Tips and Strategies to Make Compliance Training Interesting

Compliance training is a required, often dreaded task for employees at every level of an organization. In heavily regulated industries such health care and banking it takes up to 50 hours to fulfill training mandates. See a partial list of compliance training at the end of this article. It’s intimidating!

We’ve received frantic calls like this one:

How am I going to get this done? I’ve got 12 hours of narrated slides to get through followed by an exam. I’m falling asleep at my desk. If I don’t score 80% or higher I’ve got to go through the whole thing again! I’ll lose my mind!

It doesn’t have to be dry and boring. With the right approach, you can make compliance training engaging and memorable for your employees, lifting completion rates and employee satisfaction.

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Deliver Content in Bite-Sized Chunks

Instead of overwhelming learners with long, dense blocks of information, break your compliance training content down into smaller, more manageable chunks. This will make it easier for them to absorb and retain the information (Easygenerator).

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The Cost of Non-Compliance

Companies are subject to severe penalties when employees don’t conform to regulatory requirements. Here are a few cases in point:

• Johnson & Johnson fined $2.2B in 2013 for illegal promotion of prescription drugs.

• Wells Fargo fined $1B in 2018 for auto-loan and mortgage abuses.

• GlaxoSmithKline paid $3B in 2012 for unlawful promotion of prescription drugs and failure to report safety data.

• Goldman Sachs fined $2.9B in 2020 for violating the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.

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Make it Interactive

Interactive elements like quizzes, and games help keep employees engaged and make the training fun and memorable. Role playing and branching scenarios create lifelike, immersive learning experiences. When learning shifts from passive watching to active participation, users stay longer and retain more (Ethico, Elucidat).

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Use Real-Life Examples

Using real-life examples and relatable scenarios helps illustrate complex regulations and abstract concepts in a way that’s easier for employees to understand. This makes training more relevant and applicable to their actual jobs (ITACIT).

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Leverage Storytelling

Storytelling is a powerful way to make compliance training engaging and memorable. By presenting the information in narrative form, you help employees connect with the material on an emotional level and remember it more vividly (Training Industry).

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Make it Job-Specific and Realistic

The more directly the training applies to employees’ actual jobs and the challenges they face, the more relevant and useful it will seem to them. Try to make the scenarios and examples you use as realistic and job-specific as possible.

For a press-room safety compliance project, we pulled case histories from printing industry archives and re-enacted accidents. “Web with Care” reduced press room related injuries by 78%!

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Employ Gamification

Gamification uses game-like elements, such as point scoring, competition, and achievements, to make the training engaging and fun. This can be a highly effective way to increase employee participation and improve their retention of the material (Skillcast).

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Best Practices for 2024

Here is our shortlist of recommendations for today’s compliance training needs:

• Tailor the training to the specific needs of your organization and your employees.

• Use [different] types of training content to keep things interesting

• Align the training with your organization’s workplace culture and values.

• Make the training an ongoing process, rather than a one-and-done event. Provide regular refresher training and reinforce the material throughout the year.

• Use interactive content to make the training more engaging and effective.

By implementing these tips and strategies, you ensure that employees will actually absorb and retain the information, rather than just going through the motions. And that can be a major boost for your organization’s compliance efforts.

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Compliance Training Requirements for
Pharmaceutical and Financial Services Firms: