When you work in finance, corporate values and compliance training go hand-in-hand. With so many state and federally mandated policies and regulations, the financial industry relies on custom e-learning activities and skills maintenance to shape the behaviors of their employees. But shaping values like honesty, integrity, and quality, which are often vital to the success of financial organizations, requires a more nuanced approach.

Employee Buy-In

Values are the nonconscious implicit motivators that drive feelings, thoughts, and behaviors. The process of shaping values continues throughout life, but it can be a challenge to intentionally shape those values on an organizational level. There are individual forces and social pressures acting on learners that may help or hamper their growth. Brand training can go a long way toward engaging employees and building excitement around a topic, but instilling values within individual employees may require a few additional steps—the first of which is gaining organizational buy-in.

Group psychology describes an event called attitude polarization, which is the tendency of an individual's attitudes to intensify after a group discussion. So, consider channeling social influences to strengthen key values. For example, create social cohorts based around an internal brand influencer. You can also feature current employees in motivational videos to give learners the impression that their peers agree with the training initiative.

Personalization and Relevance

One of the greatest challenges to creating engaging compliance training is personal relevance. If the training content doesn't resonate with its audience, then it will be far less effective at shaping values and behaviors. Unfortunately, compliance training initiatives tend to be one-size-fits-all content and design formats, so employees are often forced to read through content that doesn't pertain to their individual roles.

Instead, you should make use of custom e-learning activities with role-based personalization. Research from the University of Dresden found that the impression of personal relevance in training content improves knowledge. Of course, each employee should still receive the same state and federally mandated content. However, you can create learning paths with in-depth custom learning activities that emphasize certain subjects, policies, and procedures based on their relevance to an employee's role.

Maintenance

Even after designing compliance training with strategies for increased knowledge transfer, the learning experience isn't quite done. While course completion or capstones may reflect knowledge acquisition, it may not reflect mastery of those skills. Applied behavioral analysis describes mastery as a number of independent correct responses measured over the course of days or weeks. But without skills mastery, the rate of knowledge and skills retention decreases.

An effective training strategy should also consider tactics to continuously measure performance. For example, learners could complete several variations of the capstone learning activity as training follow-ups. Or consider presenting knowledge-checks with assessments for months to follow the initial training event.

Conclusion

For industries steeped in policies and regulations, performance will depend on building critical skills. But to ensure those skills are still being maintained, training must also shape relevant values and motivations. That's always been a challenge, but you can make your compliance training initiative a success by using insights from behavioral sciences and impactful training tactics.