Compliance training courses are simply a necessary part of running a business these days, especially with the amount of rules and regulations that govern each industry.
Ensuring that your employees operate within the legal and regulatory frameworks of the industry is integral to protecting your company from a variety of detrimental external forces such as possible legal action or negative public perception. More importantly, regular and high-quality compliance training ensures that your staff are performing to the best of their abilities and maintaining a high industry standard.
If compliance training is not conducted efficiently, however, the cost can sometimes spiral out of control. To prevent this from happening, you need to ensure that your company’s resources are used in a cost- and time-saving manner. Read on to learn how to reduce the costs of your compliance training without sacrificing quality.
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Why is compliance training so important for employees?
It might be viewed as boring by some employees, but the truth is that compliance training can help them to better understand the requirements and limits of their own roles and responsibilities within a company. This is crucial for cultivating a positive employee experience and empowering them to take control of their duties with confidence, ultimately leading to higher employee retention levels.
Why is it so important for companies?
In addition to its potential boost for employee morale, compliance training should be the backbone of your company’s strategy for limiting legal threats and complications. Demonstrating the importance of regulatory compliance to your workforce can also have carry-over effects; for example, 29% of employees who were found to have committed fraud were able to do so due to a lack of internal controls on this issue. If your company strongly emphasises compliance training, it can work to prevent any potential fraud from occurring, uphold your company’s good reputation, and potentially increase revenue and profits.
Steps you can take to reduce costs
Depending on your industry, compliance training costs may have increased considerably over the last decade or so—as a survey from Deloitte demonstrates, spending on compliance in retail and corporate banks, alone has increased by 60% since the financial crisis of 2007-2008. With that in mind, here are some tips that should help your company to reduce the cost of compliance training:
Invest in the right technology
First off, if your compliance training isn’t conducted through an LMS—well, what are you waiting for? Using printed forms and resources is not only cumbersome and bad for the environment but is also relatively difficult to analyse—and the costs can end up outweighing the benefits.
If your company’s training is undertaken with the help of eLearning resources already, then good job! Modern companies are increasingly reliant on digital technologies such as these to stay connected, and with good reason—it allows for a consistent message to be dispersed easily, permits employees who work remotely to remain plugged in and up-to-date, and delivers easy tracking and analysis of who has completed compliance training, how long it’s taken, and so forth.
For compliance training purposes specifically, an LMS can provide a far more engaging experience for your employees than a seminar or something similar. This is due to the user-directed nature of eLearning—instead of receiving the information passively, your company’s employees will actively navigate their way through the training and should retain the information much more effectively as a result. Those who might struggle with the training will be quickly noticed as well, since eLearning platforms come with built-in tracking that enables administrators to provide support in real-time and make sure that no employee is left behind.
Of course, learning management systems can vary considerably in price themselves depending on what services they offer, whether they are cloud-hosted or self-hosted, and various other factors. Investing in an LMS that allows you to provide the eLearning content necessary for your compliance training purposes is a process that can take time and a genuine understanding of what features will come in handy. Though it’s always nice to have eLearning content that can be customised endlessly, something like compliance training should be readily understood and shouldn’t distract users from the task at hand.
Repurpose existing eLearning resources
If your company already has a library full of eLearning content, repurposing the relevant material for your upcoming compliance training should be high on your priority list. Begin by evaluating these materials: check to see if they’re still relevant and applicable to the current compliance training requirements, whether they are HTML5-compliant, or whether parts of them can be taken out and reused in a different yet beneficial manner.
Republishing your LMS’s existing content will not only cut costs associated with content creation drastically; it will also provide the company with a familiar jumping-off point from which to negotiate the production of any necessary newer material.
Make it a part of everyday work
The cost of compliance training can often appear to be larger if it occurs all at once. If it requires everyone at your company to attend a seminar or workshop for an entire day, the lost hours of productivity are clear to all observers. Similarly, a sudden overhaul in compliance training strategy can lead to unexpected costs being incurred as employees attempt to understand what it is that they are now expected to learn.
Integrating compliance into your organisation’s everyday workflow is an excellent remedy for these kinds of costs. Make it relevant to their regular tasks, and have managers demonstrate how specific compliance slips and associated costs can best be avoided. Giving your employees a clear idea of how compliance training can make the general work environment a more productive and legally secure place is bound to improve their own compliance, mitigating potential costs.
In practice, this approach is akin to studying for a test: If you cram for all of the night before the test, you might be able to perform all right, but you very likely won’t retain the same amount of knowledge later on as someone who studied less intensely but more regularly. Having employees undertake compliance training in small chunks, rather than in a quarterly or annual session, will mean that they are more likely to retain this information and more motivated to continue learning. In addition to this, you can also implement a mobile ready LMS into your compliance training and encourage employees to complete the learning modules in times that suit them best.
Consider the cost of failure
It’s not a nice thing to think about, but it’s worth your time—the cost of failing to comply with legal and regulatory frameworks can be extensive. Ensuring that your company’s employees are up to date with these and familiar with what their own duties are might seem like it requires significant outlay, but it pales in comparison to the costs that carelessness or simple inaction bring with them.
An LMS offers several benefits in this regard. Perhaps chief among them is the fact that your company will be able to maintain a view of the big picture by having all compliance training records in a centralised, virtual location. Not only will this prevent silos of different departments and their disparate approaches to compliance training, it provides a space for further collaboration between teams on best practices.
Key takeaways
Non-compliance has worse consequences than employees simply not following procedure. It can affect your bottom line, market standing, product development and workplace productivity, making it an essential part of your organisation’s backbone.
Reducing the costs of compliance training needn’t come at the cost of quality compliance training. Learning technology allows L&D leaders to easily see progress, completion and engagement rates, as well as quickly create and update interactive content in line with industry or company changes.
Better yet, it puts training in the everyday flow of work—meaning employees can access training in the moment of need and when it’s most convenient for them. They’re not taken away from responsibilities in this scenario either, which only serves to enhance productivity and sentiment around compliance training (while boosting engagement) in the process.
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