Just-in-Case vs. Just-in-Time – Employee Compliance
With today’s workforce now spanning at least three generations: Baby Boomers, Gen-Xers and Generation Y (also called Millennials), it is important that your organization is aware that the growing workforce is now consuming information very differently. This means that your employee compliance programs need to evolve so that they speak to your entire workforce, providing styles of content that appeal to each of your generational audiences.
Your workforce wants to do the right thing but needs to be approached with content that will convey your “culture of compliance” via their differing learning styles and attitudes. Therefore, to ensure that your employee compliance programs are effective, you must adapt your approach to all compliance content including policies, procedures, trainings, assessments, guidelines and more.
Just-in-Case vs. Just-in-Time.
Baby Boomers, most commonly prefer a traditional communication approach to employee compliance requirements and content. They are more comfortable with “just in case” policy and are accustom to reading and digesting a five page code of conduct. While with the evolution of technology, the younger Gen X and Millennial generations, or what we call your “evolving workforce,” embrace new tools and prefer, and basically require, “just in time” compliance content. To achieve this requirement, that same five page code of conduct needs to be cut up into short chapter snippets with tags and keywords. The evolving generation’s preference for communication is now more short subject videos that train and reinforce any compliance message.
As the world changes and sources such as Google can be used to find any set of instructions and YouTube can be used to provide a step-by-step video of how to implement those same instructions, your workforce expects your organization to evolve too.
Bottom Line: in order to have effective employee compliance programs, your organization has to provide dynamic content that is attractive to both the traditional and evolving generations. They are different audiences who consume information in very different ways.
Learn more about engaging your evolving workforce by downloading our OCEG infographic:
