Here are some of the findings, based on responses from 136 organisations representing 2.3m employees across 17 countries:
- 98% of organisations want technology-enabled compliance training to help manage risk more successfully.
- 12% of organisations say compliance training is helping achieve their business goal of changing working culture.
- 23% of businesses are raising awareness and understanding of complex regulations with compliance training.
- 67% of organisations say user engagement is the top barrier to adopting technology enabled compliance training.
- 20% of organisations include opportunities for staff to practice.
- 20% of organisations provide managers with resources and job aids to encourage application back in the workplace.
It looks to me like a whole load of organisations are experiencing a very poor return on their expectations.
In the Foreword to the report, Iain McLeod of SAI Global Compliance, which sponsored the study, had this to say:
Universally, lack of employee engagement emerged as the biggest barrier to effectiveness – and is linked strongly to the poor reputation of compliance e-learning. Ask yourself what efforts you are currently making to really engage your audience and make it relevant to them. If you are subjecting your employees to ‘death by PowerPoint’, rolling out the same content year after year to everyone regardless of their job role or risk profile, blinding the learner with irrelevant detail about what the law says rather than what it means to them or failing to engage your line managers in the process, then the chances are you are potentially turning off the very people whose buy-in you need to effectively mitigate your compliance risks.I have had the misfortune to experience some dreadful compliance e-learning, constituting the worst form of 'tell and test'. I have also seen some wonderful efforts. It is possible to do this job properly, to satisfy the needs of regulators while also providing a stimulating and thought-provoking experience that has a good chance of changing behaviour. But clearly we are not doing this often enough.
E-learning producers are in a difficult position, because a great deal of their work comes in the form of compliance training (according to Charles Jennings, 80% of all e-learning produced in Australia is to meet compliance needs). But in the long run they must surely feel the effects of a poor user experience:
- Employees hate doing compliance training
- As a result, trainers hate training it
- The answer, then, is to use e-learning instead
- With the result that now learners hate e-learning
Sorting out this problem may, in the end, determine whether formal, self-study e-learning continues to exist. In the next week I'll present my vision of what a compliance course could look like.
As you know we've been keen to conduct this research for some time - many are definitely struggling with meeting their expectations but some are clearly achieving better results (changing behaviour, culture and attitude) than others.
ReplyDeleteThe report outlines the characteristics of the more successful in terms of design and implementation so we hope that the findings will help those looking to 'raise the dead'!
Looking forward to your recommendations as well next week!
Really glad you guys are focusing in on compliance. In many respects it is the most important e-learning: if you don't learn X, someone may die, or your business will go bust. However, it's great to implement as it's most often mandatory. But for these reasons its important to make it stimulating on two scales. First is the importance to get the learning outcomes you desire across, second is that compliance e-learning is often the flag waver for more e-learning to then be delivered in an organisation. If it's mandatory and rubbish, how on earth are you going to persuade colleagues to complete non-mandatory e-learning afterwards? Can't wait for your next article; keep up the great work. Myles http://www.linkd.in/mylesoconnor
ReplyDeleteHi Clive,
ReplyDeleteI was nodding and smiling to myself all the way through your post as it seemed to resonate very much with my thinking and approach to compliance subjects within my organisation (you can read more in my posts to date)
http://tayloringit.com/category/course-to-campaign/
however I was surprised to see you use the words 'compliance course' in your closing sentence. I'm intrigued to see what you define as a 'course' in your next post.
Nice Article..............
ReplyDeleteClive, great title. You are quite right that compliance has fed the need for e-learning tracking but allowed us to be lazy with implementation. There is plenty of good compliance training practice out there, the most important need, from my view, is to raise our expectation of what we can achieve with it. Greatly looking forward to your future blogs on this topic.
ReplyDelete