MenuConcise, varied and relevant compliance communications are essential to mitigating boredom and training fatigue. But, to truly engage and motivate employees, you need to be proactive about gaining their attention and creating emotional connections within your compliance and ehtics communications.
Compliance and ethics training don’t have to be boring. If your current compliance resources just aren’t getting through to bored, disengaged audience members, you need to employ strategies for getting around their defenses.
Creating Emotional Connections
Entertaining cartoons and surprising video content are good ways to overturn your audience’s expectations, using pattern interruptions that make them more receptive and open to new learning.
Video, in particular, gives you the capability to arrange music, imagery, pacing and other elements in a strategic manner that gets your audience’s attention and guides them through an emotional experience, making your compliance training more resonant.
A compliance video designed to create an emotional response might open with the main character in a challenging ethical situation, and then invite employees to see themselves in that scenario. Once viewers are empathizing with the main character, the video walks them through the necessary steps to address the ethical or compliance issue.
A short video based on behavior-change science allows the viewer to briefly experience the negative feelings associated with following the wrong path, and teaches them to associate compliance with feelings of happiness and success. This is an ethics training success.
Focusing on emotional connections and empathy is a great way to engage employees and shape their future attitudes and behaviors. Using a variety of media provides opportunities to illustrate and show scenarios, which is helpful in making abstract compliance and ethics issues more concrete and relatable for employees. The end result is a more receptive, empowered and engaged audience – and compliance resourcesthat won’t put your employees to sleep.
A Holistic Approach To Compliance Communication
Effective compliance communication and training requires compliance and ethics professionals to put real thought into the structure, tone and content of the materials and to communicate through multiple modalities. Compared to infrequent, long-form training sessions alone, a holistic approach to compliance communication is far more effective.
Using multi-channel, multi-modal communications enables more opportunities to engage employees and accommodates a broader range of learning styles. It also allows you to apply a variety of behavior-change principles, such as pattern interrupts and repetition, showing social proof and gaining empathy.
As you work to make your compliance training more engaging and emotionally resonant, remember that training isn’t an end in itself – or just a way to avoid violating the law. Stopping an ethical or legal violation is important, but actually moving the business forward requires real culture change and a holistic approach to compliance awareness.
Striking the right balance of content types and frequency helps protect your company from liabilities and empowers your employees to conduct business in an ethical, compliant and profitable manner.
Ready to engage your employees and reduce compliance risks? Download our free report, “How To Stop Boring Compliance Training: A Holistic Approach To Employee Engagement.”
