Online Compliance Training: Why Your Employees Aren’t Making the Connection
Compliance training is crucial for your staff and while online training may offer efficiency, it often misses out on many of the key benefits simply due to a lack of connection with your employees. Why, though, aren’t your employees connecting with the online training courses that your company offers? There are any number of obstacles that could be presenting themselves. It’s going to be up to you to figure out where things are going wrong so that you can make the necessary changes to improve online training so that everyone gets more from it.
Integration Counts
Compliance training is necessary, but the way that most companies do it is what causes a big disconnect. You need to have the right compliance training software, of course, but how you deliver the training is almost as important, if not more so. Rather than cutting out an entire morning or three days just for training, integrate your compliance training into everyday work activities. Online training offers the convenience of working at your own pace, but it still might not be making the connection for everyone.
Although every employee is different, there are typically a few hindrances that are common to those who are unable to connect with online training modules. Keep reading to find out the four main reasons that the disconnect may be happening in your organization.
Lack of Context
When employees can’t connect with compliance training in the online classroom, it’s generally because it feels very static and lacks a reference point. This is something that needs to be crossed off of their to-do list and they don’t generally see it as much more than that. Online training modules are often laid out in an informative, but quite abstract manner, and that can be difficult for some people to work with.
Rather than handing out a bunch of fact sheets or presenting a slideshow filled with technical lingo and new compliance guidelines, try to find a way to translate training into something that your team can understand. Instead of just giving them the relevant information, offer it with an explanation or a little bit more real-world experience and example to help people see what the actual compliance issues look like in practical application.
People need more than a textbook-style training module. Give it to them.
Too Much Information at Once
Often, because of the nature of compliance training, companies will try to cram as much information as they can into the training session. They do this without realizing that too much information will overwhelm people and that overwhelming feeling will cause them to discard a great deal of the information that they are taking in. People aren’t sure what to do with too much information, nor which of it has more importance than the rest. This will definitely make people anxious and cause them to lose interest.
If you want to keep people on target, you have to engage them and make sure that you aren’t giving them too much information at once. Yes, compliance training is important. You may have certain laws, guidelines, or compliance matters that involve a lot of legal or technical jargon that your employees need to know. Find a way to deliver it so that they can digest it and get the information that they need from whatever training you provide. Break things down in understandable terms and only give people exactly what they need.
Filter, filter filter. Go through your online training programs. If there’s too much wordy information, trim it down and clean it up. Your employees will learn more from less.
Too Much Stress or Too Much Work
You could have the best possible compliance training in place and still have people that aren’t getting it. That might have very little to do with the actual training and more to do with the fact that your employees are stressed, overworked, or otherwise distracted and overwhelmed so that they can’t properly digest the content. Set up your compliance training so that it takes people away from their stress and regular workload. Create an engaging program that offers incentives for friendly competition.
If you turn compliance training into more of an experience than a meeting, you can guarantee that your employees will find more engagement and connect with the online courses on a personal level so that they get the insight and information that they need from the online modules that you present them with.
Get people engaged—if they’re having fun, they’ll learn a lot faster.
The Human Boredom Condition
Although it might be at the bottom of the list, this is perhaps one of the biggest reasons that training and business meetings don’t succeed. People get bored. While it might seem like something that people should just get past or learn to deal with, it’s not always so easy. When the brain gets bored, it shuts down. Therefore, if people aren’t engaged, they can’t learn even if they want to.
Right now, people have shorter attention spans than ever before, thanks to the Internet and instant access that comes with digital connectivity. You have to choose compliance training that breaks up the monotony and engages them so that they have a good time with the training modules. Consider designing courses that include simulations, games, and interactive multimedia to give people more to DO while they’re training so that they have a reason to retain information.
The Bottom Line
For success in online compliance training, you have to get people engaged. This shouldn’t be something that you just trudge through and attempt to check off of a list. It should be something that employees can use and it should be offered in a way that allows them to engage and learn as much as possible. Adapt your training to the learning styles of your employees and watch retention soar. Just because online training is easy and efficient doesn’t mean that it can’t be fun, as well. Sometimes, a little engagement can go a long way in getting better outcomes from your online compliance training.