Why is Compliance Training Important in Business?

Taking steps to meet your legal obligations may sound obvious, but only fulfilling your minimum requirements might result in missed opportunities. Understanding the compliance needs that govern your business will help you take advantage of any benefits while ensuring you stay compliant.

Companies that have compliance as a key component of their learning and development culture and have it fully integrated into their business processes will perform better. Why? Their employees have a higher level of satisfaction, resulting in improved productivity and employee retention. Their reputation and brand perception is better, which results in better economic performance in the marketplace. Safety records improve reducing both cost and risk.

Companies that do not adopt a compliance culture and ethical behaviour put themselves at risk. Organisations with poor compliance reputations will have a harder time recruiting and retaining the best talent and customers.

With global 24/7 news coverage and the reach of social media, word of damaging compliance issues can spread quickly to a large audience.

Visit the Financial Conduct Authority website for guidance on money laundering laws and regulations

A well-planned compliance strategy can help companies grow revenue in many ways, such as:

• Winning or retaining contracts that have safety or other compliance performance requirements.
• Enhancing brand image and reputation, which may attract more customers.
• Attracting the best talent who want to work for a company with a reputation and culture they can be proud of.
• Motivating employees with training and developing plans to be more productive and enjoy their roles.

6 Factors to Consider Ahead of Your Compliance Journey

1. Get Leadership Buy-in

   Your compliance journey must start with commitment from the leadership team to achieve behaviour change. Executives need to define and own the risk management process.

2. Identify Risks

   Risks to the organisation should be identified and prioritised. High-risk issues will require the greatest commitment to training and to achieve behavioural change. Low-risk issues should receive less attention.

3. Align Risks to Business Goals

   Once the risks have been prioritised, they should be aligned to support key business goals and incorporated into your business strategy. Key goals may include revenue growth, expense reduction, risk reduction, and employee safety.

   Next, a training program should be planned to train the right people, on the appropriate subjects, in the right way. The learnings from the training should be embedded in the daily routine of employees and practised on the job.

4. Be Strategic with Training

   Many compliance training programs overlook the emotional aspect of training. Emotional training messages help your team feel that the company is looking out for their safety and well-being.

   By instilling pride in working for an ethical company, employees will stay longer and work harder to support company goals. People enjoy feeling that they are a part of something good that is bigger than themselves. Help employees understand that bad behaviour may have dire consequences.

5. Be Relevant

   Your compliance training program needs to target the right job roles for each training format. Nothing will annoy employees faster than a training course that is of no help to them in their role.

6. Develop Metrics

   Meaningful metrics for the compliance program should be established at the onset. Metrics should be aligned around the key company goals that the compliance program has been designed to support.

   The compliance program should be implemented in such a way that data for the metrics can be easily collected and reported via a Learning Management System. Targets for the metrics should be realistic and achievable. When targets are unachievable, people are not motivated to reach them.

Read the full eBook, Shifting Mindsets: Adopting a Compliance Journey to learn more

Conclusion

Your compliance journey is a marathon, not a sprint. It is important to keep your team motivated throughout their learning experiences to keep the momentum going. Here are some ideas to consider:

• Share success stories with your employees of how your compliance program has succeeded in helping the company reach its goals.
• Tell the outside world about your compliance program successes. This will help enhance the reputation and brand perception of your organisation and help recruit the best talent.
• Empower your employees. Provide a Learning Management System that provides easy access to digital learning content that will help them in their jobs.
• Create learning experiences that are engaging and maximise learning technologies to provide high-quality content.
• Proactively seek feedback and survey, listen to the concerns of employees, and act quickly to respond to needs.

The benefits of strategically using compliance to support business objectives are clear. A people-centric compliance culture can help organisations reach important goals, such as revenue growth, cost and risk reduction, and improved safety. The risks of failing to adopt a compliance culture can be severe.

John Chalmers

John is a strategic business leader with a long career in Learning & Development. As an industry veteran spanning over 25 years, he’s added value to many organisations by creating learning solutions dedicated to “developing business talent” and aligned to create positive business outcomes. His specialties include SaaS, Digital Learning, Compliance, Leadership, IT Certification and Professional Development.