In light of the current administrations suspension of FCPA enforcement, Hui Chen, the first-ever Compliance Counsel Expert at the United States Department of Justice, challenges the ethics & compliance community to “Up Their Game.” Tom and Ronnie offer their strategies and ideas.

Ethics & Compliance – What’s the Point!?!
If your program exists solely to fulfill the minimum requirements, well then this new administration might have made your role a bit easier. But if the goal is to build a program that adds value to the organization and mitigates risk by effectively influencing behaviors so that employees conduct business at the highest level of integrity…well then this is an opportunity!

We know the traditional models don’t work. The annual boring, bloated e-learning that alienates employees and educates no one.  Because as we all know, its an open secret that employees are multitasking while the program plays in the background and they come away annoyed with you, which undermines trust. People do not speak up to ask questions and report concerns when they are bored, annoyed or afraid.

Reorient the program to focus on positivity and prevention. Focus on behaviors and learning. Focus on being a value add to the business.

• Focus on Promoting the Support System Of Helpful People, Policies & Resources
  • Train less, communicate more!
  • Focus on speak up reporting resources.
  • Integrate “commercials” into the flow of business. Be ubiquitous with this messaging.
  • Make those communications short and with some entertainment value

• Educate & Engage Leaders
  • Spend your first training dollars here
  • We need to get leaders on board. Remind and reinforce often.
  • It’s helpful if this training is short and engaging.

• Educate & Engage Leaders
  • Give tools and resources to leaders to make it simple and easy to cascade important messages throughout the organization
  • Short videos to play as commercials. Short, interactive games to play on Zoom-style calls.
  • Make them look good and they’ll make you look good. Then they’ll promote without the eye roll.

• Rewrite Policies & Learning Resources
  • Make sure policies and learning resources are short and action oriented.
  • Employees want to know what to do and not do. They don’t need to know the law.
  • Less is more.

• Live & Online Learning
  • Now we can focus on targeted, risk-based training. But it should not feel like a burden
  • Live training is always better because it gives you and your team face time, which makes you more approachable.
  • E-learning can be more efficient. Just make it shorter and has some entertainment value.

The most important thing is for employees to feel supported, so everything we do should be about this. As ethics & compliance professionals we need to be a value add that collaborates with the business to solve problems. But you won’t get invited to the meetings if all they know you for is that long, bloated, boring e-learning. In fact, they’ll actively avoid you. So let’s use this new reality as an opportunity to up our game and start over.

This lighter, more agile way of proactively communicating with and educating the business is actually a more efficient and effective way to mitigate risk. It’s more interesting and fun for them and for you too!

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Ronnie Feldman is the CEO & Creative Director at Learnings & Entertainments, a learning content provider made up of comedians and entertainers with a focus on corporate risk. www.LearningsEntertainments.com