ALLENCOMM BLOG | Insights
How To Lower Risks By Individualizing Ethics Compliance Training
Ethics compliance training will usually elicit eye rolls among your staff. It’s mandatory, after all. And it typically involves overacted demo videos and novel-length printed manuals. The information is important, but the training delivery method is all wrong. Employees don’t need a long list of everything that warrants a slap on the wrist. They expect something personal that links theoretical knowledge to real-world performance. Anecdotes and interactive resources to help them connect the dots and apply what they’ve learned. These 6 ethics online training activities individualize the experience to prevent lapses of judgment on the job.
1. Tell A Story
Mitigate risks with tales of past struggle
Everybody loves a good story. The same can’t be said for compliance training, but you can use the power of personal anecdotes to engage employees. Mitigate risks with tales of past struggles and challenges you overcame. Include details about how you dealt with the problem and how it impacted your job duties. You can even invite employees to share their own stories to enrich the experience. Liven things up with images, video clips, and background music to immerse employees in the tale. Also, try to avoid TMI info that distracts staffers and blurs the line between work and home life. They probably don’t need to know what you ate for lunch or where you went on your last date.
2. Develop Content Based On Employee Personas
Create distinct employee personas for every group, department, or job position. Include their personality traits, goals, gaps, and work tasks. Then use the profiles to personalize ethics compliance training content and prioritize risks. For example, customer service staffers can focus on company policy instead of safe handling procedures, which is reserved for your warehouse team. Of course, there may be some overlap. Everyone should have access to compliance resources for topics like health and safety training, especially now during the COVID-19 pandemic. Make certain the personas aren’t too niche since this might alienate certain members of your organization. Everyone should have a place in your online training community, regardless of their background or personality quirks.
3. Show, Don’t Tell
Reading about compliance protocols or tasks is problematic on multiple levels. Firstly, it often leads to cognitive overload. There’s simply too much information to assimilate at once and no visual examples to follow. Secondly, it depersonalizes the experience. Employees are passive observers required to read a passage or checklist that lacks any real-world context. For this reason, you need to show instead of telling. Include video demos, images, and step-by-step guides to walk them through the process. They can use these insightful resources to improve behaviors and disclose flaws they never knew existed. For instance, they always skipped a step in the task or they never realized accepting gifts from clients was a breach of ethics.
4. Ask For Virtual Live Event Volunteers
You could host virtual live events with SMEs, managers, and other key players in your organization. However, inviting employees to speak makes it more personal and relatable. Everyone on the team has a particular talent or strength. They might know company policy like the back of their hand. Or they may have memorized every regulation in the book. The key is to look for staffers who’ve faced ethical obstacles in the past and achieved the best outcome. Ask for volunteers so that no one feels coerced, then give them an outline to follow. For example, they must include a brief Q&A session at the end or provide a list of relevant reference links. There should also be a community hosting schedule to avoid redundant topics. Lastly, record the session and add it to your online training library so that employees can view the event anytime they like.
5. Simulate The Experience
Ethics online training involves more real-world experience than most compliance topics. This is because it requires personal boundaries. Employees must know how far they can go to improve customer loyalty without violating their beliefs or company protocols. Online training simulations give them the ability to explore new challenges in a supportive setting. They build practical experience without offending a client or putting your company’s image in peril. Branching scenarios and serious games are also great skill-building resources. They allow staffers to identify gaps on their own and learn from mistakes, instead of making grievous errors in the workplace that lead to accidents or lost business.
Explore new challenges in a supportive setting.
6. Host Group Discussions
Group discussions give employees a platform to air their grievances, share ideas, and explore different backgrounds. So, host a social media chat that centers on compliance topics. Invite team leaders to moderate the discussion and chime in when necessary. Another approach is to host live Q&As that spark conversation and prompt employees to think about how ethics training ties into their job duties. They still have the chance to talk amongst themselves and share personal experiences. But there’s a framework in place to keep everyone on track and ensure the key points are covered. With group discussions, it’s important to set some ground rules so that everyone feels respected. Nobody should judge a coworker’s comment or single them out in a public forum.
Ethics compliance training isn’t the most glamorous subject matter. However, it is one of the most crucial topics to cover in your L&D strategy as safety regulations keep changing and employees must know the boundaries and how to uphold your brand image. Their character reflects directly on yours. Thus, you must give them the individualized resources they need to adjust behaviors and attitudes that hinder professional growth. Share stories, provide visual examples, and host virtual live events to get them involved and reduce compliance violations.
