5 Ways to Make Online Training on Policies and Procedures More Engaging

Most modern-day organizations have had to update their policies and procedures during the pandemic as lockdowns and restrictions disrupted business as usual. As a result, they’re looking for ways to expedite and smoothen the transition towards remote and hybrid work models while also ensuring compliance with regulatory bodies. Many companies have introduced online training programs to enable self-paced learning. This way, they can adopt new practices and pick up tips on acceptable behavior in the modern workspace.

However, the problem is that employees find training on policies and procedures to be too long, boring, and unnecessary. They find that this type of training involves behavioral modification but doesn’t actually improve their skills and capabilities.

L&D teams do their jobs by supplying training courses and resources on organizational policies. Meanwhile, employees go through them passively, treating them like unimportant, routine tasks. As a result, businesses are looking for ways to make their online training on policies and procedures more engaging.

If you’re looking to do the same, then we’ve got you covered. Keep reading to learn how to boost participation, excitement, and engagement with a few modern training reforms.

The Importance of Policies and Procedures in the Modern Workspace

Business policies and standard operating procedures have always been imperative to an organization’s workflow and performance. Policies address pertinent and contemporary workspace issues, such as acceptable employee behavior. Similarly, procedures define consistent methods of conducting business operations that minimize disruptions and policy violations.

With most industries and organizations incorporating updates to policies and procedures, creating engaging online training programs has become essential to maximize compliance. Here are a few reasons displaying the importance of policy and SOP training:

The Modern Training Manager’s Toolkit

1. Employee Onboarding

With remote hiring and onboarding becoming the new norm, policy and SOP training has become crucial when educating new employees and providing them with the rules, regulations, and operational guidelines of their employers. Specialized departments, such as customer service, finance, operations, human resources can use this type of training to smoothen new workers onboarding experiences.

2. Behavior Management

Policies and procedures training facilitates employees on the unwanted repercussions of policy violations. This ensures that they don’t ignore or misuse the rules, regulations, and SOPs of their workspaces, as this could affect their performance and their organization’s reputation. Simply put, by training on the consequences of policy and SOP violations, L&D teams can help organizations improve their employees’ management of their own behavior.

3. A Re-Education

Modern organizations are susceptible to changes and updates to policies and SOPs. Thus, the corporate training process doesn’t end with a push of new policies. Today, policies and procedures are becoming obsolete and irrelevant because of fast-paced and emerging compliance regulations, technologies, and practices. As a result, organizations must often reeducate their employees following these readjustments.

5 Powerful Tools and Strategies to Boost Engagement with Policies and Procedures Training Programs

Most organizations understand the importance of policy and SOP training. The problem is they’re unable to build interest and excitement for this kind of training. Fortunately, the eLearning industry has come a long way in the last decade, therefore, it’s time to gear up and employ modern tools and strategies to boost engagement. Here are a few critical strategies to help you boost your employees’ engagement with policies and procedures training:

1. Microlearning

Policy and SOP compliance training is pivotal for employees and their organizations. Unfortunately, in the fast-paced modern work environment we live in, employees are becoming increasingly busy. Their multiple tasks and responsibilities are keeping them to tight deadlines. They must also stay up to date with emerging operational changes and adapt to flexible work models.

This is where microlearning comes in handy. It supplies employees with short videos, infographics, simulations, interactive PDFs, eBooks, podcasts, and a variety of visual content in short, bite-sized modules. This training strategy decimates the need for memorizing copious amounts of information as it’s available on-demand on any device, from any location, and at any time.

Therefore, employees can review updates to policies and procedures and take part in online training activities and assessments at their convenience. This level of freedom, accessibility, and flexibility adds to their motivation and helps them apply their organization’s policies and SOPs appropriately.

2. Gamification

To further boost engagement, L&D teams can use authoring tools, such as TalentLMS, TalentCards, ConveYour, uQualio, and eLoomi, among others, to incorporate gaming elements into their online training on policies and SOPs. Gamification is a popular eLearning strategy to help trainers foster a competitive environment using components, such as leaderboards, badges, points, and timers.

These prompts learners to take part in gamified programs, as these elements show how much they’ve achieved. As a result, gamification increases employee motivation, engagement, and job satisfaction.

3. Scenario-Based Modules

Scenario-based authoring tools, such as Articulate Storyline, Twine, XMind, FreeMind, Coggle, Adrift, assist L&D teams to simulate real-life situations at work. This helps employees prepare for such real-world happenings. Realistic scenarios aid employees relate to real-time occurrences in their everyday tasks. As a result, they can apply what they’ve learned through practice using scenario-based modules.

Adherence to policies and SOPs help employees adapt to new ways of doing things and avoid violating workspace rules and regulations. Scenario based modules also supply a risk-free environment and help employees learn how to handle compliance without fear of failure.

4. Social Media

Social media has become an important part of our lives in the digital age. Modern employees love to stay connected with their peers, stay up to date, exchange ideas, and take part in digital water cooler conversations. As employees actively use their mobile devices at work, it only makes sense for L&D teams to target such devices where they spend a huge chunk of time.

For instance, you can create a social media group to share your organization’s new policies and SOPs. You can add a corporate eLearning blog on your website so that your employees can share their views, opinions, ideas, and feedback. This is a fantastic way to boost engagement and impart knowledge to employees in an effective manner.

5. VILT Sessions

Virtual instructor-led training (VILT) is a popular online training strategy for modern organizations looking to mimic the feel of a traditional in-person session. This approach helps you save money on travel, training material, and logistical arrangements and it caters added convenience for employees.

As a result, many companies are now hosting short VILT sessions on Zoom, Google Meet, Webex, Adobe Connect, and other platforms to supply policy and SOP compliance training while also enabling two-way communication to boost interaction, generate feedback, and clarify doubts.

Bottom Line

Thanks to recent advancements in the eLearning industry, online training programs for policies and procedures no longer needs to be boring, lackluster, or tedious. With our five strategies, you can improve the learning curve and boost excitement, participation, and engagement amongst employees.

You can also generate actionable feedback related to new policies and nuances of training styles to future-proof your training programs. With the right tools and work environment, your corporate training courses can be both immersive and productive. Unfortunately, many organizations are sticking to traditional training methods, and they’re unable to improve their outcomes.

As these modern solutions become popular with time, you can use them to reap the full benefit of effective training for policies and SOPs.

Now that you have explored critical instructional design strategies, it’s time for you to delve deeper and explore ways of implementing sticky learning. Download this free eBook to learn how!