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
9/13/16: When you’re new to any profession, one of the first things you learn to say about yourself is that you’re passionate about your work. Sell office equipment? You’repassionate about implementing systems that make professional environments more efficient! Teach school? You’re passionate about molding young minds and watching new ideas come to life in the eyes of a child! Wait tables? You’repassionate about providing extraordinary customer service!
Given the choice between hiring two people, who would hire the guy that is merely highly competent when offered the option to hire someone that is absolutely passionate?
Perhaps the most disturbing conversation I heard this year went as follows:
Me: “So what interaction do you have with your E&C team?”
Big cheese at Fortune 100 company: “Once a year I get an email from them listing who has not done their annual Code training.”
Me: “Ok”
Ok maybe not the most disturbing – I have two teenage children, but right up there.
When considering local leaders and how to put them front and centre of ethics and compliance activities, we have much to learn from Betty Crocker. The history of the cake mix has been well documented (who knew?) and the story goes that sales of cake mix failed to take off in the 1930’s because the “just add water” approach diminished the role of the American Housewife; it failed to involve her.
It’s the same with much of our ethics and compliance work. Managers and leaders are too often talked about as the “route” or “conduit” to engaging with employees, as if they are passive entities through which we pass messages; a means to an end. In fact, they are more like a pressure valve, with the capability to slow down and even stop communications – or to speed up and focus the activity. When we are passing on performance statements or general company announcements, then potentially a certain amount of passivity is fine. When we are talking about culture and compliance activities, it most certainly is not.
When it comes to E&C, what happens to our messages if we fail to involve our local leaders and treat them merely as a route to market?
Back to cake mix. The story goes that after psychologists and focus groups got involved, the need for housewives to “add two eggs” revolutionized the industry. By the end of the 1940s there were hundreds of companies making mix, led by Betty Crocker. In terms of time and effort, adding two eggs did not turn this into a labour of love – but the end result was something that could be proudly served to family and friends.
More recently, this concept of ‘value by involvement’ has been a key tenet of IKEA’s strategy – ‘I love it, because I built it.’ Finding simple ways to allow managers to get more involved can and should achieve a similar result in our area; getting them to do some simple research, think about the context of the message for their teams, or add in some personal reflection.
When it comes to E&C communication, what are our two eggs?
Today if you ask most people if they baked the cake from scratch, they will say yes – even if they used a mix. The cake mix redefined the concept of baking. In the same way, we want our managers to be so involved in our E&C communications that they feel, even if they didn’t create the materials from scratch, that they have played a key role in bringing them to life.
Think That Engaging and Effective Compliance Communications Are Still A “Nice To Have”? Think Again.
I 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.
