A Guide on Compliance Training Program

What is Compliance Training?

Compliance training is an official program your business creates to help employees learn about policies, laws, different procedures, and necessary actions that one must adhere to avoid any legal implications in the future.

This training is mandatory to update employees with ever-evolving state or federal rules and regulations. The training program helps employees learn about the regulations in their industry and how they can work around tricky situations that can result in legal actions. Since the rules keep updating yearly, companies must train their employees yearly to ensure they haven’t missed out on crucial policies.

7 Common Examples of Compliance Training 

So far, we’ve understood compliance training and how it keeps employees updated about state or federal policies and the ones at the company. Now, let’s look at some of the common compliance training examples you must know. These include the following:

1. Occupational safety and health training

According to OSHA (Occupational Safety and Health Administration), it is mandatory to ensure all employees have access to safe and healthy working conditions. They should have access to all training programs before being exposed to a real work environment. You can update the training with new changes while they perform their roles.

2. Information and cybersecurity training

Cybersecurity awareness is all about educating employees to identify, prevent, and respond to cyber-attacks at the workplace. The main topics to be covered under cyber security are identifying phishing, password protection, malicious websites, and more.

Information training programs can be published and shared on the employee intranet or centralized knowledge base for quick and independent access. This helps you save time for your employees and reduce errors.

3. Anti-discrimination and diversity training

This program is integral to compliance training that focuses on equality and a respectful and inclusive workplace. There are many bodies governing this topic. Some of you can refer to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) and Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) for preparing training programs. This program helps you to educate your employees to eliminate discriminatory practices within the organization.

4. Industry-specific compliance training

Many compliance training programs fall into this category. If you work in the healthcare sector, you must complete HIPPA training with your employees. This will allow you to execute ethical medical practices at all times. If you belong to the financial sector, you must comply with regulations such as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) and the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act to prevent financial crimes.

5. Sexual harassment training

This training is also crucial for employees to complete as it will help them identify different harassment incidents at the workplace. This module will also encourage employees to be more vocal in such situations and help them identify whom to contact to report the incident first.

6. Workplace violence prevention training

Workplace violence prevention is another compliance training program that benefits employees. Under this program, you share strategies that help employees mitigate violent workplace situations and react faster by prompting them to share with the authorities.

7. 508 compliance training

This training program is quite sensitive and must not be taken lightly. 508 compliance falls under the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, which states that employees should not be discriminated against based on their disability at federal offices. Every form of technology at the workplace should be made accessible to all employees so they can work efficiently and produce favorable results.

Check Out, How Safebreach Transformed Product Knowledge Training with Document360:

Benefits of Compliance Training

Given how many compliance training programs your business might have to create from scratch, you may hesitate to implement them. However, understand that these training programs also offer multiple benefits that are hard to miss. Some of these include the following:

1. Encourages employees to adhere to rules and regulations

Compliance training makes employees more aware of what they shouldn’t do at work. Moreover, they become more responsible and carry out their roles and responsibilities with more caution and safety in mind. This way, they don’t break any rules and help the company avoid any legal actions in the future.

2. Promotes an inclusive and safer workplace environment

Compliance training programs also help you create an inclusive and safer workplace that employees love coming to every day. When employees know that they can reach out to an authority in case they face any discrimination at work or get harassed, they feel more confident and place their trust in the company and its policies.

3. Reduces workplace injuries

With compliance training, you can ensure that employees are at a lower risk of getting hurt during their work. You can educate them about the health and safety regulations they must follow while working. These regulations become more useful for employees in the manufacturing and logistics sector.

4. Improves company reputation

Compliance training programs help you avoid legal complications and enhance employee safety measures. When people outside the organization notice how well your company is performing while considering the safety of its employees, you boost your company’s reputation in the market.

Develop a Compliance Training Program in 8 Steps

With the benefits your company gains from creating compliance training programs, it is hard to avoid creating them in the first place. If you’d like to enjoy the same benefits, the 8-step guide below will help you create your training program efficiently.

1. Make your business objectives a part of the compliance training

When designing compliance training programs, you need to ensure that your business objectives become a part of it. Here’s how you can do it.

Let’s say your objective is to ensure complete customer satisfaction. So, when you create your program, emphasize the actions that can lead to customer satisfaction. Imagine that the customer support team needs technical assistance to resolve a customer query. In this case, they will reach out to the developer or product teams.

While they reach out to both teams for a solution, they should ensure that they offer a realistic timeline by which the customer can expect a resolution. That’s because they shouldn’t expect both teams to be readily available the moment the query comes to them. If they set unrealistic timelines, they are likely to force the teams to offer a solution to ensure complete customer satisfaction. This can create differences, and the teams might hesitate to help the support team later on.

That’s why, during compliance training, you need to emphasize that each team must respect the time of others and avoid situations that include conflict or harassment.

2. Build a comprehensive, yet easy-to-understand training curriculum

It is easy to get technical when creating compliance training programs because they include many technical terms. You have to cover many policies, rules, and regulations as per the state or federal government, and let’s not forget your internal conditions that instruct employees about the workplace culture.

However, combining them all shouldn’t mean that the training curriculum turns out to be technical. You can use laymen’s language for employees to understand each policy, law, or regulation. You can even add videos that help them comprehend the policies better.

And, don’t stop at that.

Create compliance training documentation where you explain in detail:

• What does the policy mean?
• Why did the company implement the policy?
• How does it benefit the employees?
• What help can employees receive from the company under that policy?
• Who to contact in case the policy gets violated?

With these objectives, you can create a comprehensive curriculum easily.

3. Use multiple training methods (e.g., role-based training, online modules, in-person workshops)

Compliance training can be conducted via various methods. We have highlighted a few ways that can help you execute the training process hassle-free.

• Role-based training sessions: Ask experienced employees to join the training sessions and enact a few scenarios in which employees must be mindful of all the rules and regulations. This information from existing employees will make the new ones more confident in their actions moving forward.
  
  
• Online Training Modules: Use Knowledge management systems to create training modules. With these solutions, you can create compliance programs that train employees on the necessary rules and regulations and test their ability after the training ends. You can even give out certifications to employees once they finish their training program successfully.
  
  
• Compliance Documentation: Use an internal knowledge base to create organizational compliance documents and rules for your new hires. This should be open to all employees at all times. They can always come back to the documentation in case they have any questions related to a situation and see if they are about to breach any rules in the company.
  
  
• In-person Workshops: Try in-person workshops as well. Many agencies specialize in training corporate employees to comply with all industry regulations. The best part is that their training sessions can be customized to your organization’s needs.

4. Help employees understand the importance of compliance training

There are a lot of employees who feel that compliance training can be:

• Outright boring
• Time-consuming
• Reduces productivity

And it takes time to overcome this ideology, especially if 74% of organizations state that compliance is a burden.

To change their attitudes toward compliance training and make them more accepting of it, it is important to create a sense of urgency within them. By sense of urgency, we mean explaining to them how compliance training can help them overcome workplace risks, take the right actions in case they get involved in a harassment or violent situation, and avoid workplace hazards. This will encourage them to be more proactive when finishing their training.

5. Share real-life examples during training

Another measure you must take is to include real-life examples during the training sessions or document them for reference. Real-life examples will help your employees understand the context of each compliance and adapt to them faster.

6. Make compliance training a part of your company culture

Avoid introducing compliance training as a list of rules and regulations to your employees; otherwise, they will lose interest in it right away. Instead, inform them how your training program resonates with your company’s vision and expectations of employees. When you emphasize how your compliance training reflects the way you work, employees will be interested in completing the program as they’d like to meet the organizational expectations.

7. Reward employees for completing training programs successfully

Another way to engage employees with your compliance training program is to reward them after completion. You award them a completion certification which they can post on their LinkedIn profiles. Other than that, those who perform well in the compliance quizzes should receive public recognition on the company’s internal portal. You can also offer vouchers for employees who complete their program first.

8. Keep updating your program as per changing rules and regulations

To ensure your employees show the same enthusiasm for compliance training every year, update the materials according to changing rules and regulations. Give them a teaser of what they should expect and what additions they must look forward to. In case you have compliance documentation, shoot an email to let employees learn about the recent changes you have made and where they can find the new updates.

3 Critical Compliance Training Challenges to Watch Out

While developing a compliance training program won’t be a hassle after our 8-step guide, we cannot deny the challenges companies might still face during the training period. Here are 3 critical challenges that everyone must know of before diving into the program creation process.

1. Lack of employee engagement

While we have recommended a few steps that keep employees engaged with the compliance training program, you may still experience a lack of engagement from their end. In this scenario, employees may be disinterested in the program thinking that they know it all and would rather focus on completing their goals on time.

2. Fail to measure the performance of compliance training

Another challenge is understanding if your compliance training program brings in the results you want. If you have no feedback forms in place or metrics to measure the success of your programs, you are likely shooting arrows in the dark. Set up a detailed feedback form to understand how your program helped the employees and a separate form after six months to see what benefits the employees gained from the program. This way you can understand if the program was a hit or a miss.

3. Lack of relevance

If you fail to research your industry, chances are that the compliance training programs you build may not be relevant for the employees or your business. Worse, once you create an irrelevant program, you may lose your time, effort, resources, and interest as you progress, and much more. That’s why it is important to research your industry, identify the rules and regulations that apply to your business, possible ways to work around the work challenges, and then create the training program.