Two ELI clients recently asked me, “What does your company offer to refresh the Civil Treatment® learning we’ve just done?” or “What workplace ethics and compliance training should we provide next?”
In some cases, these questions are prompted by new regulatory initiatives such as the Department of Labor’s new Plan/Prevent/Protect compliance strategy. For these clients, the immediate solution may be Wage & Hour-FLSA training.
For other HR executives, the more important and fundamental question is “What can we do now?” rather than “What can we do next?” These professionals recognize that keeping workforces current on legal and regulatory obligations is only a baseline requirement. They understand that next-step compliance training cannot fully address ongoing behavioral or cultural problems within their organizations.
So how can HR professionals keep civil workplace initiatives alive and connect legal compliance with organizational values like respect and integrity?
Here are a few simple action steps to keep employees and leaders engaged and focused on implementing what they have learned rather than waiting for the urgency of a crisis to drive a fresh need for ethics and compliance training:
- Simplify the essence of learning to a few key behavioral principles. Leaders should begin by applying a few key learning principles each week that reinforce Civil Treatment training.
- Get leaders to learn and teach. In medicine, the teaching maxim is see it, do it, teach it. The same principle applies to professionalism, ethics, legality and civility. Leaders must transfer what they have learned virally across their department or business unit through a series of short briefings, videos or simple daily checklists to guide their team’s actions. When leaders are held responsible for “teaching” or communicating the organization’s standards of behavior and ethics, they become more inclined to follow these mandates themselves.
- Make sure learning continues outside the classroom and away from the desktop. Lessons that alter behavior occur in real-world situations. When your organization delivers training on a particular topic, ask participants to keep “short, one-minute journal entries” about how they have applied what they have learned on a daily or weekly basis. Employees or associates can share what they’ve learned with others either in small informal meetings or in online discussion groups. Highlight and praise instances when leaders or teams have applied what they have learned.
- Hold people accountable for the basics they should have learned. If the content is important enough to teach, it should be important enough to be applied. If it’s not, then address the deficiency like any other performance issue. This sends a clear signal to employees that the training had a serious purpose, and that lessons need to be learned and used.
I welcome your insights and ideas in the comments section below.How do you reinforce ethics, code of conduct and compliance learning in your organization after the training is over? How do you hold your managers and employees accountable for applying what they’ve learned in training on the job?
