Taxes and compliance training.
Many financial realities are changing around us these days, but two things that won’t go away in the forseeable future are taxes and compliance training. You can ignore them, but they won’t go away. Compliance training, however, doesn’t have to be as painful as the others. In fact, depending on the topic, it can be one of the easiest things to take care of using new technology.
The problem is that few employees actually want to take training on things like ethics, diversity, harassment or Sarbanes-Oxley. They put it off as long as possible. Also, if you educated your entire labor force on all required topics with instructor-led classes, you’d never get any work done. So it makes sense to use new delivery methods whenever possible, to make training faster and more cost-effective.
Save Time and Money
Online learning is a natural solution for most compliance topics. It provides consistency, a reliable paper trail, and considerable cost savings. Employees can take the training any time, anywhere, without travel. This explains why most leading businesses across the nation have discontinued classroom compliance training, and rely completely on e-learning.
Unfortunately, many online training companies do a grave disservice to both learners and their subject matter. The majority simply take classroom curriculum and paste it online. The result is a purely text-based course that is too long and boring to be effective. Although poor e-training is more economical than poor instructor-led classes, it fails to take advantage of the interactive opportunities available with technology.
Good e-learning, on the other hand, is short, interesting and challenging. Here’s why.
Brief is best. Most compliance topics are fairly complex. But not every mid-level employee needs to know every last detail on Sarbanes-Oxley. If you cram too much information into training, nothing is retained. Think back to the last sermon or political speech you heard. You probably remember one or two points at most. The last thing you want is a similar retention record for compliance training.
Good online curriculum designers understand the retention issue, and strive for longer lasting results. So they typically limit curriculum to the must-learn material, and then offer additional documents that can be downloaded as resources. Learners can hit the key points and get the big picture. They can also drill down for more elaboration on concepts that they either don’t understand, or have a particular interest in.
Boring is bad. The human mind shuts off when it’s bored, leaving the learner feeling resentful and frustrated. That’s why good educational material, whether presented online or in a classroom, is based on lively and interesting content. Even dry topics can be explained with stories, illustrations, games or other interactive devices that engage the learner.
When reviewing an online training package, ask whether you’d be willing to sit through it yourself. Is the reading level aimed at the correct audience – neither too high nor too low? Do colors, images and perhaps flash animations draw your eye? If you sense a feeling of fun when interviewing the development team, chances are that retention numbers will rise.
Choose a Challenge. Scenarios are a wonderful way to teach ethics and other compliance-related topics. All too frequently, though, they’re too black and white. In real life, people don’t come up to you and say, “Want to take this bribe to tell me your corporation’s secrets?” Instead, we all grapple with situations in shades of gray, where we’re uncertain what is right or wrong — which is why corporations need ethics training in the first place.
A quality online compliance class will present the learner with complex situations that could be viewed from several different perspectives. Any trainee who studied the material carefully will be able to select the right answer. But the answer should never be obvious. By evaluating an issue that might be borderline, the learner has to think – always a good thing in education.
Real-World Results
Lawson Products Inc., an international distributor of fastening systems, chemicals, welding and automotive products, uses online education for all of its new sales agents. “We save thousands of dollars each month by not bringing agents in to corporate headquarters for orientation,” said Ron Beckstrom, vice president of knowledge management.
“By understanding our corporate ethics from day one, every employee knows how we expect them to behave with customers and colleagues,” he continued. “Before we went to online education, a sales agent could be working with customers for quite some time without knowing our policies, opening up possibilities for making mistakes. Agents completing our initial online module are selling more and finding success faster than agents who never took it. Furthermore, any sales organization faces a lot of turnover, and with online orientation we haven’t invested too heavily in an agent if he leaves us early in his career.”
Legal Coverage
Shanti Atkins, an attorney and CEO of ELT, a corporate compliance training firm, sees other benefits from e-training. “The single largest predictor of employment lawsuit filings is the national employment rate. Average damage awards to successful plaintiffs also rise in a weak economy. During lawsuits, compliance is scrutinized. So more so than ever, corporations must pay very close attention to compliance training – ensuring that it is consistent, accurate and complete,” she says.
“E-learning helps organizations on all three of these fronts. With instructor-led courses, you lose consistency, and can’t guarantee in a legal proceeding that everyone heard exactly the same message. Similarly, you have no way of knowing if one employee signed in for his buddy, or slipped out early during a classroom session. Online learning, on the other hand, provides irrefutable proof of attendance and understanding of key principles and workplace policies through mandatory interactive exercises. The records act as insurance in the event of litigation.”
If you’re considering e-learning for compliance, make a firm deadline for course development, and pick a contractor who can deliver on time. If you do get sued, it will look very bad to have a stalled compliance program that was never rolled out – particularly if you’ve spent large sums on a national sales meeting or PR campaign.
Then demand employee compliance with your compliance training agenda. Set an aggressive cut-off date to show that you mean business. Start training with senior leadership, to model desired behavior. Then discuss the program in your internal newsletter or magazine, so employees get the message that e-training can be fast, effective and fun.
Biographical Note: Charlie Gillette is Managing Director of Knowledge Anywhere, an online training company in Bellevue, WA: www.knowledgeanywhere.com. email: charlie@knowledgeanywhere.com
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