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I’d like to draw your attention to some facts and figures from the recently released 2012 Towards Maturity benchmark report As the report points out ‘Compliance training is often one of the first areas to be e-enabled, as learning management systems can keep precise records that an individual has been ‘trained’. However, completion rates show that mandating training does not necessarily guarantee completion ... ‘
In fact, completion rates for so-called mandatory training, and yes, that’s mandatory as in compulsory, as in there are really no exceptions, are only 63%. Yes, that’s not 100%, that’s 63%, so about two-thirds of the target audience. So only two-thirds of learners are even getting to the end of these compulsory e-learning courses. And that’s without looking at figures for whether there is a demonstratable change in behaviourfor those people who do get to the end.
And, let’s face it, mandatory compliance e-learning courses don’t always have the best reputation. A few years ago, I’ve was at an extended family gathering sitting next to a now retired Civil servant who, on hearing what I did for a living, told me with some satisfaction that he always clicked straight through any e-learning courses he was assigned without looking at the contents. And this was a man who was entirely conscientious in other areas of life and work.
So what is going wrong?It’s worth taking a step back for a moment and looking at what compliance training is actually trying to achieve.
Compliance training aims to influence other people’s behaviour.Often it’s about changing behaviour, sometimes it’s about maintaining behaviour, but whichever it is, influencing behaviour isn’t easy to do. People won’t change if they aren’t convinced they should, and they may struggle even if they are convinced, as anyone who given up on a New Years resolution will know.These two guys are Charles Duhigg and BJ Fogg and both have written thought provoking books on the subject.There’s a great story in Charles Duhigg’s fascinating book ‘The Power of Habit’ which looks at organisational as well as personal change, about how Paul O’Neill made the Alcoa aluminium company the safest in the world. He did it by integrating health and safety into processes and performance objectives, and ensuring the workplace was full of triggers which prompted people to think about health and safety, He ensured people remained motivated by firing managers who didn’t comply.It’s clear that thebehavior change mandated in many compliance programmes is unlikely to be achieved by asking people to take a single e-learning course. However, that isn’t to say that learning technologies can’t play a powerful role. Way back in 2003 BF Fogg wrote persuasive technologies, which outlined a number of ways in which computers and mobile devices can change what we think
So let’s leave aside motivation and triggers for a moment, where you’ve established there is an ability gap, you need a course, but there is still a lot of potential for things to go wrong. Lets take a look at 5 of those..‘I did this course last year, and the year before!’ ‘It’s so inflexible, it makes me feel that they have no interest in me.’ ‘Most of the course was irrelevant to me’ ‘‘The course was sooo boring. It felt like a waste of my valuable time.’ ‘There is so much info that it’s hard to remember and apply anything in the workplace.’
Part of the problem is that people are often asked to reaccredit every year, using the same course every time. Even if they haven’t already done the course, if they have been doing a job for years, much of itwon’t be new information. Forcing busy people out of the workplace to attend a course telling them what they already know wastes everyone’s time, and it won’t make them feel trusted or respected.
The solution to this is to give people who have already been trained, the opportunity to show what they know without working through an entire course they have already taken. In 2011 Epic created a Health and Safety app for NHS South Central, where learners could take a diagnostic to re-accredit, with non-mandatory interactive and video based training available for anyone who failed to pass first time or felt in need of a refresher. We are now working with a major financial institution, to introduce diagnostics to enable learners to take only those elements of a course that they need to do.
People resent compliance training if they have to come into work, or out of work or go to classroom to do it.
It’s much better to allow the training to come to them.What both CSL and the NHS have also done is give learners more flexibility about when and where they take some mandatory training. Making compliance training multi-device means that ‘found time’ on train journeys can be used for accreditation, so people have more flexibility about when and where they take mandatory training.So you design the course once, using a multi-device authoring tool such as GoMo learning which employs best-practice responsive design, and publish that same course to multiple devices of various shapes and sizes. The built-in responsive design means that the course automatically adapts itself for the shape and size of the device the learner us using.
Not everything is relevant to everyone. Compliance training is too often one-size-fits-all, which too leads to courses filled with information, all of which may be important, but not for most people.
Introducing a role-filter (you can see some examples here) lets you include everything in the course, but invite learners take only those topics which are directly relevant to them.
Some compliance training takes the form of narrator led courses, where learners have to sit and wait for the narrator to finish speaking before they can progress – meaning they spend much longer on something than they would if they had simply read it. Compliance courses are often locked down, and can be text heavy and generally uninspiring. In fact, it can feel like the fact that they are mandatory means that the people designing them felt there was less need for them to be enticing.
But mandatory e-learning, for example, explaining a complex piece of new legislation around the technicality of how websites work, doesn’t have to be dull.Good design and appealing visuals ensure that this type of course feels engaging and fun and isn’t a turn-off.Let’s take a closer look.
But mandatory e-learning, for example, explaining a complex piece of new legislation around the technicality of how websites work, doesn’t have to be dull.Good design and appealing visuals ensure that this type of course feels engaging and fun and isn’t a turn-off.Let’s take a closer look.
And this explanation of tax regulations is made far more engaging and memorable by the delivery method than it would be if it were simply a written explanation.
OK so let’s take a look at the fifth and final reason why compliance courses can fail. Clients sometimes tell me that they need a compliance course to raise ‘awareness’’ of an issue. This is dangerous for two reasons: it’s a recipe for making a compliance course long, irrelevant and dull because it’s hard to definitely say that people don’t need to be ‘aware’ of any one particular piece of informationit might get you sued! (I’ll come back to this in a moment)
As Cathy Moore points out with her action mapping approach, and as Roger Mager was saying back in the seventies, it’s vital to ask yourself: Why do we need to raise awareness? What will people do differently as a result of being aware? How will I know? If you define clear goals then it will be easy for learners to apply what they’ve learned. Remember, compliance is about behaviour, and behaviour is about doing. You may need to know things in order to do them, but ultimately it is about doing. Why might it get you sued? If you’re wondering how you could get sued for designing boring compliance training - in 2010, a US company was considered not to have an effective anti-bribery policy, even though it had instituted training. The Justice Department even went so far as to imply that the training could be actually be considered to have enabled the company to allow the behaviour to continue by creating a possible defence that could be used in court. If there weren’t other good reasons for aligning training closely with performance objectives and processes then this is surely one! Once you’ve identified clear goals, it’s likely that many of the strategies for change won’t involve designing training. Instead you may build triggers for correct behaviours into company processes, and increase motivation byaligning them to performance goals.Now, if lots of people don’t know about an issue, an awareness campaign may be appropriate. Short animations, infographics and video elements and email shots could form part of that campaign. But any course you create should focus on giving people the ability to do something differently when they’ve finished.http://www.corporatecomplianceinsights.com/how-well-does-compliance-and-ethics-training-actually-reduce-riskAccording to papers filed by the government in an FCPA prosecution in 2012, the defendant company (RAE Systems) had learned of a practice of bribery in its joint venture in China but also concluded that “implementing an effective compliance program could hurt sales.” Company personnel did, however, want to “evidence” that they were trying to stop bribery and so they provided “some FCPA training” to at-risk personnel. In this attention-getting case, the Justice Department seemed to suggest – somewhat ominously – that the training (which it labeled a “half measure”) may have enabled the criminality to continue (by creating a possible defense in the event the bribery was detected).
Remember, this is all about behaviour, so it’s vital that you let people practice the behaviours that you want to see. For example, managers are unsure when giving feedback or conducting interviews or talking with reports about areas that touch on diversity legislation. If your course offers meaningful and realistic practice opportunities for areas where they are unsure, learners are more likely to grab at it with both hands than complain that it is boring.
This course offers information about appropriate behaviour when conducting initial interviews, then shows how it should be done.Then it offers the opportunity to observe and point out mistakes, before finally offering practice opportunities. Let’s take a look.This sequence shows a clip of the best practice sequence and a short part of the observation challenge.
So let’s leave aside motivation and triggers for a moment, where you’ve established there is an ability gap, you need a course, but there is still a lot of potential for things to go wrong. Lets take a look at 5 of those..‘I did this course last year, and the year before!’ ‘It’s so inflexible, it makes me feel that they have no interest in me.’ ‘Most of the course was irrelevant to me’ ‘‘The course was sooo boring. It felt like a waste of my valuable time.’ ‘There is so much info that it’s hard to remember and apply anything in the workplace.’
So to recap on how learning technologies can effectively help with the ability part of behaviour change, here are 5 things you can do to make compliance courses go well.Use role-filters so people see what’s relevant to themUse diagnostics to let re-accrediting people show what they knowMake clever use of visuals and media to ensure courses are engagingSpend the time upfront to identify the behaviours you want to see and make sure the course teaches thoseDeliver your course across multiple devices to give learners flexibility about where and when to take it
So those were techniques for ensuring that courses addressing ability are as effective as possible.Motivation is a tougher nut to crack with learning technologies, but there are ways that learning technologies can help.
People are unlikely to allow you to do what you tell them if they don’t think you have sufficient authority. This is where war stories from practitioners in the field can be invaluable. For example, a large mining corporation was having problems with the effectiveness of its health and safety training until it employed ex-miners to recount stories about mining accidents and near-misses that they had personally experienced. The rate of accidents for people attending this course went significantly down.In 2012 Epic worked with the BBC to record accounts from leading programme makers about how they approached making programmes about controversial events, such as the Iraq war. As well as ensuring your course has the needed authority, narrative is a far more memorable and powerful technique for learning than presenting facts, as it’s stored in a different part of the brain. A part of the brain from which people find it easier to retrieve information.
The third and final element Fogg identifies as important for behaviour change (orbehaviour maintenance) is triggers. Anyone who has unsuccessfully tried to diet or give up smoking will know that even if you know what to do, and you want to do it, it isn’t always that easy! Remember, triggers act as calls to action. So the smell of donuts may be an unwanted trigger to a dieter.In fact, the wrong triggers in the environment can lead to you behaving, without thinking, in ways you didn’t intend, or a lack of a trigger can mean you just plain forget to do the new behaviour you did intend. Triggers for the behaviours you want to see in the workplace should be embedded into your processes, but learning technologies may be able to help here too.
Mobile devices, combined with QR codes, offer the perfect opportunity to position triggers in the workplace to support programmes such as health and safety and fire awareness.Waving your mobile device over a QR code can trigger a web page to load and reveal instructions or a warning. QR codes can either be woven directly into training, where people are asked to walk around the workplace and identify issues as part of an initial course, or they can be used to provide alerts or just-in-time information in difficult or dangerous environments.