When there’s a lot of pressure on your team to keep up with the demands of new regulations, it can feel overwhelming. But finding new ways to foster a culture of compliance can turn your challenges into an opportunity. As Chief Compliance Officers (CCOs) face increased regulatory pressure from governments and boards, they rely on your team to address their top concern. This means they’re ready to invest in the technology you need for employees to succeed and for you to do your job well, with 63% of CCOs expecting an increase in the technology budget.
A culture of compliance is about finding opportunities to promote policy engagement and protecting your employees and your business. A robust LMS can do more than deliver periodic training—it can turn their learning outcomes technicolor. And since corporate L&D has remained somewhere between a compliance management function and an employee engagement tool, why not combine them into one platform?
To get started, it’s important to learn:
- What a culture of compliance actually is
- Differences between weak and strong cultures of compliance
- Strategies to inspire proactive and engaged employees
Just getting started? Read the essential guide to delivering corporate compliance training
What exactly is a culture of compliance?
A culture of compliance is the continuous process across all levels of an organization to commit to the shared responsibility of compliance risks. It’s achieved by embedding the business’s rules, regulations, and policies into each employee’s daily routine— encouraging safety, integrity, and ethical choices.
Here are some examples of compliance culture in action:
- A global manufacturer promotes continuous improvement by integrating compliance training with their CRM.
- A head nurse sets up automatic notifications for their staff to finish a new mandatory course.
- A distributor introduces a partner training program after rejecting non-compliant deliveries several times.
Signs of a weak compliance culture
It’s no mistake that classic Saturday morning cartoons were set in the Wild West. An absence of order showed children how chaos, isolation, and ignorance can seriously affect your behavior, often with dangerous outcomes.
If your teams and employees don’t consider compliance at every touchpoint where it is needed, this can lead to subcultures of compliance management that may or may not be accurate.
Your culture of compliance may be weak if:
- Your team is reactive: Responses to noncompliance only occur after an incident, and you don’t track noncompliance to improve outcomes.
- Communication is departmental: Key stakeholders and teams don’t collaborate to improve and mitigate risk, resulting in siloed subcultures of compliance.
- There’s a lack of ongoing training: Mandatory courses are done at the beginning of employment with little or no further training.
- Audits are stressful: Minimal compliance documentation, weak internal processes, and no competency tracking among employees leave you vulnerable to failed audits.
- Internal audits are nonexistent: You’re unable to get ahead of external audits because of a lack of resources.
Need to go back to basics? Here’s how to conquer compliance training with your LMS
Signs of a strong culture of compliance
To reign in disorder, it’s time to introduce mechanisms that support accountability. The Cambridge Dictionary defines culture as “the attitudes, behavior, opinions, etc. of a particular group of people.”
Your culture of compliance may be strong if:
- Your team is proactive: Compliance is managed as a fundamental business need and with active participation from employees.
- You have an annual training plan: Training is planned in advance of new regulations or trends in noncompliance, including routine tests to measure employee competency on previously completed courses.
- There’s open communication across teams: Internal collaboration is facilitated by meetings, shared goals, and integrated reporting.
- Training is embedded into the flow of work: If safety instructions are labelled near the high-risk machine or integrated with your existing platform, employees are more likely to commit to your high standards for compliance.
- Leadership understands the value: Compliance reporting is built into quarterly and annual reporting to promote revenue-positive compliance goals and outcomes.
3 proven strategies for a strong culture of compliance
Creating a culture of compliance goes beyond meeting minimum standards—it’s about bringing compliance into day-to-day decisions.
To make this a reality, you need strategies that are practical, scalable, and tailored to your unique challenges. And these three proven approaches do just that.
1. The ‘just-in-time learning’ strategy
For reducing noncompliance incidents
Just-in-time learning delivers training right when employees need it by integrating your LMS in the same platform your employees use daily. This includes Human Capital Management platforms (HCMs), Human Resources Information systems (HRIS), Customer Relationship Management systems (CRMs), Electronic Health Record (EHRs) software, and more.
This method is perfect if your employees are constantly interrupted, like to learn as they go, or are in a legally regulated role. For example, if your accountant needs to understand a data privacy law with no time to spare, the training is right in their payroll software. Or if new employees are hesitant to open deliveries containing hazardous materials, key safety guidelines would be right on hand in your CRM platform.
You can deliver just-in-time learning with:
- Microlearning: Short, focused content that shares just the right information to inspire compliant choices.
- In-app training: Embed compliance courses from your LMS into your industry software, where risks are highest.
- Role-based training: Create learning pathways based on user roles to reduce information overload and enhance relevance.
Other delivery methods:
- QR codes on physical equipment
- On-demand webinars and learning modules
- Interactive chatbots
A practical example of just-in-time learning
If you want to demonstrate the value of your L&D team to C-Suite, this approach could save you a lot of time and money. Using microlearning and just-in-time delivery, Wave Utilities boosted retention, raised employee satisfaction from 3.4 to 4.6 out of 5, and increased their Net Promoter Score (NPS) by +8 points.
So how did they do it?
By pinpointing where noncompliance tends to occur, Wave Utilities provided compliance information right when and where employees needed it. Their 15-minute-or-less microlearning modules are based on the role and workflow of individual employees. Tailored to specific responsibilities, the modules gave employees clarity, replacing confusion with a commitment to compliant behavior.
Jess Myles raves about how just-in-time learning reshaped engagement at Wave Utilities. They’ve developed a strong feedback culture “and are receiving proactive qualitative data from our users through a form to help make improvements and add to our resources moving forward.”
Their success hasn’t gone unnoticed by the L&D industry. In 2023, Wave Utilities won Brandon Hall’s silver award for Best Hybrid Learning Program at the Learning and Development Awards!
2. The ‘blended learning’ strategy
For attracting compliance-focused customers
You might be thinking, “Compliance training as a revenue driver?” It’s possible, and the benefits are two-fold. When potential customers and partners find out you offer robust compliance training, it becomes another reason to work with you and choose your products. Blended learning also takes this a step further: it protects your organization from the inside out with training for internal and external stakeholders on the same platform.
You can use blended learning to deliver:
- ‘How to work with us’ overview courses: Create onboarding content that describes the compliance standards in your service agreement for their employees.
- Product education training: Create custom courses on how your external network can safely and legally use your products with confidence.
- General regulation information: Curate a library of custom and pre-made courses built by experts to grow awareness of complicated and ever-changing regulations.
- Learning pathways: Save your customers’ or partners’ time by providing only the most relevant learning pathways to each employee with personalized, role-based training.
A practical example of blended learning
Extending compliance training to your network builds trust with your customers, partners, and suppliers. It also acts as a line of defense against noncompliance and potential legal battles. But how can you guarantee your extended network will actually commit to engaging in a culture of compliance?
Blended learning is effective when you’re already equipped to meet industry standards and regulations. For example, when the digital engagement platform Symend wanted to blend employee and external stakeholder training, they needed a solution that matched their standards for engaging experiences. More specifically, Symend needed an LMS that aligned with their expertise in customer engagement and their goal to achieve SOC 2 compliance. Data privacy and security were also non-negotiable.
Symend delivered blended learning with:
- An external training portal for partners, customers, and suppliers.
- Custom training specific to their shared policies to decrease noncompliance incidents.
- Courses in multiple languages for global locations.
- A curated library of pre-built content on global compliance standards to accelerate their launch date.
3. The ‘frictionless interconnectivity’ strategy
For regional and global expansion
Is your organization looking to expand its compliance resources globally? A global culture of compliance relies on delivering accurate training across jurisdictions while minimizing the effort it takes your stakeholders to engage and comply with your standards. You’ll need to adapt to new regulations, cultural nuances, and languages to set the tone for a healthy knowledge exchange.
And what about the scope? Custom-built content can be expensive and extend the launch date of your global learning strategy. Frictionless interconnectivity is about removing the barriers to global communication, automating processes, and sharing consistent messaging about compliance across global channels.
There are many ways to deliver ‘frictionless interconnectivity’ in your global compliance strategy:
- Curate a library with expert-made, pre-built courses for regional laws and regulations (ex. GDPR, HIPAA)
- Offer courses in multiple languages
- Create personalized learning paths to ensure learners know the local compliance risks and opportunities
- Host live events in different time zones with subject matter experts
- Create global benchmarks for training and risk management
A practical example of frictionless interconnectivity
When leading accounting services provider Baker Tilly sought to serve 43,000 professionals in 145 territories, they needed solutions tailored to their diverse audience needs. To launch a learning hub efficiently, they curated a collection from a library of 20,000 courses offered in multiple languages to address local compliance standards. The result? 10,000 engaged global users representing nearly a quarter of their network.
Baker Tilly’s Global Learning and Development Leader, Abigail Bruce, attributes their growth to “frictionless interconnectivity.” Their team wanted to remove as many barriers to personalized compliance knowledge as possible. Baker Tilly ultimately achieved this with onboarding sessions and expert-led collaboration, which guided users to the right content in the hub.
Their community events facilitated frictionless interconnectivity with:
- Drop-in sessions offering an overview of the platform and its resources
- Development of a user guide and course list to help users handle the volume of learning materials
- A demonstration video emailed to those unable to attend live sessions (currently with over 700 views)
- Platform demonstrations during learning leaders’ calls and partner meetings
- Live virtual training seasons run using Absorb covering technical and non-technical topics
- Shared learning journeys focusing on specific topics such as managing people, leadership, presentation skills, and coaching
Providing relevant content is important, but so is managing the potential overwhelm of navigating a large learning hub. Baker Tilly’s L&D team supported their customer’s experience through a vibrant community of live events, with hosts who brought a human-centered experience to the learning hub. A customer-first LMS bridges the gap between unfamiliar compliance requirements and confident contributors to their industry.
Ready to mix it up? Watch the Build, buy, or both: The ultimate LMS content library webinar
Start small and build
These success stories started with a business need, grew into a plan, and accelerated their growth with the right tools. Adapting to flexible, agile technology solutions is paramount to compete in the fourth industrial revolution, and the market is ready. In a study from Indiana University’s Kelley School of Business three core findings revealed just how ready your customers are to prioritize proactive compliance:
- Consumers want to pay more for a compliance advantage.
- Integrating your product with compliance programs attracts customers.
- Customers care more about compliance than aesthetics.
Your L&D team is positioned to lead the charge. By valuing compliance training development as more than a box-ticking exercise, you position your L&D team to become a revenue-positive function that keeps your organization competitive.
Check out how others have built strong cultures of compliance:
