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Introduction
Why Did They Choose an e-Learning Solution?
Today, many companies are faced with the challenge of complying in a designated time frame with various standards, policies, regulations, and laws related to their business. Often, companies must demonstrate that their employees have completed training programs on the standards or regulations as a condition of their compliance. Compliance with standards may be driven by internal or external factors. For example, in externally-driven scenarios, companies must conduct training to meet a requirement specified by a government or other regulatory body to be in compliance with a law or regulation. In internally- driven scenarios, companies may establish internal policies requiring training to meet a specific business objective.Characteristics of successful compliance training include:
Ensuring easy access for registration and participation
Measuring the learner’s skill development on the topic
Tracking participation and other required data about the learners
Reporting the results as required
This chapter presents four case examples of companies in diverse industries that developed e-learning to meet a compliance training need. They include: The Home Depot, the world’s largest home improvement retailer; BMW of North America, LLC, distributor of BMW automobiles, motorcycles, and sports activity vehicles (SAVs); The Hartford, one of the largest insurance companies in the United States; and Wachovia, provider of complete banking services, brokerage services, asset management, wealth management, and innovative products for individual customers.The four companies discussed in this chapter each successfully used e-learning in a different way to meet the challenge of training their employees on compliance issues, regardless of time frame, complexity, and content.
Ensuring Standards in Compliance Training
The regulations distributed by legal entities drives compliance training in a variety of industries as diverse as financial services and home improvement retailing. A critical issue is for all employees to receive standard training that achieves the goals of the compliance regulation. Equally important is that this can be verified by attendance and completion records kept by the company. In the case of The Home Depot, several safety and hazard regulations set by the United States Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) impact daily safety and operations. One aspect of these regulations relates to training over 90,000 Home Depot associates every two years in forklift truck safety. The Home Depot uses a blended learning approach because it is the most cost-effective way to train its large audience with a standardized curriculum. A side benefit in using e-learning to achieve this goal was that The Home Depot saved over 60,000 instructor hours compared to the former classroom training approach.
In the case of The Hartford, a new United States federal law, the USA PATRIOT Act of 2001, mandated that they rapidly train all employees who handle or monitor financial transactions to detect money laundering. An e-learning approach enabled The Hartford to deploy a learning experience to 6,000 employees quickly and effectively, meeting the compliance for financial institutions within United States federal law. In both cases, all employees were reached with a standard curriculum, and registration and completion were tracked. Notifications were sent to employees and their managers via the learning management system when completion was delayed, or if there were employees who should attend and complete the course who had not as yet registered. This ensured complete compliance with the mandated regulation.
Employing e-Learning for Compliance with Internal Business Mandates
At times an internal issue is important enough to require a similar approach to compliance. BMW of North America uses e-learning for a compliance training program driven by internal business policies, standards, and codes of conduct. All 1,300 employees are required to complete this ethics and professional conduct training on a yearly basis as a part of their individual professional development plan. However, the learners are geographically dispersed. The use of e-learning enabled all employees, regardless of location, to complete the course within the required time frame, ensuring that 83 percent have completed the training in the first 11 months of it being offered. Wachovia Corporation’s experience combined an external regulatory requirement with an internal software roll-out. The company needed to rollout training in a new proprietary software to hundreds of users across the company. The software ensured that Wachovia could comply with government regulations that every account be reviewed once in each calendar year. Therefore, Wachovia had to train all trust administrators, portfolio managers, and their staff in a short period of time so that accounts could be reviewed prior to year end. With evaluation and assessment results indicating that the e-learning is equal in impact to that of the former traditional approach, a total of 1,300 employees have been trained in on-going monthly cadres.These organizations have found that delivering e-learning to a large number of employees to ensure compliance with externally or internally driven mandates is the most efficient and effective way to engage, train, and track completions for the targeted learning audience.
