What is the point of your compliance training? The answer isnot obvious; in fact, in too many companies, the real answer is “to reduceliability” or “to meet legal requirements.” Those goals do not, for the mostpart, translate to compelling compliance training that changes employeebehavior or improves performance.
Dan Belhassen, founder and president of Neovation,characterizes this type of compliance training as “responsibility transfer”training. Instead, he said, compliance training should emphasize outcomes andensure that learners’ time and prior knowledge are respected.
Responsibility transfer
“We think a lot of compliance training now is about responsibilitytransfer, where the real mission is to have the learner acknowledge that theyhave completed the module,” Belhassen said. “You’re essentially transferringresponsibility to the learner, so the learner says that they know not to harasstheir co-workers or how to avoid money laundering or fraud or whatever thecompliance topic is.”
Training that is measured by tracking how many employeeshave completed it—rather than tracking changes in performance-basedmetrics—falls into this category. As does any eLearning module that askslearners to indicate that they have “read and understood the content.”
Responsibility-transfer training focuses on deliveringinformation and doing a perfunctory check—those super-easy quizzes that no onefails—and documenting that employees have completed it.
“There’s a problem with quizzes,” Belhassen said: Iflearners fail, designers face a conundrum. “Do you have them take the courseagain, which just means you’re going to have to do a whole lot more chasing ofthe learners? Or do you try to get them to go back to a certain area of thecourse, which ends up being really awkward for the learner?” He noted, “What wesee a lot of organizations do is they simply, over time, start having non-failableexams at the end of their modules—so pretty much all the learners pass. Fromtheir organization’s perspective it’s a win: Look at all these learners thathave completed the training!”
“The problem with all that is that sometimes you actuallywant the learners to learn the material,” Belhassen said. And exposure to informationdoes not automatically translate to learning.
Outcome achievement
That’s why Belhassen advocates training design that focuseson learner retention or improving performance. This moves training from “responsibilitytransfer” to what he calls the “outcome achievement” realm.
While there is often a need to deliver massive amounts ofinformation, that should not be the only objective. Once information ispresented to learners, it should be reinforced—and they should be offeredopportunities to apply it and test their learning before they are placed inactual work situations that demand that knowledge.
Or reinforcement could be delivered in the workflow.Belhassen’s favored approach is continuous delivery of microlearning, ratherthan annual training courses. He also offers learners the opportunity to “testout of” material they already know and presents them with new and relevant contentand training that reinforces their weak spots. The training offers optionalmaterial as performance support and includes “the most important part”—practiceexercises.
“That would be activities that the learner completes inorder to demonstrate their knowledge—but they don’t need to know the materialahead of time,” Belhassen said. “There’s so much that people can learn just byactually exercising their knowledge about how they would solve a problem orsolve a scenario or what is the right way to handle a situation.”
His approach is based on “a lot of great science”—and extensiveuser testing and feedback. “We know from our statistics that when learners arewrong, that’s when they read the actual explanatory material,” he said. “Theydon’t read it when they’re right. They just skip on. But when they’re wrong,they’ll sit there and they’ll read it. And that’s exactly the kind ofengagement that we want because we want the learners to feel like their time isbeing respected—and that their prior knowledge is being recognized as well.”
The eLearning Guild’s white paper, CreatingCompliance Training Learners Will Love, describes additionalways to enliven your compliance training—and other eLearning as well. And don’tmiss the ComplianceTraining Summit, November 14 & 15, 2018; registration ends soon!
