compliance training for employees
Date: February 23, 2024

The Secret to Creating Engaging Compliance Training for Employees

Let’s face it: Compliance training is often considered a necessary evil by employees. Most organizations have a traditional approach towards compliance training where they invest the bare minimum to meet the legal requirements. This makes learning ineffective and boring for employees, creating a strong urge in them to rather invest their time in actual tasks. A survey of professionals in the U.S. suggests that 34% of employees agree they skim training information and tune out audio, and 49% agree they skip-read or don’t listen to their mandatory training in detail.

Compliance Training for Employees: Making it Engaging and Effective

Amid the growing disengagement with compliance training, L&D leaders must ask themselves: Are current compliance training programs catering to the evolving needs of today’s workforce? L&D teams need to change their perspective on compliance training from a “reporting and regulatory requirement to a business-critical skill”. Employees should see compliance as an essential skill rather than forced training. 

So, what are some of the ways to make compliance training less boring? Let’s take a look.

Embracing Innovative Strategies for Corporate Compliance Training

Personalized and immersive learning experiences: Creating content tailored to the needs of your learner is critical. For instance, a course on data security can be made more interesting with scenario-based learning, multimedia elements, and character-driven animations that the learners can relate to. Learners may find the course more engaging if their learning journey is personalized based on their actions and responses throughout the course and targeted feedback is provided against their name.

Gamification: Games are inherently engaging and can significantly increase employee participation in training. By introducing gamified elements like leaderboards, badges and competitions, employees are more likely to be invested in their learning experience, resulting in better knowledge retention. A study revealed that training initiatives with gamified elements saw an average participation rate of 90%, compared to only 60% participation in traditional training methods. This indicates a remarkable 50% increase in learner engagement when gamification is introduced.

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Microlearning: Going through extensive compliance literature is never fun. With increasingly distracted and busy learners, it is preferable to break down huge chunks of your training into small, bite-sized pieces of content. Microlearning can not only help boost learning retention but also accommodate busy schedules and employee preferences.

Accessibility: As business leaders have the responsibility of enforcing an inclusive and accessible workplace, it is critical to design training with accessibility-first approach. Ensuring that the interactive elements used in the training and the different formats of training are universally accessible is imperative to foster a culture of inclusion.

CASE STUDY: How NIIT is leading the way in compliance training?

Challenge: Our customer, a leading electronics and imaging company has a large business in California. The state of California has a list of guidelines that are very specific and cover the overall cycle of employment of an employee in a company which the employees must adhere to. While some of these laws are general, some are specific to California, and therefore, the employees often lack awareness about these laws and regulations. Compliance with these laws is critical to avoid penalties that may result from non-compliance. Due to a lack of knowledge about these laws and policies, many managers failed to comply with them. The goal of our customer was to increase awareness and adherence to these laws and reduce the costs of non-compliance penalties incurred. 

Solution: NIIT helped our customer design an engaging and interactive compliance training program that follows a scenario-based approach, exposing the learners to real-life relatable scenarios concerning workplace laws and making them accountable, by helping them realize the consequences of not following the laws properly. To make the course easily digestible, it is divided into bite-sized learning modules. A learn-by-doing approach coupled with a feedback and coaching mechanism ensured better learning retention and helped drive the necessary behavior change.

Result: In the span of 1 year, our customer observed an 18% decrease in complaints against non-compliance, leading to increased awareness and adherence of employees to compliance regulations.

As learning needs keep evolving, the more we enhance our learning methods, the better

Discover how NIIT’s award-winning content development pedagogy architects learning experiences that deliver business value and learner engagement.