Nicole Rose (nicolerose@createtraining.com.au), Director of Sydney-based Create Training, and Jason Meyer (jason@leadgood.org), President of LeadGood LLC in Princeton, New Jersey, USA, are cofounders of the Eight Mindsets Initiative.
At the beginning of 2020, the world changed. In a matter of weeks, we went from global travel to global lockdown. Suddenly, we were all juggling home working with home schooling and working with remote teams who needed to produce and learn remotely. On top of all of that, we had more reason than ever to educate people about compliance, ethics, and risk.
With all the demands for our time and attention—demands that are not ebbing—how do we satisfy the need to be salient to every segment of our audiences as the list of topics grows? How can we effectively educate people about compliance when we feel like we don’t have time to keep up with our day job, our families, and our personal lives?
The answer lies in eight key mindsets.
Over the past 18 months we, the authors, developed the Eight Mindsets as a joint initiative between our organizations.[1] In September 2021 we were thrilled to present them to more than 400 people at SCCE’s Compliance & Ethics Institute, during our session, “Do It Yourself: The Entrepreneurial Mindsets of Ethics and Compliance Training.”[2]
This article will break down one of these mindsets so you can use the principles immediately to help you produce your own effective training in-house. We will discuss other mindsets in subsequent articles.
The compliance and ethics training problem—and a solution
No one can speak more passionately or knowledgeably about your organization’s compliance challenges than you can. And compliance and risk challenges are often time critical. Even so, it’s no wonder that training either gets fully outsourced or put on the back burner.
We get it. Take Nicole’s experience: 15 years ago, she was working in compliance in London in the midst of a regulatory investigation. She was constantly wondering why people still weren’t getting “the message,” even with an ongoing regulatory investigation. She thought that development of effective compliance training was something that took time, needed design experts, and required countless subject matter experts. She also thought compliance training was something that people did once a year or was a punishment for those who broke the rules.
Then Nicole moved to Australia and took some time out from law and compliance to study art. A few months into the course she was asked by the chief compliance officer of an international mining company to support the compliance team. It turned out that there was a heap of training that needed updating. So, she combined her art study with her new study of compliance training.
She started doodling and playing around with PowerPoint and animation software. She then started producing short video case studies with short messages. Little did she know that this would become what we now call micro-learning and that 60,000 employees globally would be given an entirely new way of looking at compliance. In addition, the training time shortened for her client, from three hours of “click-mouse” training to a few short videos, saving the organization thousands of man hours. And the reduction in time did not reduce the effectiveness of the training.
Nicole’s team put catchy music to quickly drawn images and came up with slogans such as “There’s no such thing as a free lunch.” They turned third-party due diligence into a cartoon called “Guess who’s coming to dinner” and created an online gameshow called “Dilemmas.” And Nicole created every piece of that early training driven by her passion as a storyteller, her experience working in a team as a collaborator, and her interest in how people retain information and learn. She was learning on the job. You could say she was learning how to “DIY train.”
The result was that learners all around the world were excited and interested in compliance. Forty percent of users completed a voluntary survey, and the results were staggering: People were engaged, understood the key messages, and wanted to do more compliance training! In fact, people were doing the voluntary modules as well as the mandatory ones—all of this despite the training being produced internally by a tiny compliance team, using internal case studies and no budget apart from Nicole’s time as a member of the team.
