Do you feel that your existing compliance training programs are outdated?
Are the existing compliance training programs the best one for you?
Do they bring the required results for your organisation?
If you are worried and seeking answers to such questions, it is time to evaluate your existing compliance training programs.
Here are my five tips to evaluate your existing compliance training program.
1. Make Sure Your Training Is Up To Date
This remains as a big constraint for many organisation especially industries like pharmaceuticals, chemical and other hazardous products manufacturing organisations where the compliance policies change/update very frequently. At times what makes it worse is, by the time the organization implements the compliance training, there will be already a refreshed set of compliance change coming up. This is a big problem for the organization as there exists a gap between what the employees are trained and what are the actual and most recent changes that came into effect.
In such cases, the organization should understand the compliance environment especially with detailed reference to their industry and ensure that you are aware of the changes happening around. Depending on the complexity of your training, a quick review might suffice, or a thorough audit may be required. Consult with the compliance officer and SME (expert in the said compliance policies) and ensure all the changes are updated.
With a very high probability of such constant headaches to worry about, e-learning seems the best fit for the organization. By implementing compliance e-learning, it becomes easy for the organisation to update the changes and repack the learning contents and deliver it across the learners in a short time. When the compliance policy changes are sudden and unexpected, the organisation need not run to book the time slot for classroom training instead, just make the changes in the e-learning module.
2.Survey Employees/learners
Compliance learning can miss the mark to achieve the learning objectives if the learners are not able to relate to the learning content and are not motivated. But how do you identify if the employees are aligned to achieve the learning objectives?
I recommend surveying employees/ learners. Surveying the learners reveals insights like the following:
•The learners might not be trained on all the regulations they need in their current roles.
•The learners feel bored and think that the existing compliance training programs are not effective.
While a classroom compliance training doesn’t focus on surveying the audience or taking feedback (except for the feedback forms circulated at the end of the training programs), you can easily enable this by implementing e-learning. For example, at the end of e-learning programs, the organisation can include the questionnaire or surveys that are aimed at taking proper feedback from the learners to evaluate the effectiveness of the compliance training. Including questionnaires, promoting internal discussions through official forums and chat rooms etc. are the other strategies that can be used to gauge the effectiveness of compliance training.
3.Assess your learners
The basic objective of every learning strategy is to ensure that the learners are able to retain and recollect the learning topics. To evaluate the strength of your compliance training mechanism, I recommend testing the knowledge of the learners. If your existing training mechanism is a classroom training, then test them with an internal quiz or a written test.
But the high cost and low benefits force the organisation to walk away from it and adopt new learning strategies like e-learning.
E-learning can accommodate a plethora of ways of testing the knowledge of the learners. Include a simple e-learning assessment in the form of MCQ, fill in the blanks or using advanced forms like including e-learning games and gamified learning you are analyzing the knowledge of the learners, the organisation can identify the learning gap if any and fix it accordingly.
4. Are the employees practicing what is learned?
A compliance learning in any form is not successful if the learners are not able to implement what is learned or put the things into practice. An effective compliance program shouldn’t be implemented just as a box-ticking exercise that to satisfy a lengthy checklist of Do’s and Don’ts that reads DONE. Instead, the learners should implement and practice what is learned. Hence, it becomes very important to evaluate your existing compliance policy to check if the learners are putting the things into practice.
To evaluate the success of your present compliance training strategy, the organization need to have the metrics enabled to identify if the learners are successfully implementing what is learned.
For example, we developed a cyber security e-learning game for a reputed Investment firm. With a high rate of successful course completion, the organization could see a reduction in the info security breaches reported. This implies that the employees could put the learned things into practice or at their work environment. This doesn’t easily happen with every learning strategy and hence we had chosen a scenario based e-learning approach where the learner enjoys the experience of an experiential learning approach i.e. learning by doing the things thus enhancing the confidence of the learner.
5.Evaluate the ROI(Return On Investment)
What is the ROI from your current compliance training? Be it any training programs, the organization require to know the ROI as it is an investment made by the organization with the expectation of receiving the returns.
A trend of a reducing ROI with the present/existing compliance training program in the organization doesn’t represent a healthy statistic. This means that you need to change or adopt new learning strategies for compliance training. With increasing cost in the business world, organisations are prioritizing their investments and budget to only the most required things. The organizations are looking for more initiatives to reduce the cost of operations. Hence, I recommend implementing compliance e-learning as it can show an increased or rising trend of ROI for your compliance training initiatives.
