Corporate compliance, ethics, and governance aren't the most exciting topics. They're usually dry and unengaging. Unfortunately, the cost of poor compliance training is substantial. Research by the PonemonInstitute and Globalscape found that noncompliance costs the average organization $14.82 million, whereas the cost of compliance for the average organization is $5.47 million.

Compliance training only amounts to a small portion of this total cost, but it can have a significant impact on the organization. Moreover, compliance goes well beyond employee training and development. Typical compliance costs include:

• data protection enforcement

• incident response

• audits

• policy development

• certification

• technology.

To be effective, L&D teams need to influence the organization to create a culture of compliance. That means embedding compliance policies, processes, and values into the workplace. Though each department may have a unique need, there are a few best practices for organizational change that remain constant despite your challenge.

Influencing Employee Motivations

One of the greatest challenges to building a culture of compliance is based on employee motivations. There's simply less motivation to complete mandatory training, particularly when it's dry. Making training content more interactive and engaging can improve training completion rates, but that doesn't increase motivation to maintain skills after training completion.

Learners need to understand why behavior change is important to their individual success as well as that of the company. It also helps to prompt critical thinking around the value of training (for example, a cost-benefit analysis). Show learners how difficult it would be to resolve a compliance violation compared to the ease of improving processes.

Communication Plans

With any large organizational change, communication plans are critical. Employees don't want to be surprised by "the next unnecessary process change." Individual employees may also feel like they're being blamed for organizational challenges if the language around the compliance training initiative isn't framed positively. So, give your employees some warning before deploying the compliance training initiative and start to control the narrative from the beginning by discussing goals for organizational improvement. Perhaps film a video testimonial with an internal employee that highlights the past successes of the company as well as the potential for processes improvement and how that would contribute to greater individual and organizational success.

Compliance Training Technology

Common training technology can make the learning experience more palatable for your learners. For example, chunking content into micromodules and pushing specific subjects over a period of weeks or months can reduce cognitive load and training fatigue. Moreover, deploying content using a mobile learning platform makes content more easily accessible. But training technology isn't the only technology you need to consideryour IT infrastructure and business platforms are just as important. Your initial needs analysis may reveal technology challenges with platform functions that may have less to do with your people or processes.

Compliance training isn't difficult to build, but it can be challenging to get employees on board with the changes. Of course, there are numerous strategies for promoting organizational change. But, it's only when an organization can build a culture of compliance that significant, enduring behavior change happens.