Culture of Compliance, Learning Management Platforms, and You

As a human services leader, you go to work every day to help make your community a better place. And though it may seem tedious, compliance is a key component to this mission. Where many organizations go wrong is treating compliance as an item to check off on a to-do list. In actuality, compliance should be treated as an integral part of your organization’s culture. To effectively create a culture of compliance, taking full advantage of your learning management platform is key. This helps you craft a better compliance program, reduce risk, and ultimately, provide better care to persons served.

What a good compliance program looks like

Everyone working in human services knows the importance of a quality compliance program. But everyone may not be aware of what a good compliance program should actually look like. It’s critical, however, to make sure your organization approaches compliance appropriately, as poor compliance may cost the health of your clients, the reputation of your organization, or the funding necessary to provide your services.

In short, a strong compliance program will do the following:

• Reduce risk
• Allow for a quick response to issues
• Prevent misconduct
• Enhance relationships with regulators
• Improve client outcomes

To help your organization build this type of program and a culture of compliance around it, you should consider a learning management platform.

How a learning management platform helps reduce risk

Mitigating risk is at the heart of compliance. This could mean physical risk to clients, financial risk to the organization, or legal risk to a staff member.

Setting up a proper culture of compliance ensures your staff has the training necessary to avoid these situations. And through the adoption of a learning management platform, you can ensure these trainings are easy to access, assign, and track.

Make compliance training easier

Making sure that staff members are maintaining their compliance training is crucial for every organization. Serious consequences can result if compliance training is mismanaged, such as incurring costly fines or placing clients at risk.

Look for a learning management platform that can track staff’s progress through onboarding and annual recurring compliance training. With this capability, you can gain insight into which staff members are at risk of not completing their training on time and those who are overdue. You can then take the necessary steps to ensure they complete their training and remain compliant.

Maintain organizational compliance

When it comes to reporting, focus on the features that allow you to easily analyze and export your compliance data. Your learning management platform should allow you to report on the compliance rates of individuals, departments, and the organization as a whole.

It should also allow you to track and report on the completion of specific training plans. This will make the job of finding gaps in your compliance management easier to identify, helping to mitigate risks associated with the reporting process.

Custom reports are another important feature to look out for. Having the ability to customize your own compliance reports will make audit preparation easier and save countless hours. Additionally, it allows you to easily report on the most relevant data, such as the demonstration of job-specific skills.

Centralized reporting within a learning management platform also makes it easier to loop in managers and other stakeholders, allowing the entire organization to be on the same page come audit time — a crucial component in any effective culture of compliance.

A culture of compliance helps build relationships with auditors

While learning management platforms are great for streamlining internal processes, they can also help build relationships with external auditors. These relationships are crucial to the success of your culture of compliance and the greater organization, as auditors can help guide you through the compliance process.

By taking full advantage of the streamlined reporting and automated assignment features discussed above, you can go into your audit fully prepared. This makes the life of your auditor that much easier.

By having all your compliance data in one easy to reach location, rather than spread-out across spreadsheets, Word documents, or even paper files, they can easily judge the compliance level of your organization.

Learning management platforms can help increase collaboration between you and your auditor as well. By storing all relevant data in one centralized location, it’s easier for your auditor to access the necessary records. What’s more, using a learning management platform allows you to easily tie other members of your organization into the conversation as necessary. This enables a quick response to any issues that may arise during your audit.

Collaboration is the bedrock of great working relationships. By making your organization easy to work with, you can help boost your relationship with your auditor. By crafting this relationship, you’ll have an ally as you continue to build your culture of compliance.

Building a culture of compliance with a learning management platform

Thus far, we’ve discussed the benefits of a culture of compliance, but how do you go about building one? Like any other effective cultural shift, this will take buy-in from the entire organization.

Learning management platforms, however, can make this shift easier. By taking advantage of streamlined compliance tracking and reporting, you can easily achieve the first step in creating a culture of compliance: making sure everyone receives the same training and is on the same page when it comes to compliance.

Toward that same end, make sure you’re leveraging the policies and procedures functionality of your learning management platform. By creating a centralized policies and procedures document that everyone in the organization can access at any time, you create a baseline for your culture of compliance. This allows compliance and training managers to create standard practices across your organization, no matter its size.

To create a true culture of compliance, however, you need to take your compliance measures one step further. While it’s vital to collect data such as compliance training completions, it’s just as important to know how this information was received. Using the right learning management platform for your organization allows you to analyze how well staff absorbs the compliance training your organization offers.

By measuring both your compliance training completion rates and the effectiveness of this training, you can significantly improve your staff’s knowledge of compliance. This will lead to reduced risk for the organization and better outcomes for clients.