MenuI attended a conference recently and listened to a speaker talking about his compliance program. In the course of his talk – the Q & A portion, actually – he said two things that I think represent a deep contradiction.
The first was that his employees have been complaining that they really dislike the compliance training his company has been providing them; he fully acknowledged that this is an area where they have a lot of work to do. He says that employees complain that it is boring, way too long, not relevant to the work they are doing, and that it is always seen as an intrusion into their busy work day when it comes around.
The second was in response to an audience member’s suggestion that when her company started offering engaging and interesting bits of information about a variety of compliance topics distributed with the rhythm of a steady pulse to employees – a methodology called “pulse training and communications” – she started seeing some very positive feedback from employees. The speaker said that such an approach would be considered a “nice to have” in his organization.
In other words, while he was acknowledging that the status quo was being seen as an increasingly ineffective way to convey compliance topics to employees, his organization was afraid to adopt fresher, state-of-the-art methods that have been shown to result in much greater changes in behavior. He was saying that even though he knows that the old paradigm has ceased to be seen as effective, his company is afraid to give up its dependency on that paradigm.
They won’t be able to hang on to that view for long. Tomorrow’s expectations (on the part of the Department of Justice, perhaps) result from today’s best practices. When a sufficient number of companies adopt anything new – a method, a practice, a bit of technology – that new thing becomes an expectation, and companies failing to climb aboard end up appearing quite out of touch. By analogy, imagine a company not using email, for example, or one whose employees don’t carry smart phones for instant accessibility. Such practices – once only the realm of early adopters – are now standard operating procedure for most companies.
The adoption of the methods of “pulse communication and training” in compliance – touching people with compliance messages a number of times through a variety of communication channels in ways that are not intrusive – has recently, and rapidly, become standard operating procedure for both large, global brands and small companies alike. The days of dismissing this kind of approach as a “nice to have” are quickly fading in the rear-view mirror.
