Compliance training is vital to the success of your organization. This is especially true considering that the coronavirus pandemic has necessitated new regulatory requirements for organizations across all industries, particularly healthcare and financial services. The benefits of compliance training are undeniable. Compliance and certifications help organizations of all kinds improve quality, meet global and local standards, follow regulations and laws, and reduce overall risks. Also:
- Compliance training can save a company millions of dollars in fines
- Customers favor and are loyal to compliant companies
- Compliant organizations experience less workplace accidents
Each year, companies invest millions of dollars in compliance training in hopes of reaping the benefits of it. Compliance Wave stated,
“The average employee in the United States costs the company about $45/hour (for compliance training).”
This means that if a company has 10,000 employees, and each employee requires five hours of compliance training, the total cost of compliance training would come to $2,250,000. However, for many companies, these investments aren’t delivering.
What You Need to Know About Compliance Certifications
Is Your Investment in Compliance Training Paying Off?
A great deal of organizations’ investments in compliance training don’t seem to be paying off. For example, Boeing faced allegations that it sold the 737 Max with dangerous software. Also:
- A jury in California ruled that Monsanto failed to warn customers that its weed killer could allegedly cause cancer.
- Google reportedly paid an executive tens of millions of dollars after he was let go after a sexual misconduct investigation.
- Major data breaches occurred at DiscountMugs, Dunkin Donuts, and Houzz.
- Ransomware attacks cause significant damage to systems and day-to-day operations used by government agencies, municipalities, and corporations.
Understanding what causes compliance issues and failed compliance training can help companies avoid situations like these.
Causes of Organizational Noncompliance and Insufficient ROI for Compliance Training Investments
There are a number of causes for noncompliance and poor ROI for compliance training. They include but are not limited to:
- Human error
- Weak organizational culture
- Outdated and ineffective policies and procedures
- Faulty ethics
- Inferior technology
- Lack of accountability
- Insufficient compliance training
- Poor accessibility to compliance training
Once an organization recognizes the causes of compliance training failure, it can begin to reduce the risk or likelihood of a compliance-related situation occurring by strengthening any weak links in the organization. Organizations can boost their ROI for compliance training and foster company-wide compliance by creating better compliance policies.
Promote Compliance by Updating Your Compliance Policies and Procedures
The first step to ensuring better compliance and improving your company’s ROI for compliance training is to update your compliance training strategy. This includes defining how your organizational culture fits within your goals. Overall, your charter should include:
- Your company’s objectives concerning policies and procedures
- The areas of the business policies and procedures will cover
- The lifecycle or process used to create, review, publish, amend, and destroy policies or procedures
- Details of how organizational leaders will train and implement policies across companies
- Goals and metrics that will be used to measure compliance training success
When creating compliance policies, focus on the specific policies and processes you want to formally document. Then, create (in this order):
- Policies that are governed by law or specific industry regulation
- Policies or procedures that are required to maintain a particular certification or standard, such as ISO, HIPAA, or PCI
- Organization-specific policies and procedures, which will probably include a mixture of policies that set expectations for employees, partners, and vendors
- IT policies and operational processes that include your plans for business continuity and disaster recovery
The key to creating sound policies and procedures is to work with a group of stakeholders that will use them daily to ensure they are workable and flow naturally with each team.
Pro tip for creating compliance policies: Check out security policy templates at SANS Institute, and review sample policies at Society for Human Resource Management
You’ve Created New Compliance Policies. Now What?
Now that you have a rich set of documented policies, procedures, and manuals that have been reviewed and approved, what's next? You could:
- Publish them on an internal or external website and point your employees or partners to them
- Include them as part of your employee handbook
- Email them to all relevant parties
- Use a document management system to house and publish them
A flaw in these strategies to be aware of is that employees don’t always read through policies or procedures and thoroughly comprehend them. While policies may be acknowledged, they won’t necessarily be applied.
To ensure organizational compliance, you must understand the causes of noncompliance and then promote compliance by updating your compliance policies, distributing your compliance policies, and using specific approaches to compliance training that make your audience feel more included.
How to Use an LMS for Compliance Training Certifications
Get Better Results from Compliance Training Using These Approaches
Training and inclusion are critical elements of a successful compliance strategy. Policies and procedures require measurable training, as well as knowledge reinforcement and regular reviews. Over time, knowledge is lost, and humans tend to invent shortcuts, which cause mistakes leading to failure. Consistent reinforcement is critical to keeping knowledge fresh and applied.
Use training methods such as story-based training, quizzes and knowledge checks, and improved accessibility to reinforce compliance training and include your employees while building and reviewing the training elements of policies and procedures. Inclusion will help convert your employees into advocates, promote buy-in, and build a company culture of improvement.
Story-Based Training
Taking a group of policies or procedures and building some scenario or story-based training will make compliance training more relevant, engaging, and inclusive of learners. The training content should cover why the policies or procedures exist, what they are attempting to prevent, and how learners play a crucial role in using them.
Relevant Testing Over Time
Quizzes and knowledge checks that you run over an extensive period of time are proven to develop longer-lasting knowledge. Make sure your compliance training includes some testing where individuals can get an assessment of what they know and what they don’t. Look at how various groups need different information around a policy or procedure. Be aware that individuals on your sales team will have different needs than those on the finance team, for example. Build a reward system that is not only tied to training, but also integrated with day-to-day activities.
Improved Accessibility
To improve accessibility and promote learner inclusion, deploy compliance training in bite-sized pieces. Make compliance training searchable so that employees can access it during times when they need information or to verify that they are following your company’s best practices for compliance. Couple your processes with checklists, which allow employees to follow guidance quickly, make sure nothing is missed, and reduce the occurrence of mistakes. Last, ensure compliance training can be accessed via mobile device.
How a Healthcare Tech Company Accelerated Compliance Training with an LMS
Automate and Streamline Compliance Training with an LMS
Managing compliance training and promoting organizational compliance is a big job. For larger companies, these tasks can take up a lot of time and lead to frustration, especially if the desired results aren’t reached. Organizational leaders can increase the ROI for their investment in compliance training and streamline compliance training with an LMS.
An online learning platform, such as TOPYX LMS, can help your organization publish policy and procedure documents and combine them with online training and blended learning in classes and webinars. TOPYX also:
- Provides tools that enable you to create quizzes, assignments, and knowledge checks
- Enables mobile learning, which gives learners greater accessibility to compliance training
- Serves as a one-stop shop for not only your company’s compliance training, but also training for career advancement and general organizational knowledge
As a flat-fee LMS, TOPYX can also decrease the cost of compliance training for your organization.
TOPYX LMS helped Convey Health Solutions, a specialized healthcare technology and services company, automate compliance training. As a result, the company saved time and was spared much hassle. Burn Tan-Hoyumpa, Director of Learning and Development at Convey Health Solutions, said,
“Before TOPYX, our training and compliance courses were instructor-led across several sites, including an international location. Everything was pen and paper, and it was so painful to get everything done manually...it was a nightmare.”
In addition to automating and simplifying compliance training, TOPYX LMS helped Convey Health Solutions speed up new-employee training and build a strong company culture of learning.
Download the Convey Health Solutions Case Study
As it did for Convey Health Solutions, TOPYX can help your company automate and streamline compliance training, speed and optimize onboarding, create a learning culture that promotes participation in ongoing training, and more. Learn for yourself how TOPYX can benefit your organization by requesting a free LMS demo of TOPYX learning management system.
