For large organizations with a distributed workforce, compliance training is a key focus area. This is necessary to ensure employees are educated on the laws, regulations, and policies that apply to their day-to-day job responsibilities. Compliance training is essential for several reasons – to ensure compliance that drives better process adherence and performance, to avoid legal liability for violations, and to add business value and ensure competitive advantage. Many organizations find compliance training hard, but it doesn’t have to be. Let’s look at all aspects of this discussion!
The growing importance of compliance
As companies expand across geographies, the complexities of regulatory and compliance requirements are growing. Different regions have different laws, rules, and regulations that demand different compliance levels. Non-compliance can result in hefty fines, seizure of company assets, litigation costs, jail time or even forced closure. In the modern day, organizations need to enable compliance training on a wide array of topics, including health and safety, cybersecurity, discrimination and harassment, sustainability, diversity in the workplace, competitor dealings, insider trading, intellectual property rights and more.
It’s clear that compliance needs across sectors are growing:
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In the retail industry, companies with international supply chains need to meet the evolving compliance requirements. From import and export rules to customs declaration, GDPR, food-safety and product quality – failing to meet any regulatory compliance requirements can further drive costs and impact share price, analyst opinions, and customer sentiment.
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In the hospitality industry, due to the highly distributed and decentralized nature of organizations, meeting compliance requirements is specifically hard. With several temp and hourly employees having to deal with several disparate central reservation systems, POS systems, finance, sales, guest relations, catering and physical security systems that tie into the network, organizations have to continually evaluate new policies and drive adherence to them to avoid violations and save their name.
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For restaurants and chains, training across compliance aspects such as food handling and safety, HACCP laws, employee rights and wage laws, fire, cleanliness, permits, and more is extremely important. Non-compliance with any regulations could result in substantial penalties, including expensive illness-compliance violation penalties, lawsuits, dented reputations, and even forced closures.
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In the insurance industry, compliance ranges from anti-money laundering, anti-corruption, data security and privacy, fraud management, claims management and more. With a growing network of sales agents, technology, shareholders, and regulators, the complexity of compliance requirements is only increasing.
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In the pharma industry, globalization and increased competition have led to an increasingly complex compliance ecosystem around international regulation, standard operating procedures, supply chains and product/process requirements. To succeed, companies have to accurately understand international regulations, processes and product technologies and facilitate change to drive business benefit.
Need for training
No question then, that regulation and compliance are becoming more and more complex. With the cost of non-compliance pegged at 2.65 times the cost of compliance, effective compliance training is becoming extremely crucial for organizations. This is now a must to mitigate risks and ensure there are no violations or penalties. Today, compliance is more than just ticking a box to meet minimum requirements. It is a pre-requisite for growth and profitability. This is about more than just policies. It’s about equipping your employees with the right skills to handle the complexities of laws and regulations—and do their jobs more safely and efficiently—all this with the shared goal of being a truly compliant and reputed organization.
How can eLearning help
In order to ensure you don’t violate company policies or the law of the land, eLearning can make compliance training fun and engaging instead of the rigid and uninteresting undertaking that most employees have dreaded for ages. Through eLearning, you can:
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Present boring compliance material in a more attractive and interesting manner through the use of images, animations, and videos.
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Add credibility and effectiveness by helping employees understand how compliance applies to their own day-to-day jobs through role-playing scenarios.
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Significantly cut down on costs and make compliance training materials available online for employees to access anytime, anywhere, using the device of their choice.
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Gauge the level of understanding through online tests, quizzes and assessments; if you think some company policies and laws are still unclear, you can automate follow-up to make sure employees are well-versed with them.
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Engage employees through story-telling mechanisms that make compliance training fun and easy to digest and remember.
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Mention success stories that arise as a result of following company policies and conversely, about consequences that can arise when someone doesn’t.
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Present lengthy and verbose compliant content in small chunks through microlearning and increase the impact of training.
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Involve employees in compliance challenges that mimic real-life scenarios through gamification and drive them to demonstrate high levels of compliance. Employees can take control of their own learning path and make learning more personalized.
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Drive self-motivation by reinforcing a sense of personal responsibility. Engaged learners are more likely to apply what they have learned in their work.
Make Compliance Training Fun
Although many companies consider compliance training a big challenge, it’s perhaps not as bad as it is thought out to be. By leveraging eLearning, you can make this, admittedly, dry yet important compliance content easily available and accessible across devices and present it in the most engaging, fun, and interesting ways. Through eLearning, you can make compliance training a continuous and personalized process, rather than a singular, isolated event, and also make it fun.
Ensuring your compliance courses are effective is very important. We at eNyota have developed countless compliance courses currently in use by organizations across the globe. If a compliance course is something that your organization needs, reach out to us at via mail or fill a form and we will get in touch with you right away!
