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Excellence in Training

Envision Your Compliance Training Program

In this episode of Excellence in Training, Shawn Rogers and I consider how you should envision your training.
Shawn begins his journey with the famous book, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, where Stephen R. Covey said, “All things are created twice. There’s a mental or first creation, and a physical or second creation to all things. Take the construction of a home, for example. You create it in every detail before you ever hammer the first nail into place. . . Then you reduce it to blueprint and develop construction plans. . . Begin with the end in mind. ”

This principle applies to creating a compliance training program. A common mistake is jumping right to the question if which courses you want and how to deploy them. However, there are several things you need to think about before you start building the program.
Here are the steps we followed at GM as we envisioned what our compliance training should look like:
  1. Decide on the program’s guiding principles
  2. Establish program design objectives
  3. Develop a style guide or set of course standards
  4. Determine the exact risks that will be addressed by the training program
  5. Set up a governance process to ensure stakeholder alignment, approve the program design, approve the budget, and monitor effectiveness.In Covey’s terms, these activities resulted in the blueprint — or the  “first creation” —  of our compliance training program. We did all of these before we selected our vendor and started building our training courses.
Categories
Innovation in Compliance

Making Compliance Training Fun with Andrew Rawson


What if compliance training didn’t have to be boring? Joining us on this episode is Andrew Rawson, the Chief Learning Officer for Traliant, a compliance training company. Today we’re talking about the future of compliance training: how to make it truly effective, useful, and even fun.

The importance of training
The last couple of years have seen the intersection of two seismic forces that have created tremendous demand for quality training. The first was the #MeToo movement, which has brought up the whole topic of compliance training around sexual harassment — so much so that it’s become a need to have instead of a nice to have, even in states where it isn’t required. The second was a change in regulations in different states across the country, now requiring more than 10 million people to be trained.
Effective compliance training
There is a difference between teaching people about the law and teaching them what to do. At Traliant, they wanted to train people how to behave. What do you do when you’re faced with a particular situation? That should be the focus.
The training is also intentionally more modern: well-designed interfaces, interactive videos, professional actors, point systems, getting senior management to record training segments for their peers  — all of which help make learning more engaging.
An important part of making training effective is making sure that people are encouraged to speak up, and that when they do, they’ll be protected. You might not be able to stop bad actors, but you can encourage witnesses to point out the behavior.
Moving away from check-the-box training
Much of compliance training is very check-the-box: a once-a-year thing that companies do to get it over with. But that’s not an effective approach. Traliant has gone from doing one-and-done sessions to creating a more holistic training approach. Examples are 15-20 minute courses for managers involved in investigations and two-minute training videos on dating in the workplace that they call “sparks” — because they’re meant to spark conversations.
Preventing Workplace Sexual Harassment: 4 Top Trends for 2019

  1.  The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) is keeping workplace harassment training front and center, remaining one of its top priorities.
  2. Harassment training continues to evolve, and we’re seeing a shift from helping companies avoid liability to helping people behave properly.
  3. Training is highly state-driven, given their different requirements. So Traliant has built a platform where people can access the training relevant to them, instead of a one-size-fits-all course.
  4. There is a focus on building respectful, inclusive work cultures that embrace compliance training not because they have to, but because they want to.

Resources
Andrew Rawson (LinkedIn)
Traliant (Website)
Preventing Workplace Sexual Harassment: 4 Top Trends for 2019