HR Compliance Training: Effective Steps And Key Metrics - Part I

From theory to practice

Compliance with employment laws is everybody's job. From creating and maintaining a discrimination and harassment-free workplace to pay issues, to protected leave, to using artificial intelligence or AI in employment decisions, it is a lot. Just keeping up with new laws that affect employers can be overwhelming.

To ensure that employees are well-informed and capable of upholding these regulations, effective compliance training is important. 

In Part I, we will discuss strategies employers must adopt to overcome challenges in conducting compliance training and building an effective culture of accountability and respect.  

What Is Compliance Training?  

Compliance training is the process of educating employees about the laws, regulations, and company policies relevant to their jobs. It ensures they understand their responsibilities, helps prevent legal and ethical problems, and supports a positive company culture.  

Here are a few employee compliance training examples: 
 

• workplace safety 
• ethics training 
• anti-discrimination 
• data privacy 
• financial regulations 
• sexual harassment prevention, and  
• code of conduct

How to Make Compliance Training Effective

To be effective, compliance training has to matter to the people you are trying to reach. As a law professor and attorney who has been explaining the laws for decades, here are the things that make employee compliance training effective and worth everyone's time.

Step 1: Get the right people in the room

There is nothing worse than showing up for a meeting that is not relevant to you. Yes, safety training is really important, but what people need to know is different depending on their jobs. It is more nuanced but still important for harassment training, workplace training, unconscious bias training, and data security training. 

Customize the content for the people that need them. Create groups where people have similar roles and issues to address. It will help them feel more comfortable discussing their questions and concerns because the material is focused on what it is like to be them at work. Training, even employee compliance training, is not one-size-fits-all.

Step 2: Communicate the why

Explain in the scheduling note why this training matters. 

Any version of "To reduce risk," "As required by policy," or "Because we said so" will not work. Instead, explain a recent lawsuit or EEOC enforcement action and the many millions of dollars the employer paid. If that is not scary enough, explain where managers might have personal liability (some wage violations and harassment claims come to mind). 

Even if it is safety training required by your workers' compensation or other insurance, be upfront about the fact that it will save the company money and hopefully prevent someone from getting injured.

You can also try a positive spin like this… “Training matters to you because it will make you better at your job…” in the following ways. If you cannot think of any way, rethink why you are doing this training and just be honest.

Step 3: Make training "The Work"

If you are going to ask people to show up, delay getting other work done, and feel stressed about it all, make the training during work hours and expect the other work to stop for the training. That means advising managers that their people will not be available and instructing them to leave people be while the training is happening. 

If you do not, then training becomes a nice to have instead of an absolutely-must-do need to have and it will not happen. 

This is particularly true with online videos and other digital training sessions that employees can play double time in the background while they do other things. It is either important enough to make time for, or it is not. 

Step 4: Get people involved

Really good teachers know that if the class is not participating, they are not paying attention. Do you have internal subject matter experts that people know and like and who will feel comfortable interacting with people? If so, use them. If they will need time to put the presentation and materials together, make it The Work, and do not ask them to squeeze it into the cracks.

If you bring in outside people, make sure they are not just going to get up and lecture. It could have been an email.

Get people involved by using resources to work through examples or scenario planning, breaking into groups to think through issues, or having a contest (make sure there are prizes). The important thing is that people try the problems the training courses are designed to address, understand why addressing the problem is important, and how it could affect them.

Step 5: Make it funny

Sure, compliance is important, serious stuff. But learning about it does not have to be boring. I would much rather attend a funny traffic school training with lots of compassion, jokes, and good information than sit through a series of images of bloody, mangled cars. It is the same principle.

Step 6: Have free food

If all else fails, then food is your friend. Do the training course during lunch and make sure there is tons of food with extra dessert. People will show up for free food pretty much every time.

Key Considerations for Employee Compliance Training  

Training programs are critical for improving employee knowledge and skills, especially in compliance. Here are some important points to consider for compliance training for employees:  

• Explaining is not enough

It is not enough to tell people what the laws are and expect them to understand and be able to apply them in practice. Even the lawyers and courts have trouble applying laws in practice.

Part of the challenge is that making laws is messy. There is usually a problem or an interest that legislators want to address. But crafting the law itself involves making rules that are general enough to cover all the likely situations the law is designed for, not making rules that are so broad that they will cause problems in other areas, and making sure that the law works with all the other laws on the books.

Drafting policies has all the same issues. If you have rolled out a new policy, received approximately many questions, then had the policy backfire in a situation that neither HR, the lawyers, nor the questions raised, you understand the dilemma perfectly.

There is simply no way to address every possible situation. People take things out of context, hear what they want to hear, act in unlikely or illogical ways, and promptly forget anything they do not think applies to them.

• Make it matter

The other big problem with training on compliance issues is that even when it is mandatory, it is extra. It is not "The Work." All of those employees doing compliance training have a boss who wanted something yesterday. Getting and keeping their attention is difficult because there are so many other important demands on their time. This challenge is made worse by the ongoing compliance training efforts, which can feel like an added burden instead of a necessary part of their jobs.

• It is not over until you track the data

The point of compliance training is not simply to convey information and remind people of the importance of compliance. We also need actual compliance. It is not just a good idea; it is the law.

In your employee compliance training program, it is essential to track your data, monitor outcomes, and find issues so you can address them before they become problems, especially problems like lawsuits.

For a long time, the conventional wisdom (which is often only conventional) was to do your complete training, issue your policies, and wait until the problems came to you in the form of drama or complaints. The biggest problem with this approach is by that time, it is too late. 

Good guys and bad guys have been designated, at least in the minds of the people involved, and the organization has a potential conflict of interest between solving the problem and protecting itself. It usually goes with protecting itself, so the problems do not get solved and often get worse.

The other problem with the ostrich approach is that we have amazing tools and data. And when notice is an element of the legal issues, the standard is not just what the employer actually knows; it is what the employer reasonably should know. 

If you have and use any kind of metrics or people analytics, you actually have to check to see where there are issues and do something. Why? Because compliance.

The biggest areas of employment law compliance involve 1) discrimination and harassment; 2) wage and hours; and 3) protected leave. (Yes, there are others like data security and privacy, corruption and bribery, and safety, but they do not end up in litigation as much.)

In Part II, we will examine how organizations can measure and continuously improve compliance efforts. 

Heather Bussing is an Employment Attorney at Salary.com.