Keeping up with compliance: how your LMS can help

This article explores how to use your learning management system to support your learning and development teams to ensure compliance.

Making compliance easier with your LMS

Overseeing compliance training can be burdensome for L&D teams. Wrangling uninterested or unwilling learners to complete courses – often related to things they think they already know or that have no desire to learn – can be energy-sapping.

The good news is that your learning management system (LMS) can alleviate the workload and streamline processes around your compliance programme. This brings significant financial, reputational and regulatory benefits.

Let’s explore some of the key areas in which an LMS makes compliance easier.

Time and resource-saving automation

We’ll start with automation, since it underpins so much of what follows. An LMS gives you the technology to streamline a broad range of processes around delivering compliance training. Some of these processes – many of which we’ll discuss in more detail later – include:

Centralised, consistent compliance training

An LMS makes it easier to maintain a single, consistent version of compliance training materials. This ensures all learners get the same training.

With simplified version control, it’s easier to ensure and prove that all learners have completed an up-to-date version of any course and are compliant with the latest regulatory updates.

A centralised LMS makes it easier to manage and implement policies. It ensures organisation-wide compliance standards, while removing inconsistency and duplication.

Customisable learning pathways

Multi-jurisdiction compliance training

With a multi-tenancy LMS, you can deliver relevant, specific compliance training across multiple countries, languages and jurisdictions via a single LMS installation. This helps to boost compliance rates while keeping costs down.

It means learners in each jurisdiction get compliance training tailored to the regulatory environment in which they work. Multi-tenancy also enables centralised governance, combined with delegation of key tasks to each tenant as needed.

Instant reporting insights

The powerful reporting systems within modern learning platforms enable you to quickly identify individuals, teams and departments that need to complete compliance training. This enables you to make interventions – either directly to individual learners or with managers – to boost compliance levels.

Using these insights, you can also quickly assign learning to all of those who have compliance training to complete using the dynamic audiences.
The Office for Nuclear Regulation found that launching its LMS made it easier to compile reports and prove compliance levels, which is crucial within the nuclear industry. The platform simultaneously boosted learner engagement to 100%.

Real-time messaging, notifications and reminders

Audit readiness

Using the reporting systems, analytics and business intelligence integrations we’ve already discussed, your LMS makes it easier to prove the effectiveness of your compliance programme.

You can quickly provide a snapshot of organisation-wide or team-specific compliance rates to prepare for auditing. This includes demonstrating not only compliance training completions, but also that mandatory pass marks have been achieved and that employees have read and accepted policies.

Gamification and rewards

Sometimes the carrot works better than the stick – even for compliance training. Instead of always badgering people to complete required training, your LMS gives you the tools to introduce some friendly competition.
LMS gamification features, such as individual and team leaderboards, motivate learners to engage. Your learning platform will give you the data and functionality to manage this effectively and achieve better completion rates for mandatory training.

Instantly issue certificates

Certifications can be a laborious aspect of compliance training. First, you’re battling to get people to complete learning… then you suddenly need to issue certificates to them all.

Again, an LMS streamlines this process completely. Using dynamic rules, you can automatically issue a certificate when someone completes a particular course or achieves a required standard.

Crucially, you can also set the thresholds for a pass or certification to be achieved, which helps to govern compliance standards.

Interactive compliance training content

An LMS empowers you to make compliance training more fun, interactive and engaging. The idea of mandatory training is off-putting enough for most people, let alone when it’s presented in dull slides or text-heavy PDFs.

With an LMS, you can use multimedia H5P e-learning content, scenario-based learning and adaptive tests to make compliance training more meaningful.
The Building Engineering Services Association (BESA) enhanced its compliance programme by introducing interactive CPD video courses. Courses are also broken down into small modules, so BESA can pinpoint and respond quickly to changing regulations with rebuilding entire courses.

Reduced risk exposure

The various ways in which an LMS helps with compliance training amount to a reduced risk exposure for your organisation. Automated assignment, tracking and reminders all help to limit compliance lapses.

In turn, this limits the chance of your organisation suffering financial, regulatory or reputational damage.

Ready to find the right LMS for your compliance training needs?

Using an LMS for compliance training ultimately has enormous financial benefits for an organisation, especially once the savings of automated administration, efficient processes and reduced regulatory risk have been factored into the equation.

To discuss how an LMS would support and streamline your compliance training, book a meeting with one of our learning technology experts.

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