MenuCompliance training covers topics that have serious ramifications for individual employees as well as your business. Yet, many people see such training as fundamentally uninteresting, irrelevant – or just plain boring.
This article covers the three main factors that contribute to compliance training that leaves employees bored, dismissive and disengaged – as well as solutions to these common problems.
- Information Overload
For compliance and ethics professionals, there’s a real temptation to share everything you know about a particular compliance topic when you are responsible for training. The unintended result, however, is that you end up burdening your audience with extraneous information that they don’t need to know.
The problem is that burdening your audience with non-essential information is a sure way to lose their attention, and it dilutes the effectiveness of the message you need to convey. When an employee doesn’t see most of the information as relevant, they’re likely to dismiss otherwise worthwhile content and may end up gaining nothing from the compliance and ethics training.
One common error is to provide too much detail about the regulatory landscape and the legislation behind your company’s policy. Employees may need to know some general information about the law, but it’s less than many compliance and ethics professionals assume. Global companies face additional challenges in this regard, in that the legislation that applies to employees in Brazil, for example, may be wholly irrelevant to those in the U.K. or India.
Solution: The key is to boil down what you know about a compliance topic to the bare essentials: key principles and relevant advice about what to do in specific, real-life situations. Ask yourself, “Does this information help employees know what to do when confronted with an ethical dilemma?”
- Lack Of Clear Guidance
Traditional compliance and ethics training materials often lack clear direction and concrete takeaways for employees. Employees won’t necessarily know what they should do in a challenging situation, even after watching a 30-minute online learning session.
Typical ethics training materials on bribery, for example, teach employees all about the laws surrounding bribery in various jurisdictions. What is lacking, however, is concrete direction or a set of values for an employee to call upon if he happens to find himself in the position of being bribed.
Solution: Effective compliance and ethics training provides guidance not only on what not to do, but also on what to do (e.g., calling the legal department or even the embassy when faced with a bribe solicitation). Get right to the substance of the matter, presenting a common situation and the steps a person should take if/when you encounter it.
- Long Form, Long Content
Since e-learning tools first entered the compliance and ethics training market, the standard approach has been to cover a single topic in a long session of 30-40 minutes. The vendors creating these materials tend to fill the time with technical details that the average employee probably doesn’t need.
While long-form training modules may be an effective way to cover a handful of core issues, they’re probably overkill for other risk topics you want to address, and they increase the risk of training fatigue.
Solution: Use videos, cartoons and other short-form content to maximize attention. People expect videos to be fairly brief and slick, and when someone is able to see that a video runs only four minutes, they’re more willing to reserve their upfront objections and judgments – which maximizes their attention to the topic at hand.
In the end, failure to engage employees could increase the risks of unethical or non-compliant behaviors. It’s essential for compliance professionals to understand the factors that contribute to boring training and be ready to counter with strategies that spark interest, foster engagement and drive meaningful change.
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.”
