If your organisation is dragging its feet on compliance, perhaps it simply doesn’t understand the benefits of compliance training. If you are building your business case for online compliance training, let’s map out the key benefits of compliance training in this article to help your organisation make the move to a positive compliance culture.
Benefit 1: Reduced risk of non-compliance
An online compliance training system combines learning with detailed employee tracking, so that compliance certification can be linked directly to employee performance. You should be able to measure easily…
- Which areas have an employee become compliant in?
- How long has it been since their last compliance update?
- What version of each compliance topic did they complete?
- Which topics are they overdue or non-compliant in?
An online compliance training platform can also match course enrolments with user demographics. This helps reduce the risk of non-compliance by monitoring training levels and maintaining accurate records as evidence of compliance.
With an online compliance training platform, you can send alerts for both initial completion as well as when credentials require renewal.
As a result, one of the major benefits of compliance training is that each employee can understand exactly which course they need to take to complete to meet their compliance requirements.
Benefit 2: Promote an inclusive and safe workplace
The statistics above show real the risk of an unsafe workplace is for all organisations. As a result, it is critical to ensure all your employees are familiar with your organisation’s expectations around creating an inclusive, friendly, and safe workplace.
Remember that abuse isn’t restricted to physical violence and intimidation. Abuse can also verbal abuse, inappropriate jokes, and unequal treatment.
Managers also have a key role to play in creating an inclusive and safe workplace. Leaders and managers should receive training on how to manage situations that may involve abuse, as well as how to build a team culture of equal opportunity.
Finally, every person in the organisation should feel empowered to report anything that threatens a safe and inclusive workplace environment. Employees must know how to safely and correctly raise concerns or report issues within your organisation.
Benefit 3: Help define organisational policies
To nurture a positive culture, it’s essential that leaders establish organisational values. They must effectively and clearly communicate those values so that employees feel aligned with those values.
It’s not enough to display values across organisation media. It’s also crucial to translate compliance policies into every-day behaviours and standards that employees can relate to.
This is where good online compliance training steps it. It can bring policies to life with training scenarios and quizzes to show what happens when policy becomes action.
Benefit 4: Balance priorities and ethics
One of the key benefits of compliance training is that a positive compliance culture promotes accountability among employees. When employees feel they are acting ethically, they feel invested in their organisation.
Leaders can help staff members by rewarding them for displaying values that align with ethical ways of doing business. Furthermore, management can foster an environment where employees feel comfortable speaking up when they are concerned or think that something is wrong.
The attitude and management style of organisational managers directly impact organisational outcomes. By training your managers and employees to nurture a culture of compliance, you are laying the building blocks for success.
Benefit 5: Boost reputation and the bottom line
You might think a non-compliance fine is a once-off impact on the bottom line. That isn’t so. The resulting damage to an organisation’s reputation could wind up costing a lot more. Potential clients, investors and media will all have their focus on your organisation.
On the flip side, proactively investing in compliance training will not only help to avoid public scandal and embarrassment, it can also help you draw in like-minded clients. Your commitment to compliance, safety and ethics can be a competitive advantage.
Social media updates, blog articles, organisation values, news alerts and more can all be used to show your commitment to compliance and compliance training.
Benefit 6: Create a powerful audit trail
It’s not enough to ‘provide compliance training’ – you must be able to prove that it occurred. First, from a legal perspective, your organisation needs an accurate audit trail which can clearly show which employees are compliant in which topics.
Besides, you cannot merely rely upon ‘someone attended training’. Your organisation must be able to show that employees were engaged in the training, understood the content and demonstrated some degree of proficiency with the required behaviours or knowledge.
- Online compliance training will provide built-in assessments, which boost accountability with employees. It can help confirm that employees understood and were able to apply the required compliance knowledge – a demonstration which may become critical at a later date if an employee fails to follow correct procedures or behaviours.
- An online compliance training platform should combine compliance training, including assessments, with organisational policy, including acceptance.
- If your organisation has an accrediting body, they will also want to see proof that your employees maintained credentials in order to be able to perform their job. Equally, you may need to prepare regular internal reports on compliance for new employee induction or existing employee credentials.
In all cases, there are huge benefits of compliance training from having a central source of truth with instant access to data, instead of through some mess of outdated spreadsheets and documents.
If you enjoyed this article, be sure to check out our ‘Guide – Deliver Compliance Training‘