Compliance Doesn’t End in Training: Maintaining the Standard

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By Mark Dorosz
VP of Compliance Learning, Interactive Services

A great compliance training will get your employees inspired to remain compliant in the office. But after the initial excitement wears off employees forget what they learned in the training and go back to business as usual. Maintaining the standard set in the training is where the real work begins

Keeping the material fresh in employees’ minds is an important task for any business, and requires a team effort from managers, staff, and the compliance department. To keep the entire company in compliance after the training, consider implementing some of the following measures.

  1. A company culture of compliance.Keep compliance on your employees’ minds by making it part of the culture. Examples of incorporating compliance into everyday work life include staff meeting reminders, email announcements, and putting compliance posters on the office wall. Keep the reminders brief, upbeat, and fun. Lead by example by showing real life examples of positive compliance among staff.
  2. Team rewards.Behavioral research shows that people respond better to positive rewards than consequences. Plan to reward departments with a team breakfast or offsite bonding day who have no compliance violations within a specified time period, such as six months. Have teams work together for rewards to they encourage each other to remain compliant.
  3. Individual sanctions, as needed.It’s best not to create a punitive culture, but your office will still need to put sanctions in writing for compliance violations. First time oversights should not be punished, but put them in writing so that staff receive performance improvement training, especially if they have multiple violations. Staff who continue to make violations after training might need to be terminated. Employees found to make ethical compliance violations purposefully should be terminated immediately.
  4. Periodic updates.Training tends to grow stale with time unless your employees get reminders of the information. Along with incorporating this into company culture, ensure all of your employees, no matter how senior with the company, attend a compliance training annually.

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2 COMMENTS

  1. Training that focuses on behaviors, and is both short and offered frequently throughout the year will solve employee “forgetfulness”. Another great way to strengthen learning transfer is to engage management with tips and tools for keeping their workgroups reminded of compliance and ethical culture. We’ve got to stop thinking about training as an annual event and instructional desginers and trainers should *never* use training as a means to threaten punishment for infractions.

    • The Sentencing Guidelines (and other authorities) require us to train our workforce and some of our agents on our compliance program and our policies. If you can successfully bridge the gap between training on policies and training that is short and addresses behaviors, then you’ve hit the gold standard. It should be possible because your policies should be prescribing certain behaviors anyway. But it’s important to not lose sight of the requirements for training and to make sure the behaviors you are highlighting and training on are behaviors required in your policies.

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