MenuEvery moment I spend with Compliance Wave Members is an incredible learning opportunity. Once a company comes into Membership, I schedule a quick call to understand more about the ways these organizations communicate, get a feeling for their goals and desires for their programs, and offer up best practices and tools from our Library that I believe can start making a difference.
I always kick off these intro calls with a question: How are you currently communicating with your audience? There are so many ways to reach your employees, third parties, etc. – identifying your distribution channels and “meeting people where they are,” are both key, and something I always like to discuss early on. But what comes after you’ve identified your channels? How can you see if you've touched those employees or cut through the noise of their other communications?
These questions get harder if you are not using an LMS (or have one that you’ve struggled to use). Below are my top three alternative tracking methods, in no particular order, that current Compliance Wave Members often use as a way to report on more than just SCORM completions.
Compliance Communications Blog
The 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.
Choosing the right content and assessing your available resources plays a large role in creating an effective compliance communication strategy. Using the previous parts of this series as reference, you’ll be able to look back at your analysis and choose the most appropriate content. You’ll also have a better understanding of current internal messaging and training, which will help you pick the best content for alignment. When you start to choose content, it can be helpful to consider the following points:
Be sure to align your compliance and ethics messages with those of other internal departments and individuals in your organization. Whether you are a department of one or of many, and regardless of how large or small your business is, you won’t want to overwhelm your audience or send out competing messages. In Part 4 of this series, there will be a closer look at alignment with HR-related communications specifically. For now, here are some things to consider when you initially begin your message alignment:
6/16/15: Compliance professionals are challenged on a daily basis with determining how best to communicate their messages for maximum impact throughout the organization. In a recent post on the Communicating Compliance blog, Lisa DiBenedetto provides a capsule description of that challenge and offers a...
