Compliance training has a bad reputation for being little more than a box-ticking exercise. But here at Saffron we believe it’s absolutely possible to create effective, engaging training that achieves both competence and compliance. Read on for our top five tips for breaking the mould and delivering gold standard compliance training every time.

1. Keep it positive
Avoid the temptation to instruct your learners in what they must and must not do. Try to minimise the number of ‘horror stories’ about the dire consequences of breaking the law. Training that’s driven by fear, or by an organisation’s need to cover its back, is unlikely to really make a difference.

2. Make it relevant
When it comes to compliance, what you do is more important than what you know. So don’t focus on legislative detail; focus instead on what the law means in practice to each individual learner in their day to day work. This is a great step towards achieving enhanced awareness and competence as well as meeting regulatory requirements.

3. Keep it real
One way to achieve that relevance and engage your learners is to use scenarios: create recognisable, everyday situations and get learners to identify the issues and make recommendations. This clearly demonstrates to them what they need to know (and do) and why. It also means they’re more likely to apply this knowledge in the workplace.

4. Make it varied
If learners are engaged in and enjoy a course they’re more likely to learn from it. Use a variety of interactions and media to cater to different learning styles and keep them interested. For example, consider photo or video scenarios, handy downloadable tips, news reports or articles, real life case studies and easy to access dictionaries.

5. Keep it conversational
We’ve had user feedback confirming what we already believed: a plain English, conversational tone of voice contributes to keeping learners engaged and therefore to the effectiveness of the training. Something as simple as this is a change from the norm of compliance training and offers learners a breath of fresh air as well as delivering results.

Check back soon for a downloadable PDF of these tips, and click here or here to find out more about our approach to compliance training. We’ve also recently won an IT Training Award for a compliance training project!

A couple of days ago I read with interest Clive Shepherd’s latest blog post in which he refers to his recent experience on the other side of the fence, as a student rather than designer of compliance e-learning. He draws the conclusion that it’s hard - if not impossible - to create something that achieves both competence and compliance. This is a topic we’ve broached before on the Spicy Learning Blog and I admit my thoughts on this are perhaps half-formed (or, more accurately, ever evolving), but I’m not entirely sure I agree with Clive…

What’s interesting is that he goes so far as to say the material was not just interesting, but fascinating. This is not always the case with compliance training, and creating something which actually piques the learner’s interest and gets them engaged is a great first step towards really effective e-learning. The next step is to create something that doesn’t simply achieve compliance, but delivers improved performance and behavioural change.

I would argue that this is absolutely possible in compliance training. Let’s take data protection as an example: a ‘traditional’ approach might simply run through the eight principles of data protection, instructing the learner in what they must and must not do when handling personal data. There would probably also be some horror stories about the dire consequences of breaking the law (as Donald Clark says, ‘the driver is NOT learning or people development, it’s “fear”‘), and a knowledge test or assessment consisting of questions focused on the wording and definitions of each of the principles. This type of course is designed purely for compliance purpose: the organisation can prove they’ve trained their people as required and cover their back in case an individual does break the law having taken the course.

But this is by no means the only way to approach the design of compliance e-learning. A more effective data protection training course, which aims to achieve the competence or enhanced awareness that Clive found lacking at the end of his experience as well as meet regulatory requirements, would focus not on the legislative detail but on what the law means in practice to each individual learner in their day to day work. We recently produced a course that took this approach and certainly took big steps towards achieving those aims.

We did broadly structure the course around the eight data protection principles, but we didn’t begin each section with the legal jargon and then hammer the point home with threats of dismissal, fines or prosecution. Instead we used video to engage the learner and demonstrate relevance by using very recognisable everyday situations and asking the learner to identify what the issues might be. We also offered them a variety of resources including real life case studies presented as news reports and newspaper articles, a take away list of suggested dos and don’ts that they could refer to in future (rather than ‘must’ and ‘must not’ messages on every other screen) and a data protection dictionary to translate any necessary jargon into easily understandable terms. We also paid close attention to the end of course assessment to ensure that this approach was applied there as well - all the questions presented the learner with situations that they might reasonably encounter at work and asked them to identify whether there was something to be concerned about, why this was the case, what should have been done differently or what action they would recommend.

The result was a course that absolutely met the organisation’s compliance obligations, but which also engaged learners and gave them an increased level of awareness and competence. Having taken the course they may not all be able to recite the actual wording of each principle, but they have the appropriate knowledge to be able to identify risky situations or areas of concern and to take steps to avoid or remedy those situations. They also have a genuine awareness of the seriousness of the topic, having been introduced to relevant real life examples and case studies throughout the course.

Of course, there would be people who took the course and claimed the aims hadn’t been met. But the overwhelming feedback from users and experts alike is that we delivered something they didn’t expect from compliance training. My favourite comment was from the technical expert testing for accessibility purposes who reported that he actually found himself reading the content voluntarily and being interested and engaged - not often the case with mandatory compliance training!

I’m guessing there are some strong views on this out there and I’d love to hear them. What do you think? Do you agree with Clive that competence and compliance are more or less mutually exclusive, or do you think there are ways they can sit comfortably together in e-learning? Leave your comments below and hopefully we’ll get a snapshot of what the learning and development community really thinks about compliance training!

Criminals, fraud, terrorists, prison, fines, media frenzy and bankruptcy – exciting stuff! So why is the vast majority of compliance training as dry as Gandhi’s sandals?

Financial fraud and data protection cases have been all over the news in 2008, and 2009 is set to be a big year for legislative and regulatory bodies. Big corporates will be fighting to herd their workforce through the gate of hell that is compliance “e-learning”.  

I use the quotes because the sad truth of the matter is that learning has very little to do with the motivation behind compliance interventions and even less to do with the result. Many a blogger before me has lamented this fact; here are just a few choice quotes to illustrate the point:

“In most, you will literally lose the will to live…
This is all about attendance, not attainment – literally ticks in boxes.” – Donald Clark

“It has NOTHING to do with learning.” – Brent Schlenker

“It’s like immunising people with placebos.” – Donald Clark

When it comes to workplace training, it doesn’t get much more serious than legal and regulatory compliance. Yes, you want employees to be good at their jobs, to be motivated to continuously develop new skills and to manage their own learning. But surely, before all that, you want them not to land the company in a whole heap of trouble by leaving customers’ details on the train, letting slip the latest product info to their mates down the pub or not noticing that their fellow trader is swindling millions at the other end of the desk.

Yet the same companies who are so diligent about the quality of their e-learning when it comes to soft skills, performance management and systems training suddenly lose all ambition when it comes to compliance. So why do organisations find it so hard to see the correlation between compliance training and performance? Why is the highest ambition companies have for compliance training “you have to do it and you have to show that you’ve done it” (Sue Weeks)?

As Brent Schlenker points out, “if the goal of the training is to be compliant then you’re wasting your money doing anything more than just a simple converted PowerPoint with a test at the end.” If this attitude is the driving force behind delivering compliance training, the ROI is precisely nil. Why not get your money’s worth out of your training and actually try and prevent breaches of compliance at the same time as showing that you have done what’s required of you?

Or, at least, attempt to make the training – dare I say – fun. This is possible, I promise! Compliance e-learning offers a wealth of possibilities when it comes to making the training engaging for the learner, whether that’s going for a game-like delivery or making it as relevant and realistic as possible – you’ll know which your people will respond best to.

With 2009 looking like it’s going to be less than a barrel of laughs, let’s not add to the woes of the global workforce by sapping what little will to live they do have through mindless, pointless, painful compliance training.

Let’s dust ourselves off from the disappointments of previous efforts and keep trying to bridge that gap between compliance and performance. Or, at the very least, between compliance training and consciousness.

Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more!