Adam Balfour (balfouradam@bfusa.com) is a Vice President and General Counsel for Corporate Compliance and Latin America for Bridgestone Americas in Nashville, Tennessee, USA.
Even before the pandemic hit, compliance professionals faced a challenge of how to effectively connect with and engage employees on compliance. Employees nowadays are inundated with emails and other communications (according to a 2019 Harvard Business Review article,[1] the “average professional spends 28% of the work day reading and answering email”), working longer days (one study indicated an increase of 8.2% since the pandemic began[2] ), and trying to balance the new normal of working during a pandemic (I suspect my kids will interrupt my makeshift workspace at least three times before you finish reading this article). Asking today’s average employee to sit through a mind-numbing training or read endless and lengthy compliance communications/policies is not going to deliver an effective compliance program. Rather than simply providing training and communications to today’s overworked and overstressed employees, we have to find ways in which we can cut through the other noise to ensure those trainings and communications are affecting behaviors and resulting in learning and engagement.
In this article, I will share some thoughts and ideas on how using branding concepts such as brand relevance and resonance can help to engage employees in a more meaningful and effective way.
But have you read it?
How many of you are aware of Tolstoy’s War and Peace? I would expect that many readers are aware of its existence, but how many of you have actually read it? Perhaps not surprisingly for anyone who knows me, I (and I suspect a number of readers) have not read War and Peace (the first edition is a whopping 1,225 pages). War and Peace may be a great book, but asking about awareness of the book is a very different question—and likely provides a very different answer—to how many people have read it.
So what does War and Peace have to do with compliance? If your efforts and marketing of your compliance program only focus on making employees aware of your compliance program elements (including your code of conduct), then you are missing opportunities to really engage your employees on compliance. If 95% of employees tell you they are aware that your organization has a code of conduct, what does that tell you? It tells you employees know you have a code of conduct, but it tells you nothing about whether people have actually read it, whether they understand it, and whether they know what is expected of them in their role.
Brand relevance and resonance
Scott Bedbury is a former Starbucks and Nike brand and marketing executive and the author of A New Brand World: Eight Principles for Achieving Brand Leadership in the Twenty-First Century.[3] His book has been influential in changing how I think about compliance, especially the first principle in his book, “Relying on brand awareness has become marketing fool’s gold.” Bedbury argues that brand strength is more important than brand awareness, which is no longer considered the brand indicator that it once was. He comments that “brand relevance and brand resonance, two measures of brand strength…are much more valuable than mere brand awareness can ever be. Perhaps this is the greatest single change in the concept of ‘brand’ in recent years. Where we once looked at brands on a surface level, we now view them in more intimate and multidimensional terms.”
When it comes to ethics and compliance, we should not simply look at employee engagement at a “surface level”; instead, we need to view their engagement “in more intimate and multidimensional terms.” Rather than taking a one-size-fits-all approach and training and communicating with all employees in the exact same way, we need to find ways in which we can help make compliance relevant and resonate for each employee and their role. How would your employees respond if you asked them, “Are you aware of our code of conduct?” compared to, “Is the code of conduct relevant, and does it resonate with you and your role?” The two questions may seem similar, but they may produce very different answers.
Making your compliance program relevant and resonate with employees is not easy and will require investments of time, creative and mental energy, and perhaps some money, but the return on investment is worth it. If we want to have an effective compliance program, we must learn how to leverage the branding concepts of brand relevance and resonance to truly connect with and engage employees. The rest of this article will share some examples of how this can be done.
Make it relevant: Are you training the pilot or the passenger?
Airplane safety briefings have the right intent, even if they are not always engaging. The safety briefings tell passengers what they need to do in the event of an emergency. Airline safety briefings, however, do not tell passengers how to make emergency landings on the Hudson River like Captain Sully because passengers do not need to know how to do this. Not only that, no amount of onboard pre-flight training is going to turn the average passenger into Captain Sully—that is what flying school and years of experience flying are for. Such training would neither be relevant nor resonate with passengers and certainly would not be effective.
The same is true for compliance. Standardized training for all employees on a particular topic is not likely to have the desired impact of helping employees learn how to manage or mitigate a particular risk and is unlikely to engage your employees (perhaps the opposite). Employees who work in a warehouse face significantly different risks than those in sales and marketing; providing them with the same training will likely result in undertraining some employees and overtraining others. Providing one hour of training to all 10,000 employees in your organization (10,000 hours) is a lot more expensive and time-consuming and less effective at managing risk than providing three hours of tailored training to the 500 employees who actually can help to manage or mitigate a particular risk (1,500 hours). Employees should be trained on aspects of the compliance program that are relevant to their role—not someone else’s.
Make it resonate: Leverage managers’ voices and influence
The Department of Justice’s Evaluation of Corporate Compliance Programs says that “beyond compliance structures, policies, and procedures, it is important for a company to create and foster a culture of ethics and compliance with the law at all levels of the company.”[4] Tone at the top is critical, as is engaging middle management to make sure they have “reinforced those standards and encouraged employees to abide by them.” Any successful and effective compliance program has to engage not only senior and middle management, but also really engage the voice of every leader, manager, and supervisor throughout an organization and in every location. Senior management has a very broad audience to communicate with, but it is the managers and supervisors in each part of the business who can take that message from the top and help make it relevant and resonate with their reports through their words, actions, and what they tolerate in terms of behavior from others.
It is not enough to simply create the expectation for leaders, managers, and supervisors to talk about compliance; they need to be educated on what they should do (an example of the tailored training mentioned earlier). Compliance manager tool kits—ideally short and practical guidance for managers—can assist managers in knowing how to have these conversations. At Bridgestone, we issue a monthly compliance tip that managers and supervisors can use in their conversations and adapt to make relevant and resonate with their teams. In addition, creating annual performance goals for leaders, managers, and supervisors that require employees in these roles to regularly talk about the importance of ethics and compliance will also help ensure the conversations happen.[5]
Build upon life experiences
Compliance can seem like a foreign or abstract concept to many people. Most employees understand that compliance is important, but they may struggle to understand what it really means in practical terms. This is where a basic understanding of andragogy—also known as the adult learning theory—can be useful, as well as recognizing that children (pedagogy) and adults (andragogy) learn in different ways. Malcolm S. Knowles was a well-known expert on adult learning and highlighted that one of the ways adults learn is through the adult learner experience. Essentially what this means is that adults have life experiences that can serve as a resource for learning and relating to new ideas and concepts, so rather than trying to explain to people what a compliance program is, can you find a way to build on common life experiences to make compliance more relatable?
I have found that an effective way to do this is by explaining the pillars of our compliance program through the lens of parenting. As a parent (or other type of caregiver for children), it is important that we set a good example for children both in what we say and how we act. Children look up to us for guidance, and it is on us to set the tone for what is, and is not, acceptable (leadership). With young children, there is a constant risk assessment going on. We recognize that there are risks in everything we do, but we try to manage and mitigate the risks where possible. We also recognize that the risks are always changing. For example, when we go to the park to play, the risks include the weather, whether there are other kids around, whether my kids are tired, and various other factors that change on an almost-daily basis (risk assessment). The parents establish the standards of behavior (“Wear your helmet,” “Don’t poke the dog in the eye,” and, “Please don’t play with my work laptop”) and other controls (installing safety gates on the stairs) to ensure the children’s safety (standards and controls). We recognize that learning and engagement are key to helping our children grow, and we use a variety of different ways to help them learn (training and communication). We also recognize that things will go wrong from time to time or that sometimes we will have to intervene in a situation to investigate what happened and address the situation (monitoring and responding). (Usually in my household, it is who had the Mickey Mouse toy first. As a free bonus, send me an email or LinkedIn message, and I will send you my very nerdy “Upjohn Warning: In The Matter Of Who Had Mickey Mouse First.”)
Most people can relate to the above, parent or not, regardless of the age of their children. By drawing on that life experience, you can then layer on how compliance relates to those aspects of parenting and do so in a way that is relevant and resonates with most people. Not all employees need to understand the pillars of our compliance program (i.e., leadership, risk assessments, standards and controls, training and communication, monitoring and responding), but it is helpful for senior leaders to have an understanding; using the parent analogy helps people comprehend the concept better and faster.
Referencing TV shows and movies can be another effective way to engage employees. For example, we held a panel discussion for employees where we used Star Wars to talk about the role of culture, feedback, pressure, leadership, standards, and the three lines of defense and whether Anakin could have been saved from turning to the dark side. We have also referenced NBC’s Parks and Recreation (one of my favorite shows) to talk about conflicts of interest relating to business transactions and romantic relationships, as well as bribery of government officials (e.g., when the characters Leslie and Ben tried to bribe a government official to keep their relationship secret). We have also helped internal investigators understand our internal investigation guidelines by using lessons from Netflix’s Tiger King, including what to do if someone asks to video the interview, competing versions of events, and interviewing emotionally charged individuals.
Bridgestone Compliance Battle Royale
One of the ways in which we have tried to make compliance more relevant and resonate with our employees is through our Bridgestone Compliance Battle Royale, which started in 2019 as part of our Ethics and Compliance Week. We developed a 16-team bracket that included teams representing different departments and business units within the organization and had them go head-to-head in daily elimination-style compliance quizzes. We marketed each quiz as a battle, using an online tool that awards points based on who gets the correct answer to a question in the fastest time. We then determined the winner of each battle by the top five scores from each team.
We ran some internal marketing campaigns in the run-up to the Battle Royale, including our 2019 intentionally provocative tagline of “Compliance Isn’t About Peace And Love—It Is About Winning A War!” and our 2020 tagline “Wear Your Compliance Colors—Win With Integrity.” (We assigned each team “sports colors” and asked them to wear their colors during our socially distant and completely virtual event in 2020.) We also had employees from the Law department dress up as referees and equipped them with some talking points to turn the more challenging questions into learning moments.
We also use the Battle Royale as a way to assess engagement levels of different departments, retest questions that employees got wrong in our e-learning courses, share information (nothing confidential) about out ethics hotline (number of reports, types of categories, etc.), and include questions based on our monthly compliance tips to try to encourage more leaders and managers to use the tips.
Our 2019 Battle Royale resulted in standing-room only in many of the conference rooms, and we had employees cheering and giving each other high fives and fist bumps. Our Marketing department was very engaged and was overheard after their defeat in the semifinal talking about where they “went wrong” and discussing tactics for what they would do for an anticipated 2020 Battle Royale. There was some training and learning in the Battle Royale, but we were also intentional about providing an experience that resonated with our employees and made compliance seem more relevant.
Engage employees by making them the focus
To develop an effective and employee-centric compliance program, we cannot simply focus on making employees aware of the code of conduct. We can, and must, find ways of engaging and helping employees learn in a way that will make compliance relevant and resonate. That takes time, much thought, and effort on the part of the compliance team, but it will be a much more efficient and effective experience for employees, resulting in a more effective compliance program.
The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not represent the author’s employer.
Takeaways
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Compliance programs that only focus on making employees aware of the code of conduct risk failing to engage employees effectively.
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Compliance can feel like a bit of a foreign concept for employees, especially since every compliance program should be different and tailored to that organization.
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Incorporate brand concepts (i.e., brand relevance and resonance) into the structure of your compliance program to engage employees in a more meaningful way.
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Tailored trainings, leveraging the voices of managers, and other experience-based engagement opportunities can help make compliance more relevant and resonate with employees.
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An effective compliance program requires an employee-centric focus that communicates the pertinent aspects of the program in a relevant way for each employee’s role.