No matter the size of your organization, you can never underestimate the importance of building and maintaining a robust and routinely refreshed corporate compliance program.
The world we inhabit is in a constant state of flux. Governments are perpetually introducing and amending laws and regulations, requiring corporations to follow their lead to keep up with this shifting landscape. In an age when myriad organizations are making the leap to having their teams collaborate remotely, assessing the effectiveness of your corporate compliance program could never be more important.
In this article
- What Is a Corporate Compliance Program?
- Effectively Implementing a Corporate Compliance Program
- 6 Tips to Boost Participant Engagement and Learner Retention
- 1. Spread out the training over time
- 2. Deliver instant feedback
- 3. Combine the human voice with dynamic visuals
- 4. Make your tests more challenging
- 5. Use parables and real-life stories
- 6. Gamify your content
- The Benefits of Conducting Compliance Training Using Elearning
- Refreshing Your Corporate Compliance Program to Go Above and Beyond
- Collect data (both internally and externally)
- Identify the scope of your corporate compliance program
- Conduct a risk assessment
- Appoint a compliance officer
- Establish senior points of support
- Build a procedure for monitoring compliance on an ongoing basis
- Disseminate your corporate compliance program
- Ensuring Your Corporate Compliance Program is Effective
To ensure that your organization continues its operations seamlessly, you must establish guidelines that guarantee that everyone working for and in tandem with your organization — be they staff, stakeholders, or third-party vendors — comply with the same comprehensive set of rules.
Simply conceiving and administering a corporate compliance program, however, isn’t all that it takes. This article will explore why it’s additionally vital to actively encourage employees to opt-in to corporate compliance training, and foster a company culture where your employees are committed to adhering to regulations. You can formulate a way of promoting your corporate compliance program that will cause excitement among your team.
With all that in mind, here’s your crash course on assembling an effective and enduring corporate compliance program for your organization.
What Is a Corporate Compliance Program?
A corporate compliance program is a formal initiative that delineates a company’s policies, procedures, and actions. It should be administered internally, and every member of your organization should be obligated to take part.
On top of defining an organization’s internal policies, a corporate compliance program takes into account state, federal, and overseas laws that may apply to the company. It disseminates this information to every member of your organization in an accessible and illuminating manner and should conclude with each signing off on their understanding and willingness to comply with the policies outlined.
The legal matters that influence your company’s operations are bound to vary depending on your industry, products, and services. They will also be conditional upon the reach of your operations: are you limited to a specific region, or do you conduct business transnationally?
Your corporate compliance program won’t simply outline the governmental regulations about your company, but additionally the cost of contravening the law. What actions will be taken against both a staff member, and the organization at large, if laws happen to be violated?
Effectively Implementing a Corporate Compliance Program
By and large, corporate compliance programs possess a preventative purpose. They involve assessing and managing risk, as well as ensuring that your organization is not taking part in any disruptive practices, which can include waste, fraud, abuse, and discrimination. Establishing your corporate compliance program will involve measuring risk, and then introducing clear measures to address said risks.
For a corporate compliance program to effectively achieve what it sets out to do, it must ensure that all of its team members and stakeholders are on the same page. At the same time, it will map out a clear path toward meeting objectives, while increasing the value of the organization for shareholders.
Most organizations already have some version of a corporate compliance program in place. However, if your compliance program hasn’t been touched recently, then chances are you’re in dire need of a refresh. There are always ways that you can improve and tighten your efforts.
6 Tips to Boost Participant Engagement and Learner Retention
Unfortunately, there is often a stigma associated with compliance training. Participants may complete the training because they are required to, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that they retain most of the instruction that they have received, or even enjoy the process. Many parties may perceive your corporate compliance as ticking off essential boxes, but rarely effecting genuine change.
The good news is that you can alter this perception by crafting a corporate compliance program that is both fun and memorable. The goal of your training isn’t to instill short-term knowledge but rather to influence enduring habits and behaviors. Here are a few methods that will help you achieve this:
1. Spread out the training over time
Allowing your participants to coast through a learning module and fill out a corresponding multiple-choice quiz doesn’t ensure that they will retain everything—or really, anything—that they have learned. Long-term memory acquisition is a product of continually returning to and reinforcing concepts. One schedule for reviewing information, informed by Hermann Ebbinghaus’s spacing effect, proposes “going over information after an hour, then a day, then every other day, then weekly, then fortnightly, then monthly, then every six months, then yearly.” If retention begins to wane, then you return to the prior level and start reviewing the training more periodically.
2. Deliver instant feedback
Enable your trainees to immediately retry questions that they have initially answered incorrectly. Encouraging them to take a second stab at selecting the correct option for themselves will result in higher memory encoding.
3. Combine the human voice with dynamic visuals
It’s scientifically proven that when you pair vocal narration with visuals, learner retention swiftly increases. This is known as the contiguity principle, which asserts that multimedia instruction is far more effective when text and graphics are presented in tandem, rather than in isolation. When vocal narration is included, it allows kinesthetic learners the opportunity to take notes. This amalgamated method of instruction benefits visual, auditory, and kinesthetic learners alike.
4. Make your tests more challenging
I know what you’re thinking: that doesn’t sound like fun! But hey, when a compliance program’s final assessment contains answers that are overly obvious, participants are less likely to take it seriously. You want your team members and stakeholders to be forced to take a moment and reflect on what they have learned. This way, you’re actually evaluating whether the participants have digested the information and have the aptitude to apply it when need be.
5. Use parables and real-life stories
Parables are stories designed to teach a lesson. Humans respond far better to instructive messages when they are conveyed through a compelling story with an emotional undercurrent. Consider integrating audio clips or videos of real-life people talking about scenarios they’ve encountered on the job. Draw on examples of the impact that adhering to the compliance measures will have on your workplace. Stories are a natural way of connecting with your participants on an innate level.
6. Gamify your content
What better way to get your employees on board with compliance training than by tricking them into believing they’re playing an entertaining game? Gamification is a reliable method for increasing engagement and interpolating a little fun into the learning process. You can easily gamify your compliance program by incorporating simple elements such as levels, leaderboards, points, and badges. Using animated graphics, video clips, or sound effects will also activate your participants’ senses and trigger a stronger memory recall.
Luminosity, a leading brain training company, is one of many forward-thinking organizations that have applied the concept of emotional design to build a catalog of brain games that help increase focus and improve cognition.
The Benefits of Conducting Compliance Training Using Elearning
The rise of the eLearning industry has seen the emergence of a plethora of innovative and individualized learning experiences become available to people far and wide. Virtual classrooms have grown into a prominent trend, enabling workplaces to provide various training and compliance courses directly from inside the office.
Casting the right voice is crucial to the success of your training program. When you’re seeking out a voice actor to perform your script read, you should carefully consider the personality of your brand, match the voice to your intended participants, find a voice suitable for long-form educational content, conduct tests with your target audience, and assess the long-term goals of your training program (determine whether the actor will be appropriate to use in future iterations of your eLearning program).
Plus, creating online learning courses with rich voice overs in a variety of languages, accents, and character voices has never been easier. When you hire voice actors online through marketplaces like Voices, you not only have an expansive range of voices at your fingertips — it’s also incredibly easy to work with voice actors remotely.
Refreshing Your Corporate Compliance Program to Go Above and Beyond
Crafting a corporate compliance program that simultaneously doles out pertinent information while encouraging all designated participants to actively adhere to it is a multi-step process.
To help you along the way, we’ve laid out some guidelines to follow as you build a compliance program that invigorates and fortifies your organization.
Collect data (both internally and externally)
The process of gathering intel on your company’s current operations involves conducting audits across several divisions to assess compliance that is either already taking place, or being violated. What needs to change? What does your new compliance program need to include that wasn’t there before?
Identify the scope of your corporate compliance program
It is important to map out a timeline for getting your compliance program off the ground, administering it to all necessary parties, and subsequently assessing its effectiveness. This aspect will include formulating a detailed list of objectives that you are setting out to achieve.
Conduct a risk assessment
Scope out all the risks that threaten your organization’s operations, measuring the associated costs and outcomes, and defining what it will take to prevent them.
Appoint a compliance officer
This step will be contingent upon the size of your organization. If you do not assign a specific member of your organization to safeguard all corporate compliance duties, then it can be just as effective to have those responsibilities spread out throughout your team.
Establish senior points of support
Senior leaders ought to set an example by enthusiastically welcoming and consistently adhering to the compliance mandate. Employees should always be encouraged to offer their input. If an organization is attempting to implement an updated corporate compliance program, but the board and senior management aren’t taking it seriously, then nobody else will either.
Build a procedure for monitoring compliance on an ongoing basis
When you’ve built a sound company culture and a structured system for reporting breaches and misconduct, it will ideally act as a ‘human firewall’ that catches issues from the inside.
Disseminate your corporate compliance program
The time has come. Once you’ve carried out all the previous steps toward establishing your airtight corporate compliance program, disseminate it among all the participants it was produced for. Ensure that company officers, employees, and third-party vendors all read and sign off on the policies and procedures.
Ensuring Your Corporate Compliance Program is Effective
Throughout the entire process of administering your corporate compliance program, you should measure results and document all of your efforts.
For your corporate compliance program to have a lasting effect on your organization, it cannot simply function as a one-off. You should check in periodically with your compliance program’s participants by administering a short quiz concerning key policies. The purpose of the quiz isn’t to determine how much the participant knows, but rather how effective your program and the information it supplied was.
As always, you should welcome everyone to point out areas that the compliance program isn’t fully covering. Stay up to date with workplace and governmental policies, and regularly update your program to reflect those policies.
Equipping your organization with an effective corporate compliance program is a rewarding and necessary step toward standing tall as an industry leader with a team that cooperates and works together harmoniously.
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