The words “compliance training” often draw a collective groan from managers and employees, but it doesn’t have to be boring and ineffectual! Different types of compliance training call for different approaches. And, creating effective courses for employees is not a one size fits all strategy. Read on for compliance training programs examples that are engaging and make a difference. 

1. What corporate compliance training is
2. Types of corporate compliance training
3. Compliance training strategies
4. Compliance training examples that work
5. Best practices for compliance training
6. How to shake up your approach to compliance training

What is corporate compliance training?

Understanding the importance of compliance training is key to fostering ethical and safe workplaces. Compliance training is business-critical employee training that is mandatory for the organization to comply with regulations, legislation, or policies. It is aimed at ensuring employees are familiar and informed regarding any laws or regulations applicable to their particular job or the industry the company is in.

Often, compliance training is carried out on a periodic basis to keep pace with regulatory changes and the introduction of new policies. Organizations will set deadlines for when employees need to complete the training by, in order to stay compliant. 

At its heart, compliance training is all about creating and maintaining fair, safe, ethical organizations. Since it’s mandatory organizations need to record that the employees have completed the courses.

Types of compliance training

Common types of compliance training topics include:

• Occupational safety and health training (eg. OSHA)
• Info and cybersecurity training
• Antidiscrimination and diversity training
• Industry-specific compliance training (eg. for highly regulated industries such as banking, finance or pharmaceuticals)
• Sexual harassment training
• Workplace violence prevention

Compliance training strategies

Too many compliance courses are designed with the main goal of ticking a box to say the business has trained its employees. But this totally misses the point: compliance breaches have huge consequences (for individuals and businesses) so your training really has to hit home. The importance of compliance training is mandated by law but it goes beyond that. The real goal is to change behaviors and help your employees make the right choices.

A compliance elearning program can be engaging and truly respectful of your employees time. And, when it is, it’s much more likely to positively impact your employees’ behaviors. You can make compliance training programs fun and engaging using the following three strategies:

1. Move away from tick-box assessments – make your assessments meaningful and more engaging. Replace memory-based questions such as ‘What does the acronym GDPR stand for?’ with questions that test application such as ‘A customer email lands in the inbox you look after. The customer is requesting that her home address be removed from your database, but you use that address to send her catalogs that she requested last year. What do you do?’
2. Kick content-overload to the corner – compliance content doesn’t have to be tedious, long, and dull. But it doesn’t need to be. Use strategies such as testing first or identifying each learner’s role to cut down the content and only show what is relevant to that particular learner.
3. Give your content some context – employees learn better if they have a real-life applicable example they can draw on. Use case studies and scenarios to bring the content to life and closer to the learner.

Take a look at these examples that get it right using the three strategies outlined above.

Compliance training examples that work

1. Compliance test with question pools

Assessment is critical where compliance is concerned – but the result is too often a standard box-ticking exercise. There’s no need for engagement to fall by the wayside. This example shows how you can use question pools to create a robust assessment that ensures learners really know their stuff (and are less likely to share answers with colleagues!).

You can view this compliance training example in our Showcase page.

Why it works

• Question pools mean that when a learner retakes the test, they’re unlikely to see the same questions again. This helps ensure learners truly understand the content – they won’t be able to simply choose a different answer on a second attempt. It also makes it harder for learners to share answers as it is unlikely their colleagues will have been posed the same set of questions
• Light-touch scenarios ensure the questions are relevant – learners apply what they’ve learnt to a realistic situation, as opposed to just checking knowledge
• A range of question types are used to keep the learner engaged and avoid risking repetition

2. A test-first approach to compliance training

Businesses often need to demonstrate compliance annually. But making employees sit through the same online training courses year after year is what gives compliance training a bad rep. This example shows a different approach.

You can see this test-first compliance training example in our Showcase page

Why it works

• A “test-out” approach means nobody spends time on training they don’t need – saving time and money!
• The quiz uses a range of Elucidat question types and scenario-style questions to keep things interesting and relevant
• Testing first means users only see learning content that they actually need, and that content is kept short and focused
• From the outset, the demo is user-centric; the landing page says “protect yourself against cyber attacks”, highlighting the individual (not business) need for it

3. In-depth compliance training

Breaking down your training into short chunks goes a long way to holding learners’ attention and avoiding a situation where they click without reading. It also allows you to focus each chunk on a specific learning point or behavior, as you can see in this Cyber Security example. 

You can see this in-depth compliance training example in our Showcase page.

Why it works

• Learners can see the sections of the course at a glance and get a sense of progress as they tick off each section
• The course can be completed in multiple sessions, fitting in around a learner’s busy workday and focus levels
• Sections are practical and relevant, covering risks and responsibilities rather than legalese that’s hard to digest
• Practical, application focused activities and assessment questions are part of the learning experience, making it active not passive

4. Role-selectors and branching for personalized content

Often compliance training takes the approach of throwing the whole rulebook at everybody. This example about parental leave shows how easy it is to tailor the content to different user groups, and what a difference that makes.

Why it works

• A simple role selector means HR professionals get all the training they need, whereas other employees only see what they need to know and do
• It keeps the branching sensibly simple: in this case, HR or not-HR is sufficient, rather than tailored paths for multiple job roles
• This approach means you can create one course on a hefty policy or procedure, but let different groups access different subsets – a big user impact without content duplication
• A dynamic menu makes the branching feel seamless as, in this example, there’s no need for the user to be aware of alternative routes through the content
• The whole demo is focused on real-life application of the content, both in terms of level of detail needed and in the decisions and tasks replicated in the simple, practical quiz

5. Step-by-step compliance process

When learners need to get to grips with a practical compliance process it’s important to make it as simple to digest as possible. This example shows how you can use a visual menu to break up the steps of a process without losing sight of the bigger picture.

You can see this step-by-step compliance training example in our Showcase page.

Why it works

• This visual menu presents each step as a separate topic, stacked in the order of the process. Learners get an overview of the process at a glance, helping them see the bigger picture before they select a topic to get the detail.  
• The topic design can be flexed to suit how complex the process is. In this example each topic uses a single interaction to provide a quick overview of the step – making it easy to double up the course as a refresher module too. You can also expand this approach for more complicated processes by adding multiple pages to a topic.
• A final case study supports the steps, demonstrating how the process can be used in real life, alongside a summary of where to go to find out more.

Those were just a few examples of how you can meet compliance requirements or tackle policies and procedures in a way that engages users.

Dig deeper into compliance training best practice

If you are looking to up your business compliance training game even further we have several resources you need to check out:

• Why and how to create compliance training stragegy that drives behavior change
• Elearning best practice guide
• How to choose the best online training tool for your organization
• Top tips to rethink your compliance training program (podcast)

Want to shake up your approach to compliance training?

Not sure where to start? Elucidat is here to help.

Elucidat’s Template feature offers a series of templates tailored to help you meet your project goals. We’ve designed a series of compliance-specific templates to support authors, giving you the confidence to try out new, best practice approaches to structuring your training. From branching scenarios and case studies to in-depth explorations, there’s a template available to help you create best-in-class online compliance training.  

Inspired by these compliance training examples and want to improve your own elearning course? Get a free trial of Elucidat and see what you can do.

Compliance training has a bad reputation, and that’s on us as learning designers or commissioners. For too long, people have focused on the need to tick a box to say training has been delivered. But that ticked box is of little consequence in the face of the huge and long-lasting consequences of a compliance breach. What we should be focusing on is reducing threats, mitigating risks and preventing those breaches happening in the first place. And the only way to do that is with an effective compliance training strategy that engages employees and changes behaviors.

Compliance is a behavior and performance issue

Changing behaviors, you say? Absolutely. That’s the key to doing this well. Most safety incidents, bribery fines and cyber-attacks are the result of human error. What’s more, in many cases those errors are not just unfortunate one-time incidents, but everyday bad habits. 

An effective compliance training strategy is one that gets employees on board so that they can identify those bad habits, want to form new behaviors and make the right choices, and are equipped to do so. A people-centered strategy, not a rulebook-led strategy. 

Throwing a compliance manual at them is going to hurt (even in a fancy interactive format) and have no lasting impact. Here’s a better way.

Open their eyes and make them care

Ethical decision-making is really at the heart of true compliance. Decisions between doing the right thing and the wrong thing, decisions between taking action and doing nothing, decisions between speaking up and staying quiet. This isn’t about people being able to recite the rules, it’s about individuals taking personal responsibility for their actions and ethical boundaries.

The first challenge to overcome is making people realize that compliance breaches aren’t just something that happen to other people. 

Let’s take data protection as an example. Two of the top causes of data security incidents in the UK are sending emails to the wrong person and leaving paperwork or data somewhere insecure. We’ve all done it, right? Instead of subjecting someone to the entirety of the Data Protection Act, ask them outright if they’ve ever sent a message in the wrong WhatsApp chat, hit Reply All instead of just Reply on an email, or forgotten their phone at a friend’s house. This kind of easy, small mistake we all fall victim to is precisely the kind of thing at the root of most data breaches.

Then, make them care. For the vast majority of us, the consequences of these errors are nothing more than a moment of panic and perhaps a little embarrassment. But do it in the wrong context and that small, slip-of-the-finger mistake can cause a whole heap of trouble. In our data protection demo, we use real cases taken from the Information Commissioner’s Office website to share stories of individuals (not businesses) who have drummed up huge fines with exactly that kind of simple error. 

This approach works because it taps into emotions. Stella Collins, a learning psychologist, talks more about this in our interview with her, but in a nutshell: 

“Emotions make things real…if people don’t have emotions about stuff they find it really hard to make decisions as to whether that’s important or not important. Our emotions help us with that decision-making about what’s worth learning and what’s not worth learning … If you can get people to think ‘wow, that’s a bit scary; I don’t want to do that’ and then give them the steps out – the escape method – that’s a really powerful tool. The next time they see, for instance, a fire door that’s blocked, if they know what the consequences of that could be, they’re going to make sure they remove the obstacle.”

Help them make good choices

So you’ve made your employees sit up and take notice: oh, this matters – this could happen to me. Now it’s time to capitalize on that and create things – experiences, interventions, activities, resources – that will help move them away from everyday habits that expose them and the business to risk, towards actions and behaviors that don’t. 

Think about it: 

• Will taking a quiz on compliance laws stop someone clicking a dodgy link in an email?
• Does someone need to know GDPR inside-out to stop them being careless with data?

Probably not. Instead, give them that escape route Stella mentioned. Offer up practical tips and genuinely useful materials to help them make the right choices in their role. For example:

• Emails highlighting how to identify rogue communications and what to do instead of clicking on the dodgy link.
• Posters above the office printer asking people if they really need to print that customer data, and reminding them to shred it rather than bin it afterwards.
• A small number of carefully-chosen, action-focused tips in the elearning, directly related to the everyday errors you’ve already described (see our data protection demo again or this risk assessment demo for examples).

You could even find ways to let them make small changes directly within and from the elearning – this privacy module from Facebook lets you review and change your own privacy settings without navigating away from the content.

Give them a chance to practice

Sometimes, of course, you do want to test those choices and behaviors in a safe environment – performance support and job aids alone are not enough. Use realistic, succinct scenarios and a test-first approach – like in this cyber-security module or our personalized compliance assessment – to see how employees respond to situations and then offer up feedback, advice and tips that either reinforce their good choice or redirect them from a bad choice.

This instructional design approach is so much more effective at actually making sure learners know what to do (or not do) than drowning every person in all the content from the outset. This great post from Cathy Moore goes into more detail about why you should present challenges, not policy, in employee training.

Sustain the behavior change over time

When designing your compliance training strategy, take a long term view and consider a campaign approach. These are important topics: you don’t want people to only think about cyber-security or health and safety when they’re sitting in front of your elearning content. You need this to become part of the culture, something that’s visible and embedded. Sustained messaging and spaced practice help with this.

• Create a memorable slogan, character or mnemonic and splash it around liberally – intranet banners, email footers, posters on toilet doors, wherever people will see it.
• After an initial elearning module that provides the affective context, email out interactive challenges every few weeks. Short and straight to their inbox, this can be a frictionless way to reinforce the right behaviors and encourage habit changes.
• Use social polling to broaden people’s minds, like we do in our demo – seeing that most people consider something to be much riskier than you did could spark that ‘aha!’ moment that prompts behavior change.
• Where possible, personalize the way individuals experience the campaign. Let them identify the risks that are most relevant to them or the errors they’re most susceptible to, and then focus the incentivization and practical tips they receive accordingly.
• Consider tackling compliance topics holistically, rather than individually. Most are underpinned by common questions of personal reflection and responsibility and ethical decision-making. A campaign focused on this, rather than the specifics of each topic, could be instrumental in changing attitudes and behaviours.

“If a learner can be persuaded of the significance of something then they will engage in pull-type learning and the need to deliver large amounts of information in formal contexts (such as classroom or online courses) largely disappears … In practice, this means that organizational learning would do better to focus more on the affective context – the reasons why the target audience might care – than the informational content itself, especially in a world where information is freely available” – Nick Shackleton-Jones 

Final thoughts on compliance training strategies

Compliance training is not about proving you’ve told your employees something is important and given them the rulebook. It’s about persuading them of the importance of avoiding breaches and of their role in that. It’s about helping them to really understand where and what the risks are and equipping them to minimize and avoid those risks. And it’s about making sure that they will react appropriately if they do see something going wrong.

Personal reflection and recognizing your own ethical boundaries is key to all of this; so a click-through information dump certainly won’t cut it. Have a look at these engaging compliance training examples and get inspired. 

For more tips on how to create a winning employee training program, check out our Ultimate Guide to Employee Training! 

We can help you do it!

If you think it’s time to breath new life into your digital learning and development strategy, download our free best practice guide. And if you’d like to know more about how Elucidat can help you deliver compliance elearning that engages learners and makes a difference to your business, get in touch today.