MenuThe global workplace changed forever when e-mail as a communication medium was introduced in the early 1990s. Ease of use, speed of distribution and almost zero cost led to its universal appeal.
Fast forward to modern times, the number of e-mails sent and received per day totals over 205 billion in 2015. The average worker receives approximately 122 e-mails per day -- approximately 15 e-mails every working hour. These figures are expected to rise at an average annual rate of 5% over the next four years.
Ironically, its popularity has made e-mail a victim of its own success: with so much traffic arriving in inboxes, there’s a risk that critical communications – such as compliance – are getting lost in the noise.
Increasingly, staff are suffering from "infobesity," finding it difficult to understand an issue due to information overload. It’s easy to spot the tell-tale signs: e-mails get ignored; partial responses to messages; procrastination (often with best intentions to read later); and selective reading -- i.e. focus on the what the main message is, ignore the stuff that’s not. And the problem is getting worse: the average human attention span in 2000 was 12 seconds. Nowadays, it’s closer to 8 seconds.
Compliance Communications Blog
Effective compliance communications must focus on fostering a change in behavior, not just a change in what employees know. Integrating behavior-change principles into Code of Conduct training and compliance programs helps not only to change employee behavior in the near term, but also to change employee attitudes about compliance that will determine their behaviors in the long run.
In this article, we’ll look at how to start leveraging three simple behavior-change principles in your messaging.
3/15/16: In the March 2015 issue of Compliance and Ethics Professional (the publication of the Society of Corporate Compliance and Ethics), an article by Jeffrey M. Kaplan argues that not all corporate compliance programs “… are up to legal ‘snuff’ when it comes to risk assessment.” How can that be? Risk assessments are part of virtually all compliance programs. The problem is that many companies do not use their risk assessments in ways that comply with the Federal Sentencing Guidelines for Organizations’ requirement that they “design, implement, or modify each requirement…” of an effective compliance program to reduce risks identified through the assessment. Kaplan’s short article highlights ways in which some companies fall short and what they can do about it.
