The Compliance Conundrum

Unpack the compliance training paradox: spending vs. impact

4 hard truths about compliance training

Companies rely on compliance training to meet critical goals, like meeting legal mandates, upholding ethical standards, and protecting against costly liabilities.

Despite these vital objectives, there’s a disconnect between training investment and the actual returns in course outcomes.

On this page, we’ll confront four key challenges most businesses face—but don’t always admit. Then, we’ll show you how to overcome them.

1. Employees hate it

Compliance training has a notoriously bad reputation with employees. In fact, Gallup data shows that only 23 percent of employees who took compliance or ethics training in the past year rated it as “excellent.”

2. Check-the-box training doesn't work

Corporations spend millions each year on compliance—yet only 10 percent of polled employees strongly agree that compliance training has changed how they do their work.

3. Third-party content can feel generic and cheap

The convenience of off-the-shelf training content often comes at the cost of customization options. Cheesy stock videos, generic examples, and clunky design undermine course quality and engagement.

4. Failure is costly and dangerous

Ineffective compliance training puts companies and employees at risk. If workers don’t understand or participate in critical regulations, the consequences can include legal violations, hefty fines, and serious harm to people and business.

THE GOOD NEWS:

Better compliance
training pays off

Despite these challenges, the average cost of compliance is still 270 percent cheaper than the costs of non-compliance. So, as daunting as the task may seem, building better compliance training pays off—in employee safety, company reputation, and your bottom line.

And while legal requirements and resource limitations can feel like insurmountable constraints, there are always opportunities for improvement.

It is possible to make compliance training that works—and it starts with understanding what’s broken. In the next chapters, we’ll uncover seven critical mistakes in online compliance training—and how to fix them.