One of the key goals of any compliance program is to train employees in awareness and understanding of the FCPA and your specific company compliance program and to create and foster a culture of compliance. While it seems axiomatic that compliance training is a mainstay of any best practices compliance program, the conversation around training has evolved over the years. Beginning in the fall of 2016, through the announcement of the FCPA Enforcement Pilot Program, the DOJ began to talk about whether you have determined the effectiveness of your training. This conversation continued with the 2017 Evaluation, which asked, “How has the company measured the effectiveness of the training?” This point has bedeviled many compliance professionals yet is now a key metric for the government in evaluating compliance training. This is not simply measuring training attendance and completion rates. This is true testing effectiveness.
It evolved further in the 2020 Update with the mandate that training must be “truly effective.” Finally, the training must be presented in a language the employees understand, which means in a local language, if the training is outside the US or other non-English-speaking countries. The 2017 Evaluation focused on whether your training was “tailored” for the audience. This added two requirements. The first was to assess your employees for risk to determine the type of training you might need to deliver by risk ranking your employees. Obviously, the sales force would be the highest risk, but others may also be deserving of high-risk training. From this risk ranking, you were required to develop tailored training for the risks those employees face.
What are ‘espresso shots’ of training to help facilitate effective training? Tina Rampino, Associate Managing Director at K2 Integrity, suggests 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 Omicron Variant, espresso shots give people back a lot of time.
Three key takeaways:
- How and why have you tailored your compliance training, and how do you determine its effectiveness?
- Try an espresso shot of training.
- How is your training presented: both in languages and media?
