Some form of compliance requirements impact almost all businesses. While the nature of the training you offer may depend on what your company does, most organizations will need to offer training on the following areas at a minimum: anti-harassment; workplace safety (OSHA), workplace violence, workplace substance abuse, Human Resources regulations, and diversity. Businesses in the health care field, for example, will also need to complete information security training to be compliant with HIPPA.
Not only does compliance training benefit your organization by avoiding any penalties for non- compliance, it also helps create a more productive and safer workplace for your employees. The key to ensuring that your entire staff completes any necessary compliance training is to make training as easy to access as possible. This often means creating an effective online curriculum.
Offering compliance training online allows you to easily update, revise or add to the content as needed. It also makes it simpler for staff to know what training they need to complete or revisit, keeping them from missing out on any important deadlines. Finally, it makes the training accessible no matter where your employee is located.
Creating a training program
To start building an online compliance training program for your organization, perform an assessment of the compliance areas that cover your business. For instance, is there a specific regulation or legislation that your training needs to address? Once you have determined the topic behind your compliance training, you can start to identify the criteria that the online training must cover.
When considering how to present information online, remember that regulations can be challenging to understand with many details that may be hard to remember for the average employee. Keep the content of your program as simple as possible.
Updating compliance as needed
The next step is to continually verify that the information you are sharing in the training is as up-
to-date as possible. When it comes to regulation, it is essential that you are providing employees with the latest, most accurate direction, as rules and laws can change over time.
Don’t forget to include some real-life examples in your compliance training. Doing so gives your employees a better chance to connect to the material on a practical level. Engaging staff members in hands-on scenarios can also help reflect the training in a way that’s easier to understand than a lecture. These scenarios or activities may also need to be updated from time to time to address current situations.
Tracking your training efforts
Finally, make sure to offer your online compliance training through a learning management system so your company can track each employee’s activity. This will allow you to verify that the training has been completed, as well as remind staff about deadlines. An online compliance training program has the added benefit of letting you analyze and improve the training as needed. For instance, if you find that engagement is falling or employees are under-performing, you can make adjustments to increase participation and improve performance.