Whether it covers essential regulations, safety procedures or company policies, compliance training is critical. As policies rapidly change and more people are working from home because of the COVID-19 pandemic, efficiently delivering training and tracking compliance can be more challenging.
Successful completion of training can protect employees and customers, while reducing costs and protecting your organization from legal liability. When looking for ways to boost engagement and retention of compliance training, tap the benefits of microlearning to bolster your efforts.
Completion is no longer enough
It used to be enough to show that employees had completed training in order to limit a company's legal liability for wrongdoing. This is no longer the case.
In the U.S., the Department of Justice now evaluates the effectiveness of a compliance program, its design and whether the company shows evidence of a sincere commitment to ethics and compliance. Adding microlearning to your annual program can help increase engagement to improve results and demonstrate your dedication to full compliance.
Benefits of microlearning include engagement & retention
Many workers complete an in-depth course as part of their compliance training, but one-time exposure isn't enough to ensure that information is retained for the long term. Because each lesson is concise and narrowly focused, microlearning content is easily digestible, allowing learners to complete a unit during a break, between meetings or at the beginning of a shift. Presenting content in multiple formats, including short videos, games, quizzes and flash-card style Q&A activities, boosts engagement, which can improve knowledge retention.
An ongoing microlearning program also prolongs learning beyond the initial training course, offering repeated exposure to broad themes via courses that progress through bite-sized takeaways. Continuous microlearning helps learners cement key information in their long-term memory while advancing their understanding.
Easily measure progress
Your learning management system should house your microlearning courses, making it easy to track learners' progress from the start of compliance training and throughout the microlearning retention campaign.
Your LMS can help you further improve compliance training tracking by collecting data such as course completions. This is especially practical when it comes time to provide records or proof of compliance during audits or other regulatory checks.
An LMS should also enable you to create charts or data visualizations that display performance or behavioral metrics alongside training results—providing deeper insights and empowering you to continuously improve your compliance training program.
Microlearning reinforces a learning culture
When training occurs only once a year, learners might not think about compliance training after they've completed the annual update. Adding a continuous microlearning retention strategy does more than reinforce compliance content—it fosters daily learning.
Microlearning's short, focused content makes it a digestible and engaging format, which is reinforced by its mobile-friendly format. When learners can simply reach into their pockets and pull out exactly the information they need when they need it, they can quickly upskill and return to their workflow without getting lost navigating a lengthy course for answers. This makes self-guided learning a more approachable process and puts your learning culture into your employees' hands.
A springboard to improved performance
Rather than an annual obligation, engaging, continuous microlearning can turn required compliance training into a springboard for ongoing employee education and skills development. It can also improve your organization's efficiency, ensuring compliance and reducing legal risk. Best of all, once learners are in the habit of ongoing learning, skills development becomes second nature, freeing employees to focus their attention on what really matters: furthering your mission.
Learn more about keeping your staff compliant as they work from home. Read this blog post to see how an LMS can keep your remote team fully informed and compliant.
