ATD Blog
Fri Jul 10 2020
Though the hazards of your workplace will vary based on the environment and your role, compliance training is vital to your employee health and organizational success. Compliance with health and safety regulations can reduce injuries and improve employee performance. It’s no surprise then that a study by Brandon Hall found that 62 percent of organizations prioritize safety and policy training.
Still, shaping employee behaviors toward compliance doesn’t happen easily. It can be hard to maintain the skills learned during compliance training when employees return to their day-to-day tasks. Your employees may feel motivated to briefly practice safe behaviors after training, but that motivation can quickly fade when reinforcement strategies aren’t in place.
One of the common challenges to building employee motivation for compliance training is in the underlying company culture. Employees may not see the value in changing their behaviors to align with policies or regulations. Worse yet, if company leaders view training as a headache, then their employees will be less inclined to make changes themselves. In that case, even well-designed safety training will be ineffective.
It’s important to address the individual motivations of employees with your training content. Research by the University of Leuven found that stressing the personal relevance of a task increased attention to the task, motivated behavior, and improved performance. Your employees need to understand how compliance policies and procedures will affect their roles and see how and why they applies to them. Training content that is personalized by role may be the solution. Consider creating custom e-learning activities that offer more detail on the policies that are relevant to separate groups of employees.
Another challenge to ongoing safety compliance is poor communication strategies. It may feel reflexive to hide or minimize bad news, especially in your workplace, but failing to communicate negative workplace patterns often leads to larger problems down the road. For example, research from Purdue University found that team dynamics and performance can suffer when employees feel left out of communication channels. While general corporate communication strategies can certainly prevent most of these issues, you will want to create a communication strategy specific to your corporate training initiative as well.
As you introduce your training, explain the dangers and drawbacks of noncompliance and be transparent about the issues your training is trying to address. Consider starting the learning experience with a short video from an internal employee. Discuss the underlying challenges, detail how the training will drive the organization toward success, and emphasize the role each employee has in reaching that goal. Video testimonials, particularly from internal employees, have a way of drawing out the emotional responses critical to driving motivation.
Even with well-designed compliance training content, it can be difficult to shape employee behaviors. Though motivating factors and communication strategies may certainly play a role in your compliance training challenge, personalizing training content and providing context can go a long way toward an effective solution.
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