Joel A. Rogers

Having an effective compliance program is crucial to promoting ethics in the workplace and protecting your company from non-compliant behavior. To successfully foster a culture of compliance and ethics, one of the most important pieces of your compliance program is a well-publicized, well-understood and well-lived Code of Conduct.

If, however, your company has multiple locations across the globe, creating a single Code of Conduct that’s understood by everyone poses somewhat of a unique challenge.

For most compliance professionals, the main concern is the amount of variation in the regulatory environments of different countries. It may seem nearly impossible to have just one Code to which all employees worldwide are subject. The truth is: Not only is an all-encompassing Code of Conduct possible, but in some ways, it’s actually much more desirable.

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Having a clear, concise and well-written Code of Conduct is absolutely necessary for your company’s adherence to it.  An exasperating, wordy Code may leave too much gray area for employees to follow it properly. In fact, a Code that’s poorly written, or written for the wrong audience, may result in your compliance communication being totally ignored, thereby wasting your efforts and leaving your company at risk.

The effectiveness of your Code of Conduct relies on it being crafted in a professional yet easy-to-read manner. While this may seem daunting, creating such a Code of Conduct is actually very simple to achieve when you follow a few “best practices.”

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So get this.  The other day I was talking with a friend who sells compliance training solutions into large companies.  We got to talking about a deal he is working on and he told me this:  the Compliance Department of this company he is selling to, which provides regular training to the various functions around the organization, gets billed by those departments for the labor costs associated with that training.

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At the simplest level, a Code of Conduct should be a user-friendly guide for employees, written in plain language, that helps them navigate ethical issues in their everyday business activities. When they function at their best, good Codes of Conduct deliver a powerful message to readers both inside and outside of the company. They communicate to employees and other stakeholders: This is who we are.

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Concise, 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.

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