Tailor Your Training, Engage Your Employees
With today’s diverse workforce, employers tend to over train the workforce on everything to cover their bases rather than pick the pieces each individual needs for their job. If employees fail to see how your training or education programs apply to them, their focus may shift elsewhere.
Small wonder, then, that 39 percent of respondents in our survey ranked employee communication and education as their top compliance priority.
OCEG, in an article, How Should We Educate And Communicate About Compliance Risks, recommends, “segmenting” to increase relevance. This starts by evaluating the “risk relevance” of a certain job. Then, managers should ask, “What is the desired level of risk awareness and skill for someone in this job?” At this point, “The content and delivery method of compliance training and communications can be tailored to eliminate gaps between actual and desired levels of risk awareness.”
What Does the Fox Say?
An article by compliance attorney Thomas R. Fox, The Five Essential Elements of a Corporate Compliance Program, discusses the importance of proper compliance training. He offers three tips:
- Train the right people. You have to prioritize who you train, starting with “higher risk markets” and employees or executives who deal with the government or regulators.
- Conduct live, annual training for high-risk markets or employees as well as third parties. Doing so, Fox writes, allows you to nip potential problems in the bud.
- Tailor training by “region, country, industry, areas of compliance and types of employee,” Fox writes
The experts agree. Consider your audience before you implement a training program. In other words, increase relevance to increase compliance and retain your human capital.
Check back tomorrow for OCEG’s six steps to successful policy management.
