Transcript for How to Freshen Your Workplace Compliance Training
Cathy Foster: Thank you for joining us today for the ComplianceLine webinar, “How to Freshen your Workplace Compliance Training.” My name is Cathy Foster. I’m the director of marketing at ComplianceLine. And today, we’re very happy to share this information with all of you. We have really nice attendance for this webinar, a little bit over 100 attendees. So we’re very, very happy to see such interest in this topic.
So just a few points about our webinar logistics, feel free to ask questions in the comment section of the webinar and we’ll be sending a recording of the presentation to all the registrants. We’d love for you to share this with anyone on your team who needs this information. And we’ll also be sharing a certificate of participation for anyone who registered, plus a bonus free training of our…a free trial of our training programs.
If anyone’s interested, we’ll share the details at the end of this webinar. So for now, I’d like to introduce you to our host. We’re gonna be hearing from Giovanni Gallo, the co-CEO and chief development officer at ComplianceLine. He is the first generation American son of a Cuban refugee. And working with Gio is a joy. He brings warmth and dedication to everyone at ComplianceLine and is passionate about building an organization that cares deeply about our clients.
Giovanni Gallo: Thanks, Cathy.
Cathy: Yeah. I’d like to introduce Chris Martin, director of business development, also his deep experience in the compliance industry. Very cool guy, love for technology, and has a wonderful family. And so we look forward to hearing what Chris and Gio have to tell us about compliance today.
Chris Martin: Thank you, Cathy.
Cathy: Yeah. So Gio, I pass this over to you.
Giovanni: Cool. So let’s just jump right in. Just as we start, I appreciate everyone joining today. I’m glad to be sharing some of our day together, especially in these times where a bunch of us can meet on here remotely. So as we talk about learning and compliance training, we’re gonna kind of set the stage about some of the things that might lead to somebody having this kind of face when you send your training around, you know, and what leads employees to be disengaged and to, you know, either not cooperate or not learn from it. These are some of the big things. So one is that the training is boring. So oftentimes employees are gonna treat compliance training as a just click through, a click through it, and rarely are they actually engaged. And we’ll be talking about what we’re trying to accomplish with this training.
If it’s boring, it’s gonna mess with a bunch of your metrics and the things that you’re trying to accomplish. A lot of times training is irrelevant. It may be relevant to you as a compliance or ethics or HR leader, but for the employees taking it, it’s irrelevant. And a lot of times if you just have an off-the-shelf course or you have kind of a first generation e-learning solution and it’s not tailored to your industry or your employees, you might be shooting yourself in the foot and causing a bunch of problems you may not even know about. And ultimately when it’s boring and it’s irrelevant, it means that employees aren’t learning.
So let’s go to the next slide, Cathy, and let’s talk about the whole intention of this endeavor. A lot of people on this webinar maybe have a bunch of different responsibilities. Some people are very focused on learning in a bunch of different ways. But as we talk about the, you know, the goals of our compliance training and e-learning interactions where a lot of people talk about getting interaction and engagement. But I would encourage everyone as we’re talking through this, that to keep in mind that ultimately the intent of all these efforts is to drive behavioral change, right? If you have a bunch of interaction and it doesn’t change how someone behaves or people remember it and they don’t behave differently, ultimately those steps without getting to behavior change are, you know, tools or metrics along the path. But your destination is behavior change. And at the end of the day, for example, if someone took a CPR course and they interacted and they engaged and they completed the course, but they didn’t actually know how to deliver CPR or they didn’t do it when they needed to, then that would be a failure.
So as we walk through some of these things that you can do to freshen up your workplace compliance training, we wanna keep in mind that where we’re trying to go with all of this is to ultimately get to behavior change. And some of the things that are gonna allow you to build toward that are getting…you know, the first step is to get them involved and get them interacting with it. You wanna keep people engaged and we’re gonna talk about some ways that you can drive engagement with this. What you want them to walk away with is an understanding and an ability to retain that knowledge. So ultimately when something comes up that they can make a decision on or they can identify or they can avoid doing, that their behavior is different for having gone through this course, then it would be if you and your caring, thoughtful leadership team hadn’t implemented this.
So we can go to the next slide, Cathy. And, you know, what we wanna keep in mind as we go through all these things is what good is this compliance training if you have even 100% completion and everyone gets it done on time, what good is it if it doesn’t affect behavioral change? And what we’re seeing is the people who pay attention to this, the leaders who pick up these best practices and implement the right programs the right way, they’re getting to that behavior change. And all the things that we’re gonna be talking about today can help support that. So back to you, Cathy.
Cathy: Yeah. So we have a poll for you guys today. Let me guess. I’ll pop over to my other screen and launch this for you. We’d love to have you guys participate and just tell us, how has the coronavirus impacted your view of workplace training program? So we’ll take a few minutes for everyone to vote on this.
Wow. Interesting. I can see it and you can’t, I know.
Giovanni: I know.
Cathy: Numbers are climbing, numbers are climbing.
Giovanni: And the results are rolling in.
Cathy: Yeah, 41%. We’ve got almost 50% of our audience has voted so jump in there. It was a quick one.
Giovanni: So as we’re waiting for this to come in, everyone, I just wanna remind you that you do have a chat panel as part of your webinar screen. I might be on the side of the top depending on how you have it situated. Please drop questions that you have in there or we may be asking for some interaction as we go through this to help us focus on the things that are most important to you. And if nothing else, we’ll review those at the end and go over some questions or issues you have to help make sure that this time is as useful to you as possible.
Cathy: Excellent. It looks like we have just a couple more votes coming in. I’ll stop this in 20 seconds. Thank you, everyone, for responding. We have a clear loser for this poll, a couple of neck and neck. So 10 more seconds.
Giovanni: This is your chance to be the swing vote. Jump on it.
Cathy: I know, 10 more… Every vote counts. Every vote counts. Three, two, one. And poll was close, let’s share those results.
Giovanni: Interesting.
Cathy: Yeah. Yeah. So it looks like compliance training is more important, a little bit.
Giovanni: Yeah. Unbalanced. That’s what we’ve been hearing from some of our clients that, you know, people are remote. There’s not as much a chance for kind of that one-on-one interaction. And also we’re seeing kind of how some of the volatility that’s come up obviously from recent events has, I think, for some people, reinforced the fact that everybody needs to be part of the compliance program. Everybody needs to be informed on what is right and what isn’t, especially when we get into kind of an unpredicted or a crisis situation like this. And then there was a good portion in that last question that some people were saying that we kind of have a new opportunity that we didn’t have before for some learning now that people are working from home, you know, for whatever period of time that is.
Cathy: All right. So back to you.
Chris: Sorry. Well, I think I’m up next. So now I wanna get into sort of the meat and potatoes of the presentation here. So as you can see from the screen, we’ve come up with five topics to help you modernize your compliance training that we’d like to talk through. So these can be used to help you when you see a need to improve your current program or to help you evaluate training providers if you don’t currently have them.
So traditionally, organizations have used compliance training to manage and defend themselves against lawsuits. So it’s really not surprising that the compliance training has a reputation for being dull, for the content being static, a dense with legal jargon, and really ineffective at motivating employees to change their attitudes and their behaviors as well. But we see that changing now. Really, today, HR practitioners and employees expect compliance training to be relevant, engaging, and interactive. So the topics we’re gonna cover detail how to achieve this by transforming compliance training into something…well, from something that employees dread, like a root canal, to something that they find really valuable and even enjoy.
So obviously, the first topic we’re gonna talk about here is gamification. So if you haven’t heard the term gamification before, it’s about taking elements that make gains engaging, motivating, or educational, and then incorporating those into the learning experience themselves. So incorporating elements such as story, visual design, competition, challenge, reward, and even feedback really allow a learner to play a fun game while they’re learning. And that results in better retention of the information. And even some of the studies show that we found that when your learning material…when the learning material actively engages the users, they’re more likely to allow that material to affect and influence their behaviors as well. So now in practice, what this actually looks like is having the learner analyze a situation during their learning and decide on the right course of action, kind of like a choose your own adventure.
Or it could be asking them, you know, open-ended multiple questions during the training or even having them complete a time task. But each of these activities that has been scored based on their answer and then ranked on a leaderboard that everybody can see that shows the points that they’ve earned. And I’m gonna show you guys an example of this in just a moment. Now, there are a few psychological reasons why gamification works really well. First, achievement is one of the most powerful psychological driving factors of human behavior. So everything we do, we do to achieve something. Secondly, people don’t mind failing when it’s fun and interesting, so they’ll play until they get it right, and that’s really what helps them to embed the learning. Third, games also played the people’s core compulsions, like collecting, competing, organizing things. So as humans, we really like to like to know where we’re going and where we’re at in the process. But again, gamification helps reinforce good behavior. So when you complete something or get it right, you get a reward so you do it again and again, right?
And then finally, the final point I want to touch on here is that having a leaderboard really encourages healthy competitive spirit and motivates learners to climb that leaderboard position. Well, because no one wants to be at the bottom of the leaderboard. But more importantly, gamification really helps with some of the measurable success through engagement and retention. So as you see here, this is an example of a leaderboard that will be visible to all learners. As I mentioned before, it really helps to drive engagement and create a positive, competitive environment while learners earn points. But I wanna mention that organizations and HR leaders can also use this to recognize high scores, which really reinforces the message that compliance matters while adding sort of a social element that’s not available through other competitor courses. All right, so I’ll pass this back over to Gio for the next topic.
Giovanni: Yeah, thanks for that, Chris. Yeah, on the gamification piece, you know, maybe five or seven years ago I didn’t really…you know, this sounded like it was just kind of a fad or a trend, but my son is starting to get into video games. I know, get ready. But just seeing that competitiveness, that kind of fail, but stay engaged and kind of go past it. Seeing how those things that, you know, maybe even, you know, you playing Candy Crush on your phone or something, understanding those elements and seeing them in, you know, a phone or a video game and understanding those can really help us figure out how those can actually make some of what can be dry compliance content really engaging. Thanks for taking us through that, Chris.
So this piece that we’re gonna talk about is making your content relatable. So we’re gonna talk about this in a few different ways. But, you know, the big thing that we wanna think of as we’re going through this is there are a bunch of different topics that your training can cover, from anti-bullying to privacy, ethics, and all of those things. But the way that those are experienced by different seniority levels, different regions, different people with different levels of exposure to similar content can really change the way that learning is effective and really drives behavior change.
So when e-learning programs end up being academic documents that someone has to just kind of get done with, then you’re just gonna get kind of the first couple steps of that progression that we talked about. You might get engagement and completion, but you’re not gonna get all the way through to behavior. But when you can choose your own modules and choose your own activity, then you realize that since it doesn’t make sense to force everybody to take the same course in the same way, at the same time, and in the same order, you can create a more kind of a learner-friendly curriculum and have that flex across your workforce. And ultimately, when you can tie the circumstances and the scenarios that people see to their job and their industry or their job title, then these things are gonna help people move through from, you know, interaction, engagement, all the way to behavior change.
So the first big one that we wanna talk about, this is so huge, is that you’re learning whether it’s in person or e-learning or any kind of mixed format, you really need to be engaging stories in that. So when you can add industry-specific courses and talk about how this can really be related to something that someone experiences, people can see those real world applications and the benefits of the subject matter. Now, it’s not just kind of a phrase and a definition that they need to read and maybe remember for, you know, the survey or quiz that they have a few minutes later. But they really…stories are really gonna allow us to explore a topic at length and help people see it from a few different angles and get a firm grasp on how they might be able to apply that information outside of just this virtual classroom. Again, we don’t want them just to complete the course and pass the test. We want them to retain it, remember it, and behave differently for it.
So there are a bunch of studies, you know even back from the 1940s where these guys, Heider and Simmel, they showed a very simple story without even any people in it and everyone remembered it for a really long time. And there are notions that, you know, some of the most effective and basic ways to transmit information in tons of research studies, they’ve demonstrated that when you have that narrative involved, then people are gonna draw broader associations with it and remember it.
So having stories, not just kind of having a scenario, this is the distinction. I encourage everyone to kind of keep your eyes peeled for, not just showing a scenario, but telling a story. A story is more fulsome, a story brings somebody into a conflict and a resolution, attention, not just saying, “Hey, this happened. What should somebody do?” When you can have good topics that are relevant to someone’s position, your company, your industry, things like that, and put it into the context of a story, then you’re gonna get a lot better results out of this both on the front end of people being engaged and interacting and then on the backend when they actually have to apply it in their, you know, real world and in their job.
So just please keep in mind storytelling and look for, you know, whether it’s a presentation you’re giving or a slide deck that you sent around or the e-learning platform and content that you choose, storytelling is really key. It’s a super powerful element for all human interactions, especially this learning. We go next slide, please.
So the next thing we wanna look at is interactivity of the content. So you want participants to feel like they’re part of the activity. So to draw a contrast, you could see someone sitting down at their desk and they just have to stare at a screen and wait for this thing to be done. And then, you know, hopefully they can move on to something that, you know, is more urgent for them. Well, what you wanna be able to is make sure that the participants are active throughout this process. When those interactions can pose questions to the learners or they can integrate a scenario, this is really great that we can do nowadays with our technology is we can let someone make choices along the way. And what that does is the course reacts to that activity and then bring something else, brings up different kind of outcomes or possibilities based on how someone answers that, which brings us into our next phase of relatable content around personalizing your course progress.
So there’s one step to just have some interaction where someone can click on something or they’re thinking about something and giving an answer. You’re really amplifying all of that interaction when you can have personalized course progress. So someone’s clicking on it, their correct answers. This is a really cool thing that we can do. If someone gets the answer right and they know this well because they’ve taken this, you know, they’ve heard about this one concept every year for the past five years they’ve been there, well then, that precious time that you have as a leader that, you know, is allocated to have employees take this, that time can be refocused on something that they’re less familiar with and you can start building more mastery and familiarity and also avoiding that kind of drudgery of someone kind of sitting through, “Yes, I read the same thing last year and I remember the next paragraph from three years before.”
We can reward correct answers with shorter stories. And when they don’t answer, this is an important thing that we wanna do. We don’t ever wanna tell somebody, “Oh, you got it wrong. Try again.” I don’t know if you’ve monitored or talked to your learners around this, but there’s plenty of evidence and, you know, I’ve been tempted to do it myself to just guess and it’s wrong, and guess and it’s wrong. And then, you know, the third time you’re usually getting one of the four answers and then you can move on. Obviously that doesn’t require that someone really engages with the content. That doesn’t require that they even actually know it. So what you can do in an intelligent, modern learning platform is allow those wrong answers become teachable moments and those wrong answers become a chance for some deeper interaction.
Can we back up just a little bit? We can provide some deeper interaction to allow someone to independently assess, okay, what could go wrong in this scenario? Or, give them another question on the same topic so that they can apply the fact that, okay, I was thinking about this wrong a minute ago. Let me reapply that to a new scenario. And what it takes to do this is you need to have content that has that complexity built in, that can kind of handle that. It’s not just kind of a single stream of a 45-minute video that you hope someone stays awake for. But given the technology that we have, and it really doesn’t cost any more…it shouldn’t cost any more to be able to do this kind of stuff, what it can do is keep people from being really bored and help focus on the content that’s gonna move them to, you know, to that next grade level or that next level of understanding.
And then we can go next slide now. So the last piece about this is an ability for you as a learning or ethics leader to provide highly relevant content that’s tailored to each learner as much as possible. So, you know, if you can imagine, you know, if you’re talking to so… You know, there are kind of some slight changes that you can make. You can put your company logo on it and have some brand-specific content. You can change the content and style to reflect different geographical locations or regions. Where this really…as with all of these things where this kind of relatability and relatable content really becomes powerful is when you combine these things and you have a story relevant to someone’s region and their job.
You know, if you can imagine someone who works in a loading dock, if all of the stories are about somebody in an office or at the checkout counter and nothing’s about the actual conflicts or risks that come up in front of them, they are less likely to be engaged in that. So obviously, you know, we all have to pursue best practices and kind of take the next step toward doing that. You know, we’re not in a place where we can have every single course customized for every single person, but as you can start layering some of this in and someone can look at something and say, ”Oh, wow, that makes sense to me. Yeah, I’ve experienced something kind of like that before,” then these things all build on each other, and you get this really powerful bouquet of relatable content that keeps people engaged and moves them toward that behavior change. Chris?
Chris: Yeah. Thanks, Gio. I think that’s a really important point. The training has to be relatable, but also that customization is huge. I know that if a clients are taking or…I’m sorry, learners are taking some of the same courses over and over again and wanna be able to test out of it because they understand the content already, it’s something they’ve already done, that’s a really important thing that we get asked about quite frequently. So definitely an important factor there.
But let’s move to one of the next topics here. So as Gio kind of touched on before, most e-learning courses are super boring. And, really, a lot of times that’s because they’re often intended to reduce liability or check a legal or procedural box. Now, the topics presented are just common sense, are too repetitive, and the learners only take the course because they have to and not because they’re expected to learn anything useful.
So the compliance training is really seen by learners as a burden or something that they want to avoid. So a lot of e-learning professionals understand this, but we always ask the question that if you understand it, then why keep immersing learners in hours of mundane information or, you know, why can’t we develop courses that engage our audience in the same way that their favorite book or a TV series would do? So our goal in this section is to convince you that compliance training can be engaging, enjoyable, and effective through the way that it’s designed.
So for any e-learning course to be effective, you’ve got to start with a design that encourages engagement. This means streamlining and structuring the information in a way that makes it easy to learn and incorporate into their day-to-day life, which, of course, is easier said than done. But if the course design is something like a glorified PowerPoint, then people are just gonna click through it to get to the end.
This is really ineffective, and it forces them to focus on the quickest way to get to the end, rather than actually slowing down and thinking about the information that they’re presented with. So the first rule of e-learning design is to be simple and vibrant. The mind will remember something that’s simple over something that’s complex. I mean, right, it’s easier to focus on and requires less energy to interpret when it’s simple. But this doesn’t mean that we should just simply scroll text across the screen. It has to be more than that. So in the concept of cognitive load that defines the amount of working memory you have, it measures not only the information being brought in, but how the content is designed as well. So to digest materials, learners have to take in colors, images, and even the technology or the interpersonal systems that are involved, and even the length of learning is a factor as well.
So you can create longer courses or modules, but that’s at the risk of losing the learners’ engagement. You have to remember that your content is really fighting for your audience’s attention. So you have to keep your course short, punchy, and full of visualizations. The next key to good design is to be believable. Now, this is something that’s true for most levels of communication. People are really good at picking up on whether something is authentic or not. We’re far more likely to buy into something that comes from a credible source. So it’s been shown that people pay more attention when they feel like they’re being delivered important news. And that’s why a learning course that’s been formatted to look like a newscast style presentation is actually more effective at engaging learners. But you also need to create confidence in your learners.
So if learners feel like they’re not capable of achieving the learning objectives, their motivation levels tend to decrease. So to help with learner confidence, you should always indicate upfront how long it will take them to complete the session. So the ideal course duration that we found should be around 20 to 25 minutes. And then having these shorter courses really will ensure more focus, retention, and access for the learners themselves. So to drive these learning outcomes better, it helps to have an interaction every 30 seconds. These quick interactions help the learner to really to engage with the course content and prevents them from passively consuming and quickly forgetting it. It also helps to have your videos be no longer than 90 seconds because that’s really the perfect length to allow them to explore one concept fully while forcing them to stick to the point.
And then, of course, keeping the topic duration to five minutes or less also really helps the learner to consume it in bite-sized pieces and helps them to avoid information overload as well. So all of these design elements really help to promote engagement and retention because it’s becoming increasingly difficult for people to maintain focus for longer periods of time. So by developing courses that are 25 minutes or less with these design elements, you can actually help learners maximize their seat time to focus exclusively on the learning rather than distractions that would interrupt or hurt the learning process. All right. So, Gio, if you wanna take the next topic.
Giovanni: Yeah, sure. Thanks, Chris. So the next thing we’re gonna talk about is flexibility. And I just want to set the stage here and mention that the learner’s attention, their focus on the content, their comprehension, and their retention of the information are all helped with this concept. So I’d encourage you guys to get ready with your chat. I’m gonna ask something in a minute. But we’re looking a four…with this flexibility, we’re talking about offering bite-size learning with small learning units.
So I’d love for you guys to tell me in the chat if you ever remember sitting through an hour and a half lecture, either at a conference or at…you know, when you were in college or something like that, tell me if you would rather that have been in bite-sized pieces or if you prefer to kind of sit for a long time and kind of be tied to that. So we’ll watch a few of those come in. The point that I’m getting at is that studies have shown, in a bunch of different research studies, is that attention tends to dip after how many minutes? Ten minutes. So Cathy, we’re already like three times past that. So maybe we just pause for an hour and then we’ll come back to this later.
Cathy: That’s right. Actually, we’ve got a few questions come in.
Giovanni: Cool.
Cathy: People are listening.
Giovanni: Yeah, they are. That’s awesome. I give Chris credit for that, for being so engaging and authentic.
Chris: It’s a group effort.
Cathy: We have a few responders saying they prefer bite-sized pieces.
Giovanni: Awesome. Yeah. So studies back that up. There are a lot of scientific studies showing that, that even after 10 minutes, someone’s gonna start, you know, checking their phone if they’re allowed to have that. Maybe even if they’re not or you know, checking their inbox or multitasking or something like that. So we can have shorter spaced out modules, which we call micro-learning. It’s gonna be more effective and more effective in what? Well, effective in attention and focusing on all those things, but ultimately effective in changing behavior, which is what we’re going after.
And the other thing that really makes this flexibility, this bite-size learning powerful is that a lot of people may not have the time to do this all at once. So, you know, think of yourself trying to book an hour and a half meeting with someone on your executive team or just, you know, even someone on your junior team. It’s a lot easier to book a 15-minute meeting, say, “Hey, let’s catch up and then we’ll break and kind of get to the other stuff we have to get to, and then we can circle back later.” That’s increasingly how our world is and how people expect to be able to kind of allocate and flex their time, especially if you’re in a cross-functional environment or it’s hard to pull somebody off of the service floor or the patient ward or something like that.
It also given, you know, the attention and the way our brains work, some of that brain science Chris was talking about, when you have this bite-sized learning, you avoid the risk of becoming overwhelmed by having too much data at once. They can consume something, they can digest it, they can let that kind of settle in, maybe have some experiences in the real world that might reference it and then they can come back for the next bite later.
Another interesting piece of this, which, you know, I think a lot of people don’t consider off the bat, people can do this on the go. So if you have a flexible LMS and a learning platform that can serve this up from the cloud, then people can do it while they’re sitting on the bus or commuting, or they can take, you know, a 15-minute training while they’re waiting for a meeting to start or something like that. And that ease of access allows people to consume it on demand, right? This is the, “Hey, you know, catch us next week at 8:00 PM for the show,” or kind of the Netflix streaming on demand type of dynamic that we’re seeing across our culture.
So this micro-learning lets people do it at their own pace, wherever they are, and most importantly, it allows them to do it when they’re ready. It allows them to be more focused and makes that retention easier. And ultimately, as you break this up into bite-sized pieces and they’re not just kind of droning on kind of their eyes crossing from staring at a screen for an hour, their comprehension is gonna be easier without spending too much effort. And the big thing I want you to remember about this flexibility, in addition to that, you know, there are benefits to you being able to roll this out, to people being able to take it and then being able to learn it.
Studies have shown that the engagement with the content that’s paying attention, kind of clicking when you need to, kind of knowing what’s going on instead of zoning out, that engagement increases by 50%. That is really a huge jump. If you look at anything that you’re trying to impact in your ethics and compliance organization, getting something 50% better is huge. And just being able to split this up into pieces, you know, someone can take two 10-minute pieces one after another, but the ability to split that up with this flexibility really has huge gains throughout your entire organization. And speaking of the whole organization, Chris, why don’t you tell us about culture?
Chris: Thanks, Gio. Appreciate that.
Giovanni: That was a real transition there. You noticed that?
Chris: That was perfect. So, you know, one thing that we like to talk about here at ComplianceLine quite a bit is culture and the ways that we contribute to that and build it within the organization. So one thing that we talk about in light of learning is that learning should never be just a one-time event. It should be ongoing and constantly promoted throughout the organization. This is, actually, probably one of the biggest contributing factors in driving the behaviors that you’re trying to teach internally. And, of course, that constant reinforcement is how you embed learning into your company culture. So if we can go to the next of slide, please. Thank you.
So look, nearly all institutions provide some level of training to employees, but a culture of compliance really goes beyond a once a year training, mandated training. Really, it embeds compliance into everyday workflows and sets the foundation and expectations for individual behavior across the organization. So as a comparison, in a training culture, the assumption is that the most important learning happens in an e-learning course or a workshop or a conference. And it’s really often in response to a regulatory requirement or a perception that there’s some staff inadequacies that need to be improved.
So there’s often little focus on the transfer of learning to the actual work that’s being done. But in a learning culture, the responsibility for learning really resides with each employee and their teams as well. So it’s in this kind of culture that employees are expected to seek out the knowledge and skills they need when they’re needed. So in a learning culture, it’s also assumed that the learning is happening all the time, like at events, but also on the job through mentors, you know, through your mobile device, at events, and socially as well.
Now, part of this solution actually involves continuous micro-learnings as well. So Gio touched on them a little bit earlier, but just to give you a sort of a deeper explanation here because they really do contribute to the culture, is you can think of micro-learnings as kind of like episodes. They’re bite-sized pieces of a full train that you take until you’re done. And really, the benefits of these are that they’re adaptive. So learners can establish their baseline of knowledge and avoid training on what they already know. They’re subscription-based. So the content is at predictable intervals. And, of course, it’s micro-learnings, right? The content is broken down into very small and easy-to-consume blocks.
Now, this really helps to facilitate continuous learning and making compliance training courses an ongoing process. But I wanna take it just a step further as well because we also have something called…some video vignettes that can be used after a training is completed. We like to call them sparks, they’re spark trainings. They’re typically short two to three-minute overviews of a full course. And they’re used to engage or they’re typically engaging videos designed to raise awareness, spark conversations, and really motivate employees to speak up, you know, before potential problems have become serious issues. It’s just one more way to continue the learning throughout your organization and help employees feel more comfortable asking questions, talking about their concerns, and just overall having this constant learning become a part of the company culture.
So now, I think we’d like to take just a second to pause. I know this is a lot of information. I know, but I hope that this presentation was really educational. I hope we gave you some insight, not only into how learners are learning, but also how to adapt your course material to be more effective for them. We wanna take just a second here for any questions that you might have about what we’ve been presenting or about just e-learning in general. You know, please feel free to go ahead and type some of your questions into the chatbox in this presentation. We’re gonna give you just a few minutes to do so. We wanna make sure that we can continue just to provide as much value as we can in this presentation. So if you guys want to take a moment, go ahead and send us your questions and then we’ll answer them for you.
Cathy: So, guys, we’ve had a lot of questions come in during the presentation, so I really appreciate everyone’s participation. One question I wanna go ahead and address is people want to know if they can have this presentation after and the slides after this webinar. And anyone registered for the webinar will receive this and the certificate of participation automatically after the webinar. So that’ll be available to you. People are asking…I’m gonna go back up to the top. We have some questions about gamification. Someone asked, wouldn’t gamification have a negative effect in terms of shaming those who are on the bottom?
Chris: Gio, you wanna take that or you want me?
Giovanni: Yeah, this one I’ll take it. So that’s definitely something you wanna watch out for. And there are some different ways to solve it. So the core principle of gamification is you wanna reward progress and you wanna, you know, lift up the people who have completed their course or, you know, answer questions well or engage properly and things like that. You wanna set up those models well. I’m certainly glad that some people are thinking about, well, you know, kind of who’s on the other side of that leaderboard. You know, one way to do that is the way that you display your leaderboard, just show your top 5 or your top 10.
You know, there are some ways to, you know, only show someone if they get a good result. And, you know, this happens in video games, and those types of leaderboards where you get a badge if you do it, but, you know, 10% of the people get a badge. So you don’t feel like, you know, you’re the last kid to get picked for dodge ball or something if you don’t. So there are some ways kind of technically for you to do that. And you certainly should be conscious of not showing everybody in the whole organization and say, “Hey, here are the five worst people with compliance training.” You know, there’s that kind of standard management principle of give praise publicly and give, you know, criticism privately.
So there’s some things like that that you can do. And then also within your platform or within your program, you should have an approach to handle, you know, rewarding the people who do well and treating the people who don’t do so well with kind of a different approach. Kind of like we were talking about earlier, don’t say, “Oh, you got that wrong. Like, go do it again.” But say, “Okay, well, let’s think about that some more and let’s move into something else.” Your LMS and your learning content can be built around that. And also, you know, your kind of public recognition, leaderboards, and things like that can implement those same principles.
Cathy: Right. This kind of internal competition has been around for a while. I remember a few years ago people had Fitbits that they’re giving out to put on employee’s shoes. And then some employees got so passionate about it, you know, they were trying to outwalk their next colleague, and there was a little bit of motivation for those who are at the bottom of the pile who needed to start walking. So I think it achieved what the organization wanted. Yeah.
Giovanni: Yeah. And it always has to have that balance, right? People can go overboard with it. But I think that there have been…you know, for me in my perspective, there have been plenty of studies to show that there are positive, you know, implications from showing some friendly competitions and gamification, some of those leaderboards. So there are definitely ways to do it well. But you certainly wanna keep those negative impacts in mind.
Cathy: So another question we have is, so senior management is crucial to be involved in providing a message to employees to complete the training. What would you suggest as good messaging techniques for senior management?
Giovanni: That’s awesome. That’s a great point. You mind if I jump in on that, Chris?
Chris: Absolutely. Go for it.
Giovanni: So, yeah, it is very powerful. It’s something that we see the best, most influential, most successful ethics and compliance teams do. And you can definitely implement it as part of your learning program. That’s getting executive buy in, getting that executive voice as part of this. It can be as simple as, you know, having kind of a letter from the CEO or, you know, something like that distributed with your email or introduced by one of your senior leadership team. There are also relatively easy and inexpensive ways to put some of that into your actual learning content.
So you can have the introduction to your first video, have a quick, even 10-second clip from the CEO saying, “Hey, this is really important. This is why this matters. This is why this is part of our mission.” And providing that bigger context, you know, we like to talk about the golden circle and starting with the core of your why. When that message can come from the CEO who talks about kind of broader initiatives and can reinforce this, that can be really helpful. So that can be written, that can be on video and, you know, it’s great when you can have some of that interaction or even, you know, kind of some prizes or some access or something as part of that gamification, giving some access to that senior leadership team. Hopefully that helps.
Chris: And yeah, let me…I’ll add to that too if you’re all right with that, Gio. One thing that I have noticed, just to sort of back up what Gio said there, is that adding that little clip of your CEO introducing a training at the beginning of a training really helps to personalize it and really drives home the importance of doing that training. But one thing that I’ve found to be super, super effective from a leadership perspective is to lead by example, meaning the leadership should be taking the training and showing up on the leaderboards. So when the employees can see that the management, senior leadership is actually doing the same training, that it’s important to them, they’re leading by example and showing up on those leaderboards, it’s really just an additional motivating factor for employees to get involved.
Cathy: So those are great answers. There’s a really interesting comment on here. It’s more of a comment than a question, that this type of training seems like a solution for big corporations with 40,000 employees or more. So do you wanna address that?
Giovanni: Yeah, I’d love to address that. So I get how that would seem. But I’d encourage everyone to just kind of rethink that. So, you know, I think 10 years ago, not to, you know, date myself or anything, this would be very expensive. But, you know, the way that technology has progressed, the way that we as a company have been able to build this with, you know, obviously everyone has a budget and they’re very cost conscious. This does not have to be something that breaks the bank or you wait until you’re massive to do. There are certainly a lot of kind of big companies with really outdated content and really kind of overscoped libraries that they’re trying to maintain that charge a lot for access to any of their content and their learning.
But the way that the compliance economy is right now, there are a lot of options to both kind of get a toehold of this and just do some of this stuff in a simple format and also get access directly to this content and this format without really breaking the bank. I think in a lot of ways, there are options to implement these bite-sized pieces, this gamification, this relevant content with, you know, even a few thousand employees without really breaking the bank. So I encourage people to look into it and not to be closed off to that. If you haven’t done kind of a market check or a price check on this in the past five years or so, the price of this has gone down a lot. And also the quality of what you can get for kind of the normal, average price has really shut up just because, you know, I mean, people are shooting videos on their phones these days and it’s easy…you know, it’s a lot easier create the software for this.
So it’s not nearly as expensive as it used to be. And, you know, I think just as importantly, as you think of the cost that you already bear by doing this training, right, you have what, 1 to 3 hours across every one of your employees who take this, whether you have 800 employees or 80,000 employees, you’re already spending a lot o,f you know, kind of billable hours and attention on this. And, you know, spending an extra $3 per course library or something like that to get better engagement out of that time that you’re already spending is usually gonna be a really great return and help you build your ROI.
Cathy: Well, we just have a few more minutes here, and I’m going to summarize some of the other comments that were put in here. People are asking for tools. Where can they find the interactive tools? Where can they find the plug and play interactive ways to deliver a virtual course? So I think that’s a good segue into the trial that we’re going to share with everyone. So should we move on to the next slide?
Giovanni: Yeah, let’s go on to the next slide. So as we wrap up here, I just wanna remind everyone that what we’re going for here is behavioral change. I was talking to someone who, in this time, has been doing a kind of virtual fitness training from home and she was making the point that there are tools and there are steps in the process, but you really need a destination that you’re going after, that it’s not just a…for her, it wasn’t just a weight or a number, but it was being healthy. Being healthy in training is getting that behavior change. So yes, you want interaction, yes, you want engagement and you want retention, but those are all steps along the path to get to your destination of behavior change.
And in the spirit of trying to be helpful in this whole webinar and, you know, the content that we’re providing and just, it’s kind of how our company ComplianceLine is, what we wanna make available is for everyone who’s attended this webinar, everyone gets a free trial. So if you wanna see what this is about, you get a free trial, you get a free trial, you get a free trial. This is a special that we’re offering right now. You know, everyone is kind of reacting to a bunch of volatility and trying to figure out how to do this. And there’s no obligation here. There’s nothing other than we’re going to give you a chance to see what some of this looks like. Try out a new course that shows you some of this content.
And, you know, if you could either raise your hand in the comments or email us and let us know that you want one, we’ll make this available to everyone who’s attended this webinar. Clearly, you’re people who care about this and are willing to, you know, take time to learn about this more, and we’d love to kind of give you another step on that so that you can see what this really new era of training is about. What Chris was talking about that, you know, this is not just kind of staying out of lawsuits and, you know, make sure you check the box and have plausible deniability that you told people about a concept. If you really want this to be effective, you need to have this new format of training.
And in that trial, you’ll get a sense of, you know, what type of platform is gonna allow you to do this, to distribute it to different learners and to track them and to give people reminders and all that kind of stuff. So please let us know either by email or in the chat. If you would like this, we’d love to give you a chance to do that and give you a chance to check it out.
Chris: Yeah. And one other thing, if it wasn’t already obvious, definitely wanna say it. You know, all the things that we’ve talked about today for best practices to truly engage your learners and change their behavior. So the gamification, relatable content, the design, the flexibility, and even the embedment, making that training embedded in your culture, there are all things that are a part of our trainings that we offer. So we would encourage you guys to take advantage of the free offer that we’re giving out today so you can truly experience the difference and how we put these best practices into place. We’re really looking to providing value for you, guys.
Giovanni: Yeah. So I want to thank everyone. Oh, go ahead, Cathy.
Cathy: Yeah. People are popping into the question panel and saying, “I want the free trial.” So just raise your hand if you’re interested in the free trial. We’ll also have someone on our team follow up with you and make sure that the right person on your team gets the access to the free trial. So we’ll do that another couple of minutes. So my screen froze. We’re wrapping up here. So we’ll send the recording to everybody. So go ahead, Gio, with the…
Giovanni: Yeah. I just wanted to thank everyone for sharing some of your day with us. You know, we care about the job that you’re doing and we… You know, I had a post on LinkedIn earlier in the past week about how even “The Economist,” this international publication, is realizing how this crisis has shown the value and the massive impact that HR and compliance and ethics leaders can have on companies. So this is really a time to shine and it’s also a time that, you know, a lot of us are kind of being tested or, you know, we’re kind of putting all of our planning to work. So I know there’s a lot going on.
I’m honored that so many of you chose to share some of your day with us. I really truly hope that some of what we went over today can help you serve your team better regardless if you have some of this in place or if we can help, you know, more formally by working with you. But I really hope that you learned something today, that you got something that you can take away to your team and say, “Hey, let’s try to take a step forward on this.” You know, we’re always gonna be in this process of continuous improvement and figuring out how we can kind of take another step forward, and hopefully there’s something here that you can implement. And, you know, if you have questions, even if we’re not working together right now, we’d love to share our expertise and our knowledge and our insights with you. So please contact our team and give us a chance to help you out. Please have a great day. I hope everyone stays safe. Stay sane and stay sanitized. Take care, everyone.
Cathy: Bye-bye.
Chris: Thanks, everyone.
