CEP Magazine - February 2022

The compliance and ethics training problem—and a solution

No one can speak more passionately or knowledgeably about your organization’s compliance challenges than you can. And compliance and risk challenges are often time critical. Even so, it’s no wonder that training either gets fully outsourced or put on the back burner.

We get it. Take Nicole’s experience: 15 years ago, she was working in compliance in London in the midst of a regulatory investigation. She was constantly wondering why people still weren’t getting “the message,” even with an ongoing regulatory investigation. She thought that development of effective compliance training was something that took time, needed design experts, and required countless subject matter experts. She also thought compliance training was something that people did once a year or was a punishment for those who broke the rules.

Then Nicole moved to Australia and took some time out from law and compliance to study art. A few months into the course she was asked by the chief compliance officer of an international mining company to support the compliance team. It turned out that there was a heap of training that needed updating. So, she combined her art study with her new study of compliance training.

She started doodling and playing around with PowerPoint and animation software. She then started producing short video case studies with short messages. Little did she know that this would become what we now call micro-learning and that 60,000 employees globally would be given an entirely new way of looking at compliance. In addition, the training time shortened for her client, from three hours of “click-mouse” training to a few short videos, saving the organization thousands of man hours. And the reduction in time did not reduce the effectiveness of the training.

Nicole’s team put catchy music to quickly drawn images and came up with slogans such as “There’s no such thing as a free lunch.” They turned third-party due diligence into a cartoon called “Guess who’s coming to dinner” and created an online gameshow called “Dilemmas.” And Nicole created every piece of that early training driven by her passion as a storyteller, her experience working in a team as a collaborator, and her interest in how people retain information and learn. She was learning on the job. You could say she was learning how to “DIY train.”

The result was that learners all around the world were excited and interested in compliance. Forty percent of users completed a voluntary survey, and the results were staggering: People were engaged, understood the key messages, and wanted to do more compliance training! In fact, people were doing the voluntary modules as well as the mandatory ones—all of this despite the training being produced internally by a tiny compliance team, using internal case studies and no budget apart from Nicole’s time as a member of the team.

What are the mindsets?

Why did this particular approach work so well? We’ve spent a lot of time analyzing what’s worked the best for us and our clients, and we’ve concluded that effectiveness doesn’t rely on any particular technology solution or media platform. Instead, as implemented in the strategy described above, effective training happens when the compliance team iteratively and simultaneously applies eight different mindsets to the creative process.

1. The mindset of an entrepreneur: Make more with less. Innovate with the resources you have.

2. The mindset of a learner: Think about your audiences and their needs, not just rules and processes to be imposed.

3. The mindset of an advertiser: Learn from the people who persuade for a living. Convey messages and reinforce them through repetition and variety. Sell your message.

4. The mindset of a storyteller: Capture hearts and minds by using your institutional and individual memory to find the story.

5. The mindset of a producer: Use a repeatable production process. Make a plan and sweat the details.

6. The mindset of a collaborator: Use and enlarge your internal and external teams to find and test ideas, innovate, and encourage. Don’t go it alone.

7. The mindset of a buyer: Vet and build a core of creative, technical, and technology providers that complement your internal culture and provide the talents, platforms, and resources you’re missing.

8. The mindset of a program executive: Consider, deploy, and coordinate all your different channels for engaging your people. Become a pro at repurposing and managing content.

In short, effective training and messaging does not have to come from backbreaking effort and high budgets. Usually, the success of a good message comes from its simplicity. That’s why we know that anyone can produce effective ethics and compliance training and communications.

The mindset of a learner: ‘What’s in it for me?’

The mindset of a learner is what everyone needs to think about when producing any type of content. There are two parts to this mindset: how to engage your learners and how to help the content that you produce stick to your learners.

Notice that there is nothing about this mindset that requires any design knowledge, creative ability, or technical skills. Yet it is probably the most vital part of the training process, as without a learner, you have no reason for the training, and without understanding how a learner thinks or processes information, you can’t produce effective content. Simply put, you need to think like a learner before you can think about producing training (i.e., be learner-centric).

So how do you think like a learner? The answer to this question is why we believe that successful compliance and ethics content is produced far more effectively in-house by ethics and compliance teams themselves. Because if you work in-house, you will know three things:

1. Who your learners will be (i.e., where they will work in the organization and what their pain points are),

2. What risks and issues come up that the learners need to know about (i.e., what is relevant to the world they live and work in), and

3. What are your learners’ concerns, expectations, and aspirations (i.e., what is salient to them).

The principle of this mindset is, “What’s in it for me?” It’s the little voice in the learner’s head that is sitting there in any meeting room or in any e-learning course, asking, “Is this about me, or is it a total waste of time?”

Unless the training says from the first minute, “This is about you!” you will lose your audience—no matter how engaging, polished, elaborate, creative, or unique the training is. On the other hand, you can retain the interest and engagement of your audience, whatever the training method, if they know what’s in it for them. Even if the content means an hour of legal and regulatory analysis.

The learner equation

When producing training, the messages of and about the organization must not be greater than the messages about your audience that your audience is prepared to hear. That is, the majority of the message must be personally beneficial to the learner.

Another way of looking at this is understanding that the content has three components:

1. The seller (organization),

2. The product (message), and

3. The buyer (the learner).

If what you are “selling” is not in line with what the buyer (learner) wants or needs, then the buyer will not be interested in your message—however important you may think it is.

For example, saying, “You must follow the company policy on gifts and benefits, or the company could be in breach of its regulatory obligations,” is not much of a selling point to a learner.

However, saying, “We have put in place a policy on gifts and benefits so that we have consistency and fairness across the entire organization, and we can ensure that we are all ‘doing the right thing.’ This training is designed to work through how the policy works for you,” is more effective as it tells the learner three important messages:

1. The use of the word “we” is a message that we are all in it together. No one is being singled out.

2. The policy is about fairness and consistency across the entire organization. This will no doubt resonate with people and speak to their values.

3. The training is going to help them to navigate the policy so that they can do their job effectively.

The key outcome for the organization is the same (i.e., training on the gifts and benefits policy), but the messaging in the second scenario provides the learner with a reason to want to participate in the training.

Helping your learners learn

Once our learners are ready to “buy” our message, we want to ensure that the messaging is structured in such a way that they remember and retain the key content. There are two parts to this: understanding how the brain learns and helping their brains retain the information.

Just like with a new language, remembering what a word looks like and saying it when you have a book in front of you is not the same as using it in a real-life situation. We want our learners to be able to recall the information and utilize it when they really need it—outside of the training situation. The way we do this is by giving people the product (the message) in a way that they can process it.

James Zull in The Art of Changing the Brain explains that we learn using four regions in our brain that are activated in a particular order.^[3] These are:

1. Gathering information through an experience: reading, watching, participating, etc.

2. Making meaning through reflection and relating it to what you already know.

3. Creating new ideas from these meanings and thinking about how you can apply the information in your organization.

4. Acting on those ideas or active testing (e.g., explain it to others or seek feedback).

If we provide learning experiences that engage all four of these experiences, we can expect deeper learning from our learners. We need to help them relate to the content with what they already know and then apply this content.

Helping your learners remember

Another way of engaging our learners is to use something that we call the Memory Principles. There are too many to set out in this article, so here are just some key principles:

• The power of three: Studies have shown that people can only remember three or four things at once. So, just like we have done throughout this article, if we want people to recall, put together three messages or items at a time.

• Opening and closing messages: This is also known as the primacy effect and the recency effect discovered by the psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus in the 1880s.^[4] He observed that people’s ability to accurately recall items from a list is dependent upon the location of the item (i.e., either at the beginning or the end). That’s why it is useful to introduce a topic with a story or explanation and then end it with a key takeaway.

• Engagement: This is a whole topic itself. But the principle is simple: Get people active and engaged, and they will remember.

• The power of repetition: Zig Ziglar said: “Repetition is the mother of learning, the father of action, which makes it the architect of accomplishment.” Don’t be afraid to repeat messages. (That’s what advertisers do!)

Putting it into practice

While we don’t have time to go through each of the mindsets, we hope that we have inspired you with the power of three takeaways: to be more entrepreneurial, more learner-centric, and more independent in your compliance and ethics training.

Consider some existing training content and apply some of these principles to making the training more effective. This will also help you retain the information in this article through active application.

And know that it is not only perfectly possible to produce your own in-house training, but the result is also often the most effective and rewarding—for your learner, and for you.

About the authors

Nicole is an artist, lawyer, compliance specialist, and director of Create Training. With Jason, she is co-founder of the Eight Mindsets initiative, and co-host of The Eight Mindsets Podcast. She is also creator of “The Power of the Doodle,” and she shares her doodles regularly on LinkedIn—both training and compliance messages and of the guests from The Eight Mindsets Podcast.

Jason is president of LeadGood Education, which creates and produces custom training on ethics, compliance, and governance, and advises educational institutions on compliance matters. He also applies an entrepreneurial mindset for clients of Meyer Business Law, a firm he oversees in Princeton.

Takeaways

• No one can speak more passionately or knowledgeably about an organization’s compliance challenges than the in-house compliance and ethics team.

• With that advantage, in-house compliance and ethics teams can create effective training and communications by applying eight entrepreneurial mindsets to the creative and production process.

• Central among these is the mindset of the learner: building content around a specific audience’s concerns, expectations, and aspirations.

• The quantity of organization-focused messaging delivered must not outnumber the messages that the audience wants to hear (i.e., messages that personally benefit the learner).

• By being more entrepreneurial and learner-centric, and by applying memory principles and other ways the brain learns, in-house communicators can produce deeply engaging compliance and ethics content.