Despite the growing awareness of systemic inequalities driving demand for workplace diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) training, numerous studies have found that it has little impact on organizational culture change. This is because employers frequently treat DEI training as a chore that employees must endure—enroll, check the box, and they’re done. This type of exercise may satisfy an employer’s training attendance requirements and even demonstrate rote compliance with some applicable legal requirements, but it is insufficient for changing ingrained cultural norms.
According to Deborah Coram, CEO of Australia’s leading compliance training provider, Safetrac, organizations must implement these five things in their compliance training in order to contribute to long-term workplace culture change.
1. Make it meaningful
Employers should tailor compliance training to their industry and organization in order to make it more meaningful. They should also make sure to develop courses that are relevant to the roles and responsibilities of their staff. Courses should contain interactions and activities that require the learner to demonstrate that they understand the content. Real work scenarios and suitable case studies can also be used to explain abstract concepts in a manner relevant to the workplace and employees.
At the conclusion of the training, test staff to ensure they understand the content. This will allow you to follow up with staff on areas where they demonstrate a lack of understanding.
Once the training has been rolled out and completed by the majority of staff, ensure the training is discussed and applied in daily activities.
2. Make it continuous
Making compliance training a regular occurrence will help ensure that employees are always up to date on the most recent compliance regulations. Booster courses and MicroLearns are a great way to reinforce training concepts, and refreshed training should be rolled out annually. This way, staff are kept up to speed on legislative changes while being reminded of your organization’s procedures and policies. Monitoring employee effectiveness and providing regular reports on breaches, incidents, risks, and hazards to decision-makers will also help to foster a compliance culture.
3. Make it sustainable
The importance of compliance training cannot be overstated as navigating the regulatory landscape for businesses becomes more complex. An effective compliance training program assists an organization in risk management, penalty avoidance, and reputation protection.
While many organizations choose to deliver compliance training programs in person by face-to-face methods, the pandemic introduced a new work-from-home culture that has made this form of training very problematic. Compliance training that is online ensures that all staff receive access to consistent, up-to-date information within a uniform timeframe. It also allows timely access to leaders (and regulators if needed) of reports detailing completions, knowledge analytics, and overall transparency of training efforts.
Furthermore, moving training online avoids staff traveling to and from multiple locations to attend training sessions, which, in addition to the removal of printed material, can have a significant contribution to reducing an organization’s carbon footprint.
4. Make it start from the top
The leaders of an organization set the tone for the whole group. For compliance to be effective, management and executives must set the tone through their actions, conduct, policies, and procedures. Further to this, the way in which breaches are handled must be transparent, consistent, and in line with policies and procedures. The tone from leaders then needs to be demonstrated and reinforced by those in middle management. Keep in mind that compliance violations often start with small, everyday decisions or actions. These need to be addressed immediately, and not allowed to continue. From there, organizational culture will start to emanate from all staff at all levels.
5. Make it better
Finally, improving compliance training is another way to drive organizational cultural change.
Once upon a time, compliance training was seen as a means of checking the box so that, in the event of regulatory intervention, an organization could demonstrate they had made efforts to train their staff. While this remains an important aspect of compliance training, it is not sufficient. Utilizing staff productivity hours to complete poor-quality compliance training does little to educate or change behaviors. When looking for a compliance training partner, it is essential to ensure that the courses are:
- varied, with different types of interactions and activities
- modified, so that generic branding can be changed to be made to look and feel like your own organization
- customizable, ensuring that scenarios, activities and imagery are updated to suit your workplace and the various staff roles
- engaging, to establish learners outcomes are realized
- effective, associating pre and post-testing to ensure learners possess adequacy of knowledge to give you confidence staff understand the concepts.
Safetrac stresses the importance of implementing compliance training that reflects an organization’s values, ethics, and culture. Compliance training should always be available and implemented regularly. It is pointless to train and create policies if they are only kept on someone’s desk, inbox, or intranet.
About Safetrac
Safetrac has won the LearnX Platinum Award for Best Compliance Program an unprecedented 11 times. Since 1999, the firm has been known for providing the best compliance training programs for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) to large corporations in Australia and New Zealand.
To learn more about Safetrac and its courses, anyone interested can visit their website or schedule a consultation with one of their consultants to talk about particular aims and objectives.
Deborah Coram
enquiries@safetrac.com
1800 170 830 safetrac.com.au