This blog article was written prior to LEO Learning becoming part of GP Strategies.
Personalized compliance training is key when it comes to building emotional engagement with your learners and driving behavioral change. In this blog post, we look at our “Head, Hand and Heart” engagement model and explore methods to motivate your learners and improve the application of learning.
Learner Engagement Model
When it comes to compliance training, engaged learners are key to driving effective behavioral change. However, that’s often easier said than done. It can be challenging to truly engage learners with compliance training due to the volume, repetitive subject matter and mandatory nature of this type of training.
So how do you ensure learner engagement is always considered in your learning design? We use our “Head, Hand and Heart” model to ensure behavioral design—or designing for engagement – is intrinsic in all our learning programs.
Our model pays homage to BJ Fogg’s three-pillar model, which posited that for behavioral change to happen, three factors must be present. If just one factor was missing, then behavioral change will not take place:
- Trigger – The ability to recognize the signs/scenarios when learning should be applied
- Ability – The ability to apply the learning
- Motivation – The desire to apply their learning/or concerns over the consequences of inaction
The model of learner engagement builds on the principles of the three pillars, but with a particular focus on learner engagement in the governance, risk, and compliance arena.
To bring this model to life, let’s take a closer look at the Heart section to understand how you can increase learner motivation through emotional engagement.
Why Is It Important to Personalize the Learner Experience?
One way to win over your learner’s heart is to demonstrate that you offer a customized learning experience by tailoring the content to individual learning needs.
This shows that you value their time and understand their individual circumstances. By answering “what’s in it for me?” you go a long way to increasing a learner’s motivation, and therefore tackle this crucial element of the ‘Head, Hand, Heart’ engagement model.
With compliance training topics, this often means getting your learner to believe that it’s important to be vigilant on the job. You want them to feel motivated and for this to manifest as behavioral change. So, for example, if they do see suspicious activity following anti-money laundering training, they have the desire to report it.
Customizing the learner journey lets you:
- Serve up content tailored to individual needs
- Save time for the individual
- Create individual learning goals and growth areas
- Drive efficiencies by reducing overall training time
How Do You Personalize Compliance Training?
Here are two ways to achieve custom compliance training.
1) Stranding
Stranding allows you to serve up the content that is relevant to your learner by tailoring the learning path to the individual.
For stranding to work, you need to assess what content is relevant to the learner. This is typically done in three ways:
- By job role
- By region
- By competency
Stranding by job role or region ensures that the correct, localized content is served up. Competency assessments will test to see what the learner already knows, and you can reduce their learning path according to the thresholds you set. If you decide that a thorough assessment is enough to prove competency, those with the highest competency may not even need to complete further training.
This approach can take more time to develop and test, but it pays off. Not only are you likely to increase engagement, but there are also significant efficiencies to be made by reducing the time learners spend on training. We worked with a global bank that had over 20 eLearning modules, and through stranding we reduced training time, saving between £2 million and £4 million on annual accreditation.
2) Scenarios and Storytelling
Scenarios and storytelling are important because they offer a sense of challenge, an immersive experience and portray the impact of making poor decisions in a safe environment.
Personalizing scenarios and story-telling is a powerful way to deliver messages that mean more to the user. If you have a global audience, it ensures the content is relatable – local laws, regulations and customs make the learning meaningful to the individual.
Stranding by job role, for example, allows scenarios to be used that will get the learner thinking about how to apply it the learning to their job role. Take anti-money laundering training – the signs of suspicious activity may vary greatly between a teller in a bank and a customer service agent in a contact center.
You can also get creative with how you theme and build storytelling using classic narrative techniques, by incrementality building a story, using teasers and adding suspense with high consequence examples. Cliffhangers aren’t just for Hollywood. They can also leave your learners wanting more. And that’s an effective way to build a continual story between modules.
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