Welcome to this special podcast series, Integrity Matters: Culture, Training and Compliance, sponsored by K2 Integrity. This week I visit with Koby Bambilia, Managing Director, and Tina Rampino, Associate Managing Director. Over this series, we will break down corporate culture, compliance training and communications. Topics include breaking down the big picture on culture, espresso shots of training, skills development and regulatory changes, tailored and risked based training and operational aspects of training. In Part 2, I am joined by Tina Rampino who discusses ‘espresso shots’ of training to help facilitate attainable training demands.

We began with the status of compliance training after 18 months of Covid-19. Here Rampino noted, “in the early phase of the pandemic, institutions had to quickly change to a fully virtual working environment. They had to find creative solutions to adapt their training programs in response. All planned instructor-led training was cancelled or transitioned to virtual training.”
But what was the impact of Covid-19 on compliance training plans? She said it varied between each organization but “the delays, rescheduling, and redesigning of mandatory trainings to accommodate the virtual working environment caused a big training load and a heavy training burden for institutions. Many institutions delayed mandatory training as they tried to work through issues as mundane as bandwidth as all employees were now remotely logged in to the same Learning Management Systems at the same time every day.” The bottom line is that many organizations pushed training to the end of the year or into 2021 and competing priorities and demands had to be managed. Moreover, we are now into Q3 2021 and even though the virtual work environment has become routine for compliance professionals, the pressure is on to get back up to speed on all those trainings.
If your organization finds itself in that place, Rampino advised on what she called “an espresso shot” of compliance training which can be both shorter and more concise, but drills down to specific risks relevant to an institution. She went on to relate that she has been involved in creating solutions that can deliver shorter and more tailored training which will result in increased relevance to the employee and have a lighter burden of training hours. Rampino said, “The concept of espresso shot training can assist employees to better manage their workload while keeping up with important issues relevant to their roles. For example, institutions should think creatively on delivery and modality of training content. Not only in an e-learning format: something engaging, cartoons, videos, interactive virtual training.”
I think that every compliance professional strives to find the right balance between training on general awareness topics and shorter, more relevant and practical training opportunities.  Unfortunately, compliance training is viewed as a “check the box” activity or worse, something that is dreaded and is usually ineffective. Rampino suggested compliance training incorporates real life scenarios, case studies or simulations to give employees an opportunity to learn in a sand box environment and to practice the skills that they are being taught.
Some of her suggestions include keeping your compliance training segments concise as “shorter, bite-size learning is a trend in training programs.” This means that instead of offering half-day and full-day sessions, break programs into shorter segments of 20 minutes or less, which are easier for participants to absorb – and schedule. Another example is that short cartoons or animated videos can be excellent quarterly reminders. Done properly, they do not feel like an assessment or certainly not a ‘check-the-box’ exercise. The bottom line is that with all training most employees must undergo now and even more so in the continued time of the Covid-19 Delta Variant, espresso shots give people back a lot of time.
K2 Integrity has developed an online training platform and resource center, Dedicated Online Financial Integrity Network (DOLFIN), to help clients with their training requirements and provide more diverse options for training content and modalities. Find out more about DOLFIN here. For more information on K2 Integrity click here.