Compliance, the Yarno way

We’ll be offering a brand-new Compliance feature in Yarno shortly. We’ve been planning and developing it for a while now, and we’re excited to offer our customers the opportunity to do compliance the “Yarno way”. But why now?!

For over ten years we’ve focused our energy and offerings on capability uplift and behaviour change. That’s what got us excited back in 2016, and where we felt (and still feel) we could have the most impact, especially given what was on offer in the market. For more info on that journey, check out this post that I wrote earlier in the year explaining our journey from day one to day 3,652 (give or take a day or two).

Capability uplift

Our two flagship features, Embeds and Bursts, are designed to introduce and reinforce learning in a fun and engaging way. Adults learn best when learning content is goal-oriented and tied to real-world application. So we collaborate with subject-matter and process-matter experts to design learning content that solves immediate, practical problems.

Topics are varied and include leadership, cybersecurity, product knowledge, customer service, and onboarding. Over time, we’ve noticed customers using Yarno for compliance and safety topics too. We were curious as to why, so we asked.

We learned that customers valued Yarno’s microlearning approach and focus on engaging content. They wanted to achieve the same high engagement with compliance that they were seeing with capability topics. This was motivated by the near-universal dislike of traditional compliance delivered via the LMS as long-form e-learning. It was a chore!

We also learned that while the learner experience in Yarno was superior, a few features were missing:

• A pass mark that learners need to reach to be marked as compliant
• The ability to “persist” a learning campaign (setting an expiry date is optional)
• The ability for a learner to complete a campaign multiple times, on a fixed cycle e.g. annually

The compliance journey begins

So we began researching the compliance space, talking to key stakeholders responsible for compliance training, exploring market offerings and the needs they addressed. We found that compliance training has always been framed as mandatory and risk-minimising.

Buyers wanted proof that employees had completed training, and learner engagement wasn’t a priority because regulators didn’t ask for it. So completion was the metric, and engagement with the content was just not a focus. As a result, vast content libraries are offered with generic, one-size-fits-all content.

As fate would have it, while we researched, Australian WHS law was changing. The law now requires employers to demonstrate that employees understood their obligations, not just that they completed a module. Comprehension over completion is a mantra we’ve repeated ad nauseam over the past ten years, so this felt like familiar ground!

The Yarno team discussed the idea of building a compliance feature based on everything we know works in workplace learning over the past ten years, while adding new compliance-specific functionality.

This was exciting, though mixed with apprehension too. To date we’d purposefully shied away from compliance. Part of Yarno’s appeal is that it’s not about compliance and it’s not mandatory. Learners appreciate the short, succinct and relevant learning. It’s micro in delivery and time required yet macro in impact. Would we jeopardise this by offering compliance? We’ve spent many hours discussing!

Ultimately, we decided to proceed with compliance based on customer feedback, recent legislative changes, and the belief that we can offer compliance done the Yarno way without negatively impacting learner engagement.

Introducing Compliance Campaigns

Our Compliance campaign feature, launching this month, helps prove your team met a required standard, not just that they completed the training. Compliance campaigns leverage the same quiz-based engine that our customers love, with some additional compliance-focused features built in.

Compliance campaigns are built to answer three questions instantly: who’s compliant, who’s due soon and who’s overdue, for every learner, at any point in time.

It’s best for regulatory and legal training obligations, safety and induction, policy attestation, annual renewals, and lifting manager capability, especially for wellbeing and psychosocial conversations.

Which campaign type do I need?

A quick way to work out where your training fits is to ask: what is this training required or intended to do?

• If the answer is to show proof my team reached a required standard, Compliance campaigns are best.
• If the answer is to build my team’s capability over time, Embeds and Bursts are best.

I look forward to sharing more about Compliance campaigns very soon! If you’re wondering whether something similar could work for your team, we’re always happy to chat.