Lessons from the Pandemic: Resolve to Engage Employees in Compliance Training

By Simon Greany, Founder & Chief Product Officer, Elucidat

As people line up to get vaccinated for COVID-19, we are finally seeing a light at the end of the tunnel for a return to normal, or whatever that might look like. For businesses, it’s no different. As vaccinations roll on, companies are going to slowly transition back to at least some form of “business as usual”, but now armed with important lessons learned from our collective experience.

With 2021 poised to be a transitional year, leaders in the financial and insurance industry would be smart to continue, with purpose, many of the changes implemented during the pandemic. So much wisdom can be taken from this tumultuous time, having observed months of work-life altered, marked by working and staying home, traveling less and social distancing. One of the most vital lessons coming from this, I believe, is how important it is to keep employees engaged.

In the world of compliance training, engagement is still a real problem. Elucidat recently surveyed finance and insurance employees to see what they thought about their company’s compliance training. While the survey’s findings don’t paint a rosy picture, there is hope that the ways we’ve changed during the pandemic may actually hold the key to boosting flagging employee engagement numbers. A big part of that going forward will be a blended learning approach that includes elearning.

Compliance’s Engagement Problem

But first the results. Elucidat’s survey, of professionals in American finance and insurance organizations that have over 1,000 employees, found that 15% of respondents admit to clicking through mandatory compliance training without reading or listening, while 34% say they only skim-read the content or tune in or out to audio. Also, half of respondents (49%) skip reading or listening to their mandatory compliance training in detail. 

But lack of employee engagement wasn’t the only consistent theme pulled from the findings. Another big one is the significance of respecting employees’ time during compliance training. 70% of respondents shared their compliance training runs 30 minutes or longer, with the most common word used to describe it being “boring”. 

Between lack of engagement, long training sessions, and material that doesn’t hold people’s attention, the results paint a wider picture that should serve as an eye-opener for L&D teams in the finance and insurance sectors. Ultimately, a failure to engage your employees in mandatory compliance training puts the entire organization at risk, particularly with regulators, who seek compliance as a result of training that’s targeted and effective. 

Getting Engaged with Elearning 

A result of the pandemic is that we won’t necessarily revert back to the traditional ways of training that got us into this engagement predicament. Brandon Hall Group benchmarking data released in June found that 0% of organizations have plans to increase face-to-face in the next 12 months. That parallels Elucidat’s research, which found that a mere 12% of organizations plan to fully revert to pre-pandemic levels of face-to-face training. 

So while face-to-face training is on ice for the time being, L&D teams have also become creative during the pandemic with their approach, and specifically with the use of elearning, which almost doubled in use between April and June (Brandon Hall Group).

The pandemic forced many organizations to pivot to elearning to solve immediate issues, but a digital approach to training and learning offers benefits far beyond the current circumstances. From innovative ways of building connections between learners to enabling on-demand training, people-centered elearning offers wide-reaching opportunities for compliance and L&D. 

For instance, we’re witnessing more engaging approaches to elearning that ensure that training lands in a way that is both targeted and more relevant and impactful. L&D that focuses on delivering more engaging experiences, while using less employee time is proving far more successful. Short, bitesize elearning modules that are personalized to be relevant to people’s roles and context is a great starting point for raising the bar when it comes to engagement.

So how can compliance departments take advantage of this? One way is employing a scalable platform and process that guarantees impact on organizational KPI’s, while also upping their engagement game. To do this, view L&D as not the order takers for training, but instead a center of excellence. 

With an elearning platform, L&D can empower a network of experts within an organization to become collaborators – overseeing it all and not just switching their focus onto niche flagship projects. Ideally, this model also means they can do more immersive training tailored to specific teams.

All of this creates a win-win for L&D and compliance teams as a whole, allowing them to construct a wide and impactful footprint within the business, while also addressing one of the most fundamental problems facing compliance today, getting employees to embrace and become fully engaged with their training. 

Simon Greany is Founder and Chief Product Officer at Elucidat