Is your ethics training useful?

Try the test below:

How difficult was that?

That’s the feeling employees get when they complete the quiz at the end of most online ethics training. They listen to the story of a fictional employee who overheard a colleague say he was willing to pay a bribe to get a contract and the quiz reads “What should Joe do? (A) Report what he heard to Legal; or (B) Nothing because he’s not personally involved in the wrongdoing.”

I’m exaggerating a bit for effect, but not that much.

That kind of training does not help employees recognize ethical dilemmas, does not show them how to take action, and thus is a huge waste of your budget.

Consider instead a live session between a manager and her direct reports (video call is great). Change the script so that it’s not clear that what Joe overhears is a promise to pay a bribe. Make the conversation about what Joe should do and how he should do it. Then shift the discussion and talk about how employees in your company, not Joe’s fictional company, should react in this situation. Who should they talk to? How can they reach them? What should they say?

The purpose of ethics and compliance training is to help employees be compliant and ethical at work. Is yours achieving these goals?

Training options

There are different ways to train employees. Depending on the risk we face, some ways are better than others. Here are a few options (among many others):

Onboarding training – That’s the one-and-done approach. It should be reserved for no/low-risk activities, like “Here is where the corporate policy manual is.”
Basic training – Also for one-time training events, and recommended for low/medium-risk activities, like “Careful Email Communications”.
Refresher training – The training we repeat every year or every other year, for specific groups of employees. Best for medium/high risk activities, like “Discrimination and Harassment”.
Task-based training – This is when the training is baked into the actual tasks of the high-risk activity. Ideal for significant risks like antitrust, corruption, or trade sanctions.
Simulated-risk training – I call it War Games. A common example today is phishing your own employees to test their alertness, awareness and decision-making skills. When used for high-risk activities, repeatedly failing these exercises could lead to disciplinary actions.

Don’t memorize compliance training

I am currently creating a training module on the importance of trust in the workplace.

A colleague of mine suggested that we reverse the usual order of these modules. Instead of explaining what trust is and then testing our employees’ understanding through scenarios, she recommended that we let them struggle with the scenarios first.

It’s a simple idea and not a novel one. Yet, I haven’t seen it applied to E&C training. We typically give employees dozens of slides on a specific topic and then quiz them. In other words, we give them the answers first and see if they can remember them. It’s not the best form of learning. We see proof of this when employees violate rules they were trained on because, one year later, they don’t remember the training.

I look forward to trying this new approach. As a learner, I would prefer to discover rather than to memorize.

HT to Seth Godin

Your best training is the next one

At first, you don’t provide any ethics & compliance training.

Then something happens and you realize it was a mistake not to train your employees. So you develop a short training for newcomers. And you beat yourself up for not having done it sooner.

Don’t.

Because soon you’ll realize that your induction training doesn’t cover everything it should. After you beef it up, you’ll realize that long-term employees need refreshers too. And then, it’ll just make sense to provide employees in different functions their own customized training. Later, you’ll feel it would be more efficient to use a vendor to create online training. Only to discover, a few years down the road, that in-person training can be more effective. Then you’ll try to produce short animation, text messages, and funny comic strips to fill the gaps between training campaigns. By then, some employees will tell you that there is so much information that it’s hard for them to know what’s really important, so you’ll consider reducing your training. And you’ll beat yourself up for not getting it right all these years.

Don’t.

Your training needs to change with the state of the market. The best you can do is to pause regularly and to reflect on whether your training program is doing its job. If yes, great. If not, change it. But don’t dwell on what has been. You’ll never win that game.

Instead, we need to think of our next training idea like the launch of the latest iPhone. When Apple executives are touting the phone’s cutting-edge technology while pacing the stage, what they don’t tell us is that the next 2 or 3 generations are already in development. Prototypes with flexible screens, built-in projectors, 3D screens and holograms. No matter how great our latest training is, we need to deploy some humility and remember that all of our prior attempts had a short life. By all means, we should launch that latest training with pride but we should already have an eye out for the next best thing. Because the marketplace has already changed.

That’s how we stay relevant.