaging. Instead of bland manuals, switch to short videos, quizzes and checklists - and make sure they all look modern, inviting and tailored to your brand to make them feel more relevant.

#13 Make compliance content relevant to your employees

Great-quality content doesn’t need to cost the earth. Sometimes it’s just about making it more relevant to your people, which could mean combining content from multiple sources. This US digital health company did just that, bringing together multiple content streams into a single platform to create a tailored compliance package for employees, and this simple change led to a 100% increase in compliance training completion.

#14 Go beyond off-the-shelf content

While off-the-shelf learning content is super useful for small L&D teams, compliance training tends to work best when it’s more tailored to your organisation. Something as simple as transforming your policy documents into more interactive resources or issuing a quiz asking employees to apply their knowledge to different scenarios will help bring content to life in the context of your business, meaning it doesn’t feel generic.

#15 Keep compliance content up to date

If you’re a one-person L&D team, the thought of regularly updating your training can be overwhelming. But chunking your content into short resources makes it easier for you to switch assets out as and when you have time, so when you need to update a policy document, you can simply switch it out in your playlist rather than having to edit and reupload an entire elearning module. Simple!