How To Gamify Compliance Coaching And Make It Superior
Awesome and Applicable: How to Take Compliance Training on Gamify
Let’s talk more about the concept of gamification and how it can be applied to your compliance training program. It is especially important for new hires to understand the procedures and protocols your organization needs to comply with regulations.
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Compliance training topics
Every company and every industry has different compliance training requirements. Healthcare has HIPAA, utilities have NERC CIP, GDPR, PCI, CCPA, etc and the list goes on! Depending on your industry, you may even have to meet certain industry-specific requirements.
Your employees don’t have the same goals as your company. Learn how to use goal alignment to get better results in your compliance training.
Setting goals for compliance setting
Passing an audit is not easy. There is so much to do and a lot at stake as potential compliance violations persist. But just because compliance is a serious issue doesn’t mean we can’t have fun getting there. It is important to understand that it is not easy to get your employees to pay attention to compliance exercises.
Let’s look at the two different types of goals and how we can align them: institutional goals and individual goals.
A institutional goal is geared towards the needs of the company. For example, passing a SOC 2 audit could be an institutional goal to achieve compliance. This is important to the company for a number of reasons.
While institutional goals make a lot of sense to the company, they almost never directly agree with you individual goal for each of your team members. Employees most likely don’t care if you pass a SOC 2 audit. They will not lose their jobs, they will continue to receive paychecks, etc. So you need to find ways to motivate them to help the organization comply with the regulations. This type of goal serves to align each individual employee with a common institutional goal and to work together.
Creation of a compliance culture
Now that you understand the principles behind goal alignment, how do we work to build a compliance culture? We’ve all heard a lot about a company establishing a compliance culture, but what does that actually mean? It helps to understand the compliance process to gain insight into why building a compliance culture is so important.
FAILED ALARM: The establishment of a “culture of silence” is usually brought about by a poor compliance culture based on fear. Instead of punishing mistakes, use them as a learning tool to improve your compliance program.
You will find many errors during your first compliance experience. A great compliance program is designed to do the following things. Recognize, evaluate, correct. Spotting bugs is the first part of a great program. In this phase, you train your staff on how to find problems, figure out what could be causing them, and then create a way to fix them so they don’t recur.
This process can be fun when employees work together to fix processes and the work is fun. Your training program should cover how your organization goes about finding compliance issues and creating a compliance culture that all work toward a common goal.
This is how compliance with gamification is fun
We learned earlier that setting individual goals is the way to establish an institutional goal. So how can we get individuals to perform? The concept of gamification is a way of motivating individuals or teams to work towards a goal. It is a common misconception that gamification means playing games. It couldn’t be further from the truth.
Gamification principles can be designed to bring your compliance initiatives to a close while also giving your employees a clear deadline for completion. So while we’re going through an audit, we may want to incentivize our employees. This process of mini milestones and checkpoints is the beginning of the gamification processes. The achievements achieved can be at company, department or individual level. Whatever your goals, you can create friendly competition among employees.
Gamification isn’t the only way to make compliance a pleasure. Think about the experiences your employees have. Getting the compliance training you need is usually not the funnest activity in the world. But if you can bring it to life through storytelling, gamification, and other ideas, it can be a fun adventure.
The central theses
- If your organization conducts training just to tick the compliance check box, you need to click a break because compliance does not mean good safety
- Work with your leadership team and department stakeholders to define both institutional and individual goals to go beyond compliance requirements and build a safety culture
- Use gamification to think about how you can attract employees to their training courses and motivate them to participate
Conclusion
Most compliance training courses are just filled with boring rules, regulations, and a quiz. Think about how you can put this training into practice and how you can make learning and applying compliance the ultimate goal. When employees are rewarded for good behavior, you can gain more approval from other employees who want to do the right thing.
We wrote the How To Make Great Training Awesome: Your New Employee Onboarding Checklist eBook. Each chapter ends with important insights, and you can also repeat our webinar where we discuss how you can incorporate storytelling into your staff training.
