Compliance Training Tips

Compliance is about more than checking a box. Allen approaches compliance training within the larger context of business goals, holistically creating levels of relevancy and establishing a strong sense of business context for learners. Here are some best practices that we often use in our creative compliance consulting and development.

Relevancy is crucial for learners to stay engaged and achieve lasting knowledge. Unfortunately, many learners approach compliance courses with skepticism, so this sense of connection and relevance must be immediate and strong, inviting learners to evaluate meaningful issues with real consequences and personal applications. On the positive side, significantly improving an under-performing compliance course can be as simple as changing the dramatic framework for the content.

Customer: Major Pharma Company

Training Objective: High-Level Compliance Training

Solution: Allen combined a marketing quality introductory animation with an interactive infographic. These strategies, together, established the quality of the course’s media design and the organization’s commitment to the topic, and allowed the learner to explore critical information in an open, non-linear environment that respected different learning styles.

Compliance training is, by definition, typically a legally mandated initiative. We meet the demands of these directives by keeping content relevant to learners and assessing completions and scores. However, we create lasting behavior changes and real performance by creating secondary layers of support—that is, a system in which learners are shown not only what the content is (layer one), but also how to access it again moving forward to support complex job functions (layer two).

Customer: Fortune 50 Retail Company

Training Objective: ERP System Redesign

Solution: Allen conducted a major system training initiative for a complicated resource planning system, with difficult regulations and policies. Courses engaged learners in complex scenarios and role-based training exercises. Most importantly, we tied courses to a performance-monitoring system, using surveys and automated reporting models. Results from these real-time performance inputs were then tied to strategic follow-up tools, allowing program administrators not only to report progress to executives, but also to immediately align supplemental training materials with any areas of weakness that emerged.

Important decisions in the workplace are rarely black and white. In the same way, simply checking a box in a passive compliance training course may meet oversight demands, but it rarely gives a learner the tools they need to improve. To account for this challenge, the best compliance courses include complex decision-making scenarios that are relevant to workplace issues and require forethought and in-depth application of policies and standards.

Customer: Financial Services Organization

Training Objective: Ethics Training for Key Personnel

Solution: Allen created scenarios focusing on the gray areas in decision-making within the financial services industry. We gathered realistic challenges and problems from experts across the industry, and then used that data to craft branching storylines that engaged the user and took them along paths that allowed them to play out multiple approaches and see realistic results. The keys to the success of this approach are, first, using data-gathering tools that allow busy industry experts to provide critical source content quickly, and, secondly, mapping scenario decisions back to the key business performance goals to ensure alignment and relevancy.

Learn more about how we can help you create effective compliance training.