COMPLIANCE TRAINING SHOULD TEACH SKILLS, NOT RULES

COMPLIANCE TRAINING SHOULD TEACH SKILLS, NOT RULES

Teaching workplace skills not only achieves compliance; skills powerfully increase the effectiveness of teams.

Business and workforce compliance rules have proliferated in the past decade.? A survey of hundreds of Emtrain’s clients shows that companies are assigning employees five hours (plus) of compliance training every year.? At an average hourly rate of $40.00/hour for a knowledge worker, that’s $200 of time per employee every year.? For a 1,000 person company, that’s $200K of employee time each year for compliance training, which does not include the cost of acquiring or producing the compliance training program.

With employee skills training, that investment of time and money is not wasted. Employees can become more effective team players; teams can be more productive, retention increases, and businesses are more profitable.

Compliance training has not demonstrated any efficacy in reducing compliance problems because a “rules only approach” simply does not work.? If anything, compliance problems are increasing which is why lawmakers continue to pass an increasing number of business and workforce compliance rules.

Compliance laws are created when people lack judgment and social skills.? That might sound harsh but we only pass laws after we see the societal disasters that flow from peoples’ poor decisions and bad behaviors.? Take these compliance laws that govern how we treat co-workers and conduct business:??

  • Laws prohibiting harassment and discrimination?
  • Laws prohibiting retaliation and protecting whistleblowers
  • Wage and hour laws
  • Laws preventing fraud and corruption
  • Laws ensuring fair competition
  • Laws protecting our privacy, including data privacy, etc, etc.…

We passed those laws when we saw we couldn’t rely on peoples’ judgment or their ability to navigate complex social situations.? Our most recent example is data privacy.? We’ve had social media applications for ten years and now there’s research to show these applications have harmed our society.? A decade later, we’re just now passing bi-partisan legislation to address the harms caused by product managers who did not think through the mental health effects on pre-teens and teens.? The actions of these product managers led to societal harm and now we’re passing laws because we are unable to rely on people exercising good judgment.

But what if we take a step back and actually teach people how to make good, ethical decisions and teach them the social skills needed to interact with co-workers from different generations, cultures, races, communication styles and so forth?? If we spend those five (5) hours each year teaching people skills and how to exercise good judgment, we will significantly increase compliance throughout the business, not to mention improving company culture!? Given the amount of poor decisions and poor social dynamics that take place in workplaces every day, it seems safe to say that anyone can make bad decisions and behave badly.? People are not “good” or “bad”; they are just flawed.? And people can behave either productively or negatively depending on the context and situation.??

So.. what if we approach compliance with a skills based approach – rather than dumping a bunch of rules on busy employees who will likely not read the rules or care overly much about them???

Companies who take a rules based approach to teaching compliance are not measuring efficacy or ROI… because if you measure efficacy and ROI, you quickly see that a rules based approach does not change behaviors, improve decision-making or provide any other organizational benefit to risk management or company culture.?

With a skills based approach, you can upskill employees to be better corporate citizens, better team players, and better at accepting each other’s differences. Then you can measure the impact of the training by watching your employee relations claims decrease.

This is why it’s time to take a skills based approach to teaching compliance. Check out Emtrain’s compliance/culture skills matrix - that enables better decision-making and more positive social dynamics within businesses.


Joe Murphy, CCEP

Editor, Compliance and Ethics: Ideas & Answers

9 个月

Janine Yancey A couple thoughts on this. We tend to act as if the important violations occur among the workers. But if you follow the big cases, the risk is with those who have power: the bosses, the c-suite. Improving training for the workers is not the issue - it is how you reach those with power. Another suggestion is to focus much more on the incentive system. Train me all you want, but if my pay and promotion are determined only by how much I sell or how quickly I get the job done, where do you think I am going to focus? As Peter Drucker said, what gets rewarded gets done; everything else is preaching. I agree training should be designed to be effective, but we also need to focus on who has the power, and how you get things done in an organization. Cheers, Joe -??Editor, Compliance and Ethics: Ideas & Answers?https://ideasandanswers.com

回复
Diana Lyman

Accelerating growth for mission-led orgs | Women's Health Advocate | GTM & Commercialization | Brand & Acquisition Marketing | Strategic Partnerships | Community-led Growth

10 个月

Couldn’t agree more! Policies are not practices. And while the practice of company culture starts at the top, middle management is the glue.????????????

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