5 Tips for Making the Best Videos for Compliance Training

Read Time: 5 minutes

Nowadays, compliance training has never been more important, yet it’s more difficult than ever to make it memorable. As a corporate trainer, you’re fighting all kinds of distractions. From the phones of new employees to the “real work” current employees deem more time-sensitive than your long video course.

Even so, employees often find themselves in sticky compliance situations. They can be unsure of what to do, who to turn to, and experience a fear of retaliation if they come forward. Maybe they saw something between colleagues, but aren’t sure if it’s harassment. Or a friend asks about work, but an employee isn’t sure how their answer impacts company security.

Scenarios like these are happening below (or even above) the radar all the time, and that’s why your training role is a SUPER big deal. To stop these from happening, you understand that video compliance training might be your winning ticket to making your message stick.

But how can you optimize your compliance training videos so employees will listen, remember, and act responsibly?

Together, we’ll go through our top 5 tips to making the best compliance videos! That way your trainees will sit up, pay attention, and feel that your training is relevant to them. Follow these simple tips, and your employees can be prepared no matter what lies ahead.

1. Microlearning the Right Way

Most likely, your training videos are too long. I know! You have SO MUCH to cover, and every nugget of information feels critical. But in reality, if you can keep it short and conduct microlearning, you’re golden.

With your audience having the attention span of a goldfish, you’ll need to find a way to say everything you need, but in simple, short spurts. You might be familiar with the term microlearning, but keep in mind, microlearning isn’t just about making shorter videos.

Microlearning is about creating short learning sessions that are IMMEDIATELY followed by ways employees can use critical thinking to process what they just learned. Maybe that’s a short quiz, a role-play (if part of a group training), or a scenario to think of a solution for.

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One more thing. Your training is super awesome, but hopefully, this isn’t the first and last time employees learn about these compliance policies. Cut down your content as much as possible and let employees know the resources at their disposal to learn more or ask follow up questions.

2. Lights, Camera, Characters!

When creating compliance training videos, you’ll be tempted to add stock images of people in an organizational setting. This is a big no-no for two reasons:

1) The truth is stock images can be pretty snooze-worthy. So when using stock images in your teaching materials, it makes your content seem boring too!

2) Research shows that while we trust and relate to those who look like us, we can subconsciously be critical of the appearance of others. With a diverse set of employees, you’re likely to have learners who will not identify with your stock-actors. The result? They’ll feel detached from them, and what you’re saying about them.

Instead, try animated characters! They’re adorably fun, engaging, and best of all allow viewers to better identify themselves with those characters since they’re not real.

Also, be it sexual harassment prevention, diversity and inclusion training, or workplace health and safety, it’s important to be sensitive to the gender, age, appearance, and ethnicity of the characters you use. Powtoon’s diverse character catalog is perfect to see how you can use inclusive characters to make your video relatable.

3. Set the Scene

Now that you’ve got all your characters, let’s set the scene. If you’re conducting an OSHA training, it can be fun to create themes and motifs for safety, like construction sites or mad hazardous labs. It relates to your content and gives context to your videos’ instructions. Got a HIPAA training to build? Create hospital scenes that will feel realistic to your learners.

If you’re looking to create compliance training at an enterprise, play around with different scenes for different departments or segments of your employees. This can also get them to sit up because it looks more relevant to them than something that’s set as a one-size-fits-all scene.

4. Branding Fosters Belonging

Employees tend to identify with your company’s brand and feel a sense of belonging and accountability toward it. So grab your brand book, logo, and use them in your videos! Let employees know these regulations aren’t just law-abiding, but part of the fabric of your company’s spirit and culture.

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Work as an external trainer? You might be tempted to put your company logo and colors on your videos. But remember: you’re looking to foster loyalty and compliance between employees and their company guidelines. Not yours.

5. Compliance Training CTAs

Let me tear this one out of the marketing playbook, but it’s really important for compliance trainers. When you create compliance training videos, it can never exist in a vacuum. Like I said earlier with microlearning, people need to take action to implement what’s on the screen into their lives.

By creating compliance training calls-to-action, you let your learners know who they can turn to if they have questions and resources they can read or watch to learn more about a given topic. There should always be next steps.

One common concern when it comes to compliance and taking action is anonymity. Often enough, employees will withhold talking to HR, a compliance officer, or even their managers out of fear of retaliation. To handle this, always offer (when possible) an anonymous way to report misconduct. That way people can feel safe and will be more inclined to act, making your company safer as well.

What are YOUR Tips for Better Compliance Training Videos?

Compliance training, unlike other forms of training, has laws and ethics riding on its shoulders. Subsequently, it can be difficult to do away with content that might make the difference for your company of staying in the clear or facing a billion-dollar lawsuit.

By using video, you can make your compliance training approachable, informative, relatable, and actionable. Give employees the compliance training they deserve by using micro-courses, characters, scenes, branding, and CTAs to bring compliance to life!

Got your own tips on how to use videos to maximize your compliance training videos?! Let us know in the comments below. We hope these tips help you make your next compliance training unforgettable!

Stay compliant and Awesome!

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Shoshi Davis

Shoshi joined Powtoon as a Marketing Assistant. To read more of her stuff, you can find her content on Upwork and Business 2 Community talking all things inbound marketing for SaaS. After only 2 weeks at Powtoon, Shoshi was dubbed by the marketing team as having the superpower of "Unbridled Enthusiasm." So that was pretty cool.