Corporate Compliance

Corporate compliance is the practice of developing a system with informative policies and procedures within a company to mitigate risks. Great corporate compliance programs recognize legal risks and avoid them with stable defenses.

Compliance Training

Industry compliance training consists of educating employees on laws, regulations, and policies pertaining to the company. Effective compliance training creates a fluid work environment and helps recognize and avoid any efforts that may serve as a liability to the company.

Each onboarded employee should be aware of the company’s stance on certain issues and how to handle them. Whether it’s ethical or legal matters, having a corporate compliance training system with officers in place will serve as guidance to all employees when it comes to solving disputes or dilemmas.

Compliance Training Best Practices

Compliance training best practices start and end with Federal Sentencing Guidelines Organization’s (FSGO) seven steps, written to encompass and better frame an organization’s compliance program. They are as follows:

Training Material

Compliance learning content covering standards and procedures that are reasonably capable of reducing the risk of criminal conduct from employees. Compliance officers should always pursue ongoing training and complete certification programs. Lessonly provides a platform for easy content creation to educate officers on general compliance standards as well as company-specific standards. Lessonly is also a great platform for preparing officers for certification programs.

Compliance Officer(s)

The assignment of someone or someones to monitor and ensure the following of all standards and procedures (located in HR). A compliance officer or team should complete corporate compliance officer training and go through a compliance certification program and compliance officer duties should include pursuing best practices in company compliance training by reading up-to-date articles, studying other organizations’ practices, and attending compliance seminars. Finding compliance officer training can be time-consuming and costly. We suggest building internal training and then putting financial efforts towards certification programs.

Assigning Authority

Before giving employees copious amounts of responsibilities and access to certain company information, take into account any illegal history or ethical wrongdoings. A properly trained compliance officer will know when to avoid delegating authority to someone who has the potential to cause legal damage to the company. The first step to doing so is constructing background checks.

Communication

It’s necessary for compliance teams to construct thorough content to train employees on a business’s regulations and standards. Lessonly can serve as a regulatory compliance software comprised of compliance courses accessible to employees and administrators from anywhere, at any time.

Compliance courses can range from “Proper Use of the Company Kitchen” to ethics training. When onboarding new employees, it’s important to monitor initial learning of compliance material and to reference it in times of debate. Lessonly lets administrators track the learning progress of employees, so you know what they learned, when they learned it, and how well they learned it.

Having a System for Reporting

Employees should know exactly what to do when they encounter a legal or ethical dispute. Compliance officers help by making clear what problems should be reported and how they should be reported.

Enforcement

Recognizing violations or ignorance of compliance protocol and knowing how to discipline accordingly. If a compliance officer knows of a situation that has yet to be reported, it is that compliance officer’s duty to approach, clarify, and inform both parties of the policies and procedures.

Development

Always improving the compliance learning program, taking into account industry laws and cultural shifts. Especially within growing businesses, compliance development will always need additions. Lessonly makes this easy with feedback features as options within each lesson.

Compliance Certification

Compliance certification is more than just taking a test. In fact, in order to become certifiable by the Compliance Certification Board, immersive experience as a compliance ally or active compliance professional is required. Additionally, before scheduling and taking the exam, you must earn twenty continuing education units (CEUs) that are completed a year prior to taking the test. These units can consist of conferences, seminars, and in-person training events. More information can be found on the CCB website.

Though seemingly tedious, compliance certification creates a standard for businesses, and compliance officers with certifications are more highly credible, therefore making their internal structure more credible.

Employee Compliance Courses

Compliance training courses can cover a myriad of topics. Distinguishing between what practices are general to your industry and what are business-specific will help you with content-creation.

For general industry material, like covering the Fair Labor Standards Act or Safety Training Materials you don’t have to build your own content, because there are plenty of online resources to pull from. However, we suggest simplifying the legal jargon and then linking to official documents. For business-specific procedures like codes of conduct or social media use, build out detailed lessons with examples.

Implementing and Maintaining Compliance Programs

If your company is still fresh off the block and has yet to firmly implement a compliance training program or corporate compliance tools, there is some awareness to gain before diving in. Firstly, know that all employees are onboard to adhere to ethics and compliance training and information within. Secondly, emphasize the importance of feedback. Whether it’s in initial training or ongoing training, open-ended feedback, surveys, and polls are great ways to accumulate qualitative and quantitative data to report and improve upon.

Maintaining a corporate compliance program requires constant updating, testing, and reporting. Compliance needs to be considered with every industry change and cultural shift. When content is updated, you should inform people accordingly.

Lessonly allows you to share lessons with the entirety of a company or certain individuals with the click of a button. There’s no longer need for email attachments or untrackable progress. You don’t have to export compliance manual, but you can with the PDF download feature. Compliance staff will know who has seen what, when they looked at it, and how well they tested with it.

Lessonly provides a platform for training compliance officers as well as training employees on compliance learning. The platform is intuitive to navigate and makes content easy to build and learn.

With Lessonly, administrators can update lessons anytime. All content is automatically saved. Learners can learn, take quizzes, and give feedback at their convenience on smartphone or tablet before an assigned deadline.

If you’d like to learn more about Lessonly, just check out a few of our videos or free resources on our Resources page.