5 Innovative Compliance Training Strategies That Will Get You the Desired Results

If you are looking for ways to make your compliance training compelling and interesting, read on! In this article, I outline how to uplift boring compliance training with innovative strategies and successfully meet your mandate.

The Best Compliance Training Strategies That Offer The Desired Results

Compliance training is a crucial training for organizations who must comply with the policies and procedures from Government or Regulatory bodies. As an extension, the Compliance training requires 100% conformance, and it must be completed a certain number of times during the year.

At EI, we have been working with Compliance teams of our customers spread across the world for over 18 years now. In fact, one in 6 courses we develop is on Compliance. Over these years, we have seen the following key challenges:

• Challenge 1 – Lack of motivation: The learners are motivated to complete trainings that help learners upskill or perform better. However, when it comes to Compliance trainings, they do not have any intrinsic motivation.
• Challenge 2 – Passive learning experience: On top of the fact that the learners are not motivated to complete the Compliance trainings, there is a related challenge that these trainings tend to be rather boring. This is on account of the fact that learning strategies that are used are the most obvious ones. As a result, they do not engage the learners.
• Challenge 3 – Prescriptive approach: Quite often, the way Compliance trainings are scripted, the tone tends to be preachy or prescriptive. As adult learners, we all know how we react to this!

This leads us to the crux of the problem. Considering Compliance trainings are crucial and mandatory for organizations, unless they are crafted with learning strategies that connect with the leaners, they will not deliver the required impact.

What Kind of Compliance Training Strategies Work Best?

My belief is that for creating effective Compliance trainings, we need to take an integrated approach that factors for engaging learners at multiple levels. Their learning path should be designed as shown here.

Step 1: Creating awareness prior to the Compliance training roll-out. This will offset the first challenge and create interest in the given training.

Step 2: Using more engaging and immersive learning strategies. They not only create a sticky learning experience, but push the learners to think, understand the impact of their action (or inaction), and eventually drive the right behavior.

Step 3: Retaining a connect with the learners, even after they have completed the required training through learning aids. 

What Compliance Training Strategies Can Help You Deliver the Desired Impact and Results?

At EI, we have experimented with a wide spectrum of Compliance training strategies that have helped our customers meet their mandate successfully.

Our approach in creating interesting and engaging Compliance training strategies includes:

1. Consultation on establishing a comprehensive Learning and Performance Ecosystem-based approach.
2. The use of immersive and sticky learning strategies that push learners to analyze and act correctly (in line with the Compliance mandate).
3. Offering Learning aids (Performance Support Tools or PSTs) that help reinforce the primary message or highlight new perspectives that may have emerged post the initial training.

4. A sustained use of Learning aids over a period of time that will trigger the required behavioral change.
5. Continuing the connect with the learners (post the roll-out of the Compliance training), and one investment we recommend is to create Communities of practice that focus on your various Compliance training programs. This focus can truly help you deliver your Compliance mandate successfully.

To create high-impact Compliance trainings, you must opt for a 3-tiered strategy as shown here:

1. Begin with messages to create awareness: You can use the following assets to achieve this mandate:
   1. eMailers (featuring Infographics).
   2. Posters.
   3. Teaser Videos.
2. Opt for Interactive learning featuring immersive strategies like:
   1. Microlearning.
   2. Video and Interactive Video Based Learning.
   3. Gamification.
   4. Guided exploration based active learning.
   5. Personalization.
   6. Scenario Based Learning.
   7. Story Based Learning.

3. Do not forget to include Learning aids as reinforcement and on-going connects.

From our vast repository, I pick 5 examples to illustrate Compliance training strategies that you can use to deliver the desired results.

Example 1 – Compliance Training Strategies

Antitrust Compliance Training: This course features the usage of Gamification and is designed for procurement teams to have basic knowledge of agreements and practices prohibited from an antitrust perspective. The learning path uses:

• A level-based Gamification approach with gating activities at the end of each topic.
• Key cards for users to proceed to the next level.

Example 2 – Compliance Training Strategies  

Conflict of Interest: This course features the usage of Personalization. The course was created to bring about awareness on conflict of interest issues using a Personalized approach that connects learners to the content. This course allows the learner to go through a series of activities where:

• He or she has to first choose an avatar to become a part of the scenario.
• The learner then interacts with fictitious characters who face certain challenges and as an expert, he or she has to answer their questions and proceed to learn more.

Example 3 – Compliance Training Strategies

Intellectual Property course: This course was intended to make learners aware of the various aspect of Intellectual Property, covering topics on IP, brand protection, and patents. This course makes use of:

• Infographics and typography based dynamic motion videos with expert and leadership videos overlaid within them at the start of each topic.
• Infographic based screen presentations.

Example 4 – Compliance Training Strategies  

Health and Safety training: This Microlearning course was fashioned to develop eLearning assets that support a Blended Learning approach to establish minimum safety expectations on seven specific life critical safety topics. In this course, learners go through a learning path that uses multiple Microlearning nuggets:

• View (conceptual videos/context setting).
• Learn (interactive learning bites, including Tips, Activities, and Resources).
• Cheat Sheets/Ready Reckoners/PST (Learning Aids).
• Read More/Deep Dive/PST (Learning Aids).
• Wrap up: End of module Assessments (Summative).

Example 5 – Compliance Training Strategies

Risk Management Training: This interactive PDF was designed as a post-course takeaway of a training program on risk management. This post-course takeaway makes use of:

• An infographic iPDF format.
• This would help learners retain the key learnings and use the printed version for reference.

I hope the 5 Compliance training strategies featured in my article would inspire you to adopt them. Do invest on the Ecosystem based approach for your Compliance trainings and you will certainly see the desired results. If you have any specific queries, do contact me at apandey@eidesign.net.

Read More

1. 4 Amazing Ways to Uplift Boring Compliance Training with Microlearning
2. How to Use Gamification to Enhance Compliance Training – Featuring 4 Examples
3. Free eBook-Strategies to Create Compelling and Immersive Compliance Training—Featuring 8 Examples
4. 5 Tips To Encourage Employees To Comply With Compliance Training
5. Compliance Simplified: Using Creative Instructional Design Approaches To Instill The Spirit Of “Why Comply”