Time for a ‘proper’ compliance training program?
So, your organisation wants to create a ‘proper’ compliance training program, with features like:
- Online content available 24/7 in any location
- Automated enrolments with due dates and reminders
- Automated notifications to managers on completion rates and overdue topics
- Australian content which is up-to-date with regulations and legislation
- Recorded assessments to demonstrate employee understanding
- Separate training for managers to ensure correct oversight of employees
- Unique completion certificates, with completion dates and training hours
- Employee feedback and data about compliance concerns or uncertainties
- Central repository for your compliance policies, including version tracking
- Policy acceptance during employee induction with data tracking and reporting
- Coverage of all key compliance issues – behaviours, employment, IT, health and safety
- Presented in your branding to reinforce the organisation’s commitment to compliance
As the person responsible for making this happen, how are you feeling now? A little overwhelmed? That wouldn’t be surprising and, often, organisations have paralysis about compliance training programs. It all seems like too much hard work.
- ‘Our employees will be confused.’
- ‘It’s another process or platform for everyone to use.’
- ‘It’s just too hard to know where to start.’
- ‘We’ll get to it later.’ (A date which never seems to arrive until a compliance incident occurs and suddenly it can’t happen fast enough!)
In many ways, this is a change management process. Like most change management processes, the fears and worries of that change are typically exaggerated. Within just a few weeks, employees and the organisation have moved on and it is all ‘business as usual’.
At least, it can be. With the right platform and the right planning, the roll-out of a new compliance training program can be easy, rapid and effective. Let’s break down the roll-out into a four-step process to make your compliance training program easier.
Step One – Start with compliance fundamentals
Quick wins. That’s what we want at the start. It helps prove the concept to all stakeholders before undertaking the next steps. Let’s start with ready-made compliance training. Ideally, that training should be…
- Presented in your branding to reinforce the organisation’s commitment to compliance
- Based on Australian content which is up-to-date with regulations and legislation
- Able to cover all key compliance issues – behaviours, employment, IT, health and safety
You could start by just having employees complete a module or two, but given the very low workload in this step already, we would recommend going a little further. Ideally, create 4-5 ‘Pathways’ of related topics. These Pathways can become the cornerstone of your compliance training program, as you build into and around each Pathway.
Your organisation’s values or compliance methodology may already have compliance streams or pillars which can form these Pathways. If not, common Pathways are…
- Conduct
- Anti-bullying and anti-harassment for employees
- Sexual discrimination awareness
- Alcohol and drugs in the workplace
- Safety
- Workplace health and safety fundamentals
- Office and workspace ergonomics
- Manual handling safety
- Duty of care for employees
- Information
- Information security for employees
- Phishing awareness for employees
- Social media awareness
- Privacy in the workplace
- Management
- Anti-bullying and anti-harassment for managers
- Equal employment opportunity for managers
- Duty of care for managers
- Managing staff underperformance
For example, in an online compliance training platform like Tribal Habits, you can import these topics from our Compliance library and bundle them together into Pathways in just a few minutes. Pathways provide enrolment notifications, due dates with reminder notifications, module completion certificates and a variety of automated enrolment options. With Tribal Habits, everything appears in your branding too.
With this approach, your organisation’s workload is dramatically reduced in the first step. You will only need to set-up your compliance platform (which is done for you with Tribal Habits) and set-up your employees (which you can do via a spreadsheet upload in Tribal Habits).
Suddenly, you have four Pathways of branded compliance training ready to go. You could immediately enrol new employees as part of induction and then start a rolling process through existing employees. Quick wins are easy to create at this point.
Step Two – Add your compliance policies
At this point, with your compliance fundamentals humming along, you can turn your attention towards your organisation’s compliance policies.
Assuming you have developed your policies, your next step is to fold them into the training process. Each policy needs to be presented to employees in a way which improves their understanding and demonstrates your organisation took appropriate steps to inform and educate employees.
Ideally, your compliance training platform can handle this too. In Tribal Habits, for example, you would use our Compliance Policy template to rapidly build training modules around your policies. This template gives you a ‘fill in the blanks’ process to present your policies as interactive online training, which captures policy acceptance, employee questions and online assessment. It takes less than 30 minutes to create a policy training module too.
You can then build this into each of your Pathways. For example, let’s return to the Information Pathway. Let’s say your organisation has an ‘Acceptable Internet Use Policy’. You would use the template to create that module, and then add it to the Information Pathway.
- Information
- Information security for employees
- Phishing awareness for employees
- Social media awareness
- Privacy in the workplace
- Our Acceptable Internet Usage policy
In a platform like Tribal Habits, the combination of ready-made compliance training and your own custom policy training is seamless. All training appears in your branding, with consistent navigation and interactions.
With just a few 30 minutes sessions, you can add your policies into each Pathway. Suddenly you have a perfect combination of compliance training and policy acceptance.
Step Three – Expand for specific roles
Your final step in the process is to take the ‘training + policy’ approach and expand it to cover all roles and key issues in your organisation. For example…
- Warden training
- Risk management, incident reporting and injury management
- Driver training
- Mental health awareness and management
You may find that many of these issues continue to be covered by ready-made training modules and can be combined with your internal policies. With a platform like Tribal Habits, you can then discreetly target enrolments in these modules based on teams, locations, roles, titles or any other demographics.
Step Four – Build your custom compliance training
As your experience and results with compliance training grow, you may even take the final step – creating custom compliance training. For many organisations, this is not necessary. Most organisations find that the combination of ready-made training and customised policy training is enough.
However, your organisation may have specific industry or regulatory compliance requirements which are not available in external libraries. Alternatively, you may have certain compliance requirements which cannot be adequately managed by online training – working at heights or working in confined spaces are examples of issues which generally need instructor-led training to adequately prepare employees.
At this point in the program roll-out, you have many positives achieved already – with very minimal effort. Making the investment to create these final modules is often much easier now with that experience.
Small steps lead to an easier compliance training program
The key is small steps, each building on the previous step, to avoid overwhelming yourself, your employees and your organisation. Then, in just 3-6 months, you suddenly find you have ticked every objective listed at the start of this article and you will be wondering why it didn’t happen sooner!
If you enjoyed this article, be sure to check out our ‘Online Compliance Training – The Ultimate Guide’!