How to Make Compliance Part of a Great Employee Experience

Let’s face it: when it comes to the employee experience, compliance training is probably not the most anticipated learning and development opportunity! In fact, Gallup reports that most employees found compliance and ethics training uninspiring, forgettable or irrelevant to their work^[1].

Employees, and companies, tend to view compliance as simply a box-ticking exercise to keep on the right side of the regulators. As a result, compulsory compliance training sounds tedious and procedural, rather than an integral part of the employee experience.

But it doesn’t have to be that way.

Approached in the right way, compliance training can cultivate employees’ sense that they work for an ethical business. By shifting compliance training away from learning rules and procedures, companies can actually enhance the employee experience.

Why you need to prioritise compliance training

Compliance training needs to be addressed urgently, because it is an increasingly large component of the employee experience–especially onboarding.

Onboarding is a crucial stage in the employee journey, and employees agree that the quality of their onboarding process shapes how they view the company, their employee experience, and ultimately, how long they stay with the company.^[2]

New employees need compliance training to get up to speed with all sorts of policies, procedures, codes of conduct, data privacy and security regulations, and so much more.

Unfortunately, most employees are underwhelmed by their onboarding, and that is often down to dry, uninspiring administrative compliance training.^[3]

What’s more, the growth in remote and hybrid working and the implications for data privacy, has made compliance training even more critical.^[4]

As new policies and practices arise, companies need to update their compliance procedures and documentation. And that can mean even more compliance training. As employee experiences go, standardised, dull compliance training isn’t exactly the best way to delight and engage your staff!

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How compliance training can enhance the employee experience

Compliance training should not just be about learning the rules to avoid penalties. It's about instilling a sense of corporate ethics.

The objective of compliance training should be to inspire a sense of ownership of and responsibility for the company and its organisational culture. However, unless compliance training is interesting, engaging, and relevant, employees aren’t going to feel particularly inspired or motivated in that direction.

Here are some ways to make your compliance training an integral, valuable, and even enjoyable, part of the employee experience.

Build compliance into the company culture

Rather than presenting compliance as a list of rules and regulations, focus on how it reflects the company’s vision and values. Design your compliance training in a way that emphasises “the way we work here”.

If employees see compliance training as contributing to high professional standards and corporate social responsibility, it can encourage them to view themselves as market leaders and top performers.

Allow employees to self-lead their compliance training

Nothing enhances the employee experience more than when management demonstrates trust and respect.^[4] Rather than imposing an obligatory, top-down, one-way-traffic training session, use your knowledge management system to provide employees access to compliance training resources and encourage them to follow their own learning path.

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Make it quick and easy

The lengthy training workshops of old are tedious for employees and take them out of their working day. Instead, design your compliance training around bite-sized microlearning modules that employees can access within your learning platform and fit easily into their schedules. In this way, compliance training becomes an integral part of the daily employee experience.

Make it competitive and social

With a learning platform that makes knowledge sharing easy, compliance training can be gamified and even (dare we say it?) fun. In Learn Amp, for instance, you can set up a compliance leaderboard, get employees to collaborate and compete in teams and make use of interactive multimedia and quizzes. By recognizing and rewarding compliant behaviours, you can help embed compliance into the company culture.

Make it consistent

Compliance training should be part and parcel of the employee’s job, rather than just a one-off workshop during onboarding. Consistency is key to building a better employee experience for your staff and promoting a reliable, compliance-aware working culture.

The employee experience is what you make it

When it comes down to it, compliance training is only “uninspiring, forgettable or irrelevant” if that’s how it’s presented to your employees. By rethinking how your company delivers compliance training, you can not only make it inspiring, memorable, and relevant but actually embed compliance and risk management as a core element of the employee experience and your business culture.