The Best Tips for Creating a Successful Compliance Training Program

It is not uncommon for organizations to struggle with creating a strong compliance training program.  All too often, compliance training is looked at like a box that needs to be checked- something that just has to be done.  Not to mention, compliance training is often dreaded by employees everywhere.  Do you worry your compliance training has grown mundane?  Chances are, you wish you could effectively impact prevailing attitudes and behaviors, but you’re just not sure how.

Compliance training, if done correctly, creates a strategic advantage that minimizes operational and financial risk.  Leaders responsible for compliance within an organization need no justification for investing in better compliance training programs (Panopto.com).  Success is measured not only by things that happen, but what doesn’t happen – including fines, lawsuits, reputation damage, dangerous incidents, lost business, and more.  In some cases, noncompliance with safety procedures can be the difference between life and death.

Building an effective compliance training program doesn’t have to be a difficult task.  In order to achieve the main goals of reducing risk and expanding employee learning retention, you want your materials to be purposeful and impactful.  Know what best practices exist and what to look for before selecting a program to use with your staff.

There are certain elements that if put in place, can help ensure a compliance training program is successful.  The first one to examine is retention, which is best understood when looking at the Learning Pyramid.  Studies show that varying your study methods and materials will improve retention and recall of information, and enhance the learning experience. The “learning pyramid,” developed by the National Training Laboratory, suggests that most students only remember about 10% of what they read from textbooks, but retain nearly 90% of what they learn through teaching others. The Learning Pyramid model suggests that some methods of study are more effective than others and that varying study methods will lead to deeper learning and long-term retention (educationcorner.com).

One example of an effective method of learning and study is “Practice by Doing.”  This method of study encourages students to take what they learn and put it into practice, therefore promoting deeper understanding while moving information from short-term to long-term memory. Practice by doing makes material more personal, and ultimately more meaningful to students. This also leads to more in-depth understanding of material, greater retention, and better recall.

The next element to examine in creating a successful compliance training program is creativity.  With each training, you want to be creative with the subject – regardless if the training is in-person or online.  An example would be to include relevant case studies within the training, or regulatory actions that best suit the department or group of people you are teaching.

Using creativity helps foster interactivity.  It’s imperative to engage your audience and make them feel a part of the training. Exercises that incorporate real-world examples are crucial for employees to partake in.

Another consideration in a solid training plan is to create efficiency (ethinkeducation.com).  Here are a couple of things to keep in mind while making efforts efficient:

• Budget.  Always ask for more funds than needed.  During the year, the training plan will change, and you might be asked to add more initiatives due to regulatory changes, updated policies and procedures, new services offered, new systems, and management mandates.
• Exclusivity.  Review all the training entries to determine if there are any overlap of topics between departments.  It’s great to train more than one department at a time if there is a workflow that impacts multiple areas.  It’s also good for the fostering of relationships between departments.
• Time-saving.  The goal is also to save time since you are taking staff members away from their actual work.  If you’re able to produce training that covers multiple, related topics, your audience will appreciate it.
• Avoid overtraining.  Determine which topics as a percentage of the training plan are included.  It’s important to check if there are any concentrations that may lead to overtraining (ethinkeducation.com).

Creating a successful compliance training program is not a difficult task, but it must be done right and with due diligence for it to be effective.  When training is done correctly, fines and risks within the workplace are reduced, and employees have a chance to actually be engaged with the material rather than merely talked at.  HWNY has a variety of successful online training programs to fit the needs of your organization – contact us today for more information!

Enabling Compliant Residents – Day One

OneCity Health is New York City’s largest Performing Provider System (PPS) and is sponsored by the largest public health care system in the United States, NYC Health + Hospitals. HWNY began working with OneCity Health in 2017 to advance their mission and help meet their DSRIP workforce deliverables. Since then, HWNY has provided consulting on digital training solutions to train more people easily and quicker than before, planning and deployment of training impact and evaluation tracking, customization of an HWapps Learning Management platform, and development of various training features and reporting tools that seek to automate existing manual processes to save time.

Through this, HWNY continues to provide OneCity Health a customized solution for training deployment across multiple healthcare organizations. The strength in OneCity Health’s Learning Management System rests not just in the power of the highly project-specific technology, but also in the resources that allow for continuous streamlined implementation of the larger training delivery mechanism that helps OneCity Health deliver metric-based, professional development, and value-adding training resources to its partner network quicker and easier.

In total, the OneCity Health Learning Management System supports training delivery and provides career-enhancement and professional development opportunities to 120,000 healthcare employees across the PPS network.

73,000 users with access to career-enhancing trainings

25,000 registrations into trainings

Over 225+ trainings available across numerous catalogs and initiatives

Features of this Project:

• Highly customized HWapps Learning Management System
  • A substantial amount of time was reserved for implementation at the start of this project; considerable collaboration, planning, design, and development was conducted in partnership with OneCity Health to design a Learning Management System with the capability to serve their entire network’s DSRIP needs
  • An emphasis on user-experience lead to an advanced user dashboard tool, comprehensive automated and manual communication tools, and innovative ways to showcase training initiatives and engage with employees
  • Powerful new databases designed to support large-scale aggregation and tracking
  • Day-to-day attendance tracking tools for in-person trainings designed to minimize the burden of manually processing data for OneCity Health
  • Implementation of an advanced class capacity tool that automated the process of coordinating enrollment in trainings with space-limitations
  • A tool to automate post-training evaluations
  • A built-out Support section with both user and administrative guides, support FAQs, and resources
  • Advanced administrative dashboards custom-designed around providing OneCity Health training managers a time-saving hub to operate from
• Onboarding Health + Hospitals Employees Process
  • As NYC Health + Hospitals saw the effectiveness of the OneCity Health Learning Management System in quickly enrolling large numbers of employees into trainings, it became interested in HWNY’s ability to address a growing need: for incoming onboarding employee rounds, how can OneCity Health and NYC Health + Hospitals effectively manage the enrollment of thousands of people across multiple locations before training deadlines pass? Through collaboration, a process and a technology solution quickly poised itself to address this need. HWNY would collaborate with OneCity Health to utilize a customized bulk-enrollment tool to enroll onboarding employees automatically and confirm their enrollment automatically over email. When the training was complete, the onboarding employees would be marked as “complete.”

• Integrated, seamless access to trainings for all NYC Health + Hospital employees
  • To provide the best user-experience for NYC Health + Hospitals’ over 64,000 employees, HWNY successfully implemented fully integrated single-sign on (SSO) for employees to access trainings on the OneCity Health Learning Management System directly from the native Health + Hospitals environment. HWNY integrated with PeopleSoft, H+H’s internal software, to share data and make this possible.
• HWNY Consulting
  • HWNY consulted with OneCity Health in order to strategically transition the network to a digital environment. Specifically, HWNY advised and participated in communication, outreach, preparation of promotional material, and deployment of the entire project across such a large network in a way that minimized the “culture shock” of digitizing training processes and maximized interest and understanding in the value of the project among stakeholders.
• Continuous Agile Development
  • HWNY Product Managers continuously worked with OneCity Health to determine needs, priorities, and enhancements to support improving user-experience, responding to new training initiatives, and adapt to unfolding data management and tracking needs. The HWNY development team utilized agile development methodology to ensure the OneCity Health Learning Management System was rapidly evolving and responding to the changing environment.
• Account Services
  • HWNY’s account service team, an extension of the OneCity Health team, makes day-to-day training operations possible. As experts in the HWapps technology, the account service team is continuously involved in the administration of new trainings, preparing of data reports, and ensuring that OneCity Health is meeting its short-term deliverables and deadlines.
• Customer Support
  • OneCity Health contracts HWNY to provide direct customer support to users across its entire network. Through official HWNY Support channels, employees can contact HWNY’s Support Team directly to get real-time assistance. HWNY utilizes a custom-designed ticketing system to address requests thoroughly and rapidly.