Whew! Compliance training is finished. Everyone knows precisely what they are supposed to do, and HR can breathe a sigh of relief until next year when you need to run the training again.
But we all know that training isn’t enough. You have to reinforce the training, and HR says that’s happening. In fact, according to a recent study by Go1, 85 percent of HR leaders say their training is reinforced.
Great.
Then why 53 percent of those same HR leaders saying that their “organization experienced incidents in the past 12 months that additional training, reinforcement, or earlier intervention may have helped prevent”?
Oh.
And also, 76 percent of “compliance, legal, and risk leaders say reinforcement happens always or often.”
But the contradictions increase. While everyone is saying, “Oh, yes, we do our compliance training, and then we follow up with it!” they also admit that there are problems.
Only 18% of HR leaders and 13 percent of compliance, legal, and risk leaders say their current compliance approach focuses on reinforcing learning after training.
If you’re not reinforcing training, you’re not really training.
If you train someone how to run a cash register at a fast food restaurant, the “training” takes one shift, maybe two. It’s not complicated. But that training is then reinforced every single time the new employee comes to work. Every shift, the employee runs a cash register until they are ringing up burgers and fries in their sleep and saying, “Would you like ketchup with that?” to random strangers.
That’s reinforced training.
But with compliance training, most of the tasks aren’t done every day. Some of the training is for tasks that may never actually happen.
So, it’s difficult for someone to have their training reinforced through daily work. It takes a concentrated effort for managers to train their employees.
Which is why you have to work the training into the day-to-day.
Managers need support
Training isn’t just an HR issue or an employee issue. It’s a manager issue. Is continued compliance training a KPI for your managers?
If it’s not, it’s doubtful that your managers will truly focus on training on things that don’t come up all that often. Yes, the daily tasks are fine and well learned, but the other things–the sometimes things–are not learned.
If a manager doesn’t benefit from focusing on training, they are unlikely to reinforce training. And that’s how you end up with errors and problems even after HR has checked the box saying everyone is trained.
Checkbox training is the problem
You can see videos of people “completing” training by fast-forwarding videos, or skipping to the end and answering a quiz that they can pass without thinking.
Passing a quiz is a checkbox, not a reinforcement of principles.
The true test is real-world compliance. Can your employees put the information to use in real life?
This requires a bit more work on the part of the trainer and the manager. Setting up a scenario in the workday, for instance, can refresh memories and truly test if someone understands. The idea isn’t a “gotcha” where you punish employees for making a mistake, but an opportunity to see if the employee truly knows what to do.
Compliance training is important, and it’s not enough to just get it done. It needs to be reinforced.
Simulations as a solution
This is where Go1’s Immersive Simulations are worth considering. It’s not a quiz that your employees take where they can get the right answer by knowing a bit about logic and reasoning. Go1 focuses on simulations where they have to apply real knowledge.
That matters because compliance problems rarely arrive as neat, obvious quiz questions. They show up as grey areas, awkward conversations, unclear reporting moments, or situations where employees need to decide whether to pause, ask, escalate, or act.
By giving employees a safer way to practice those decisions before the stakes are real, Go1 Immersive Simulations can help organizations see where people are confident, where they are guessing, and where more support is needed.