Creating a culture of compliance by encouraging training and building awareness

While creating a culture of ethics and compliance within a firm depends on a host of elements that circle across people, processes, and technology, an element that stands out, and demands our attention today, is ‘Training and Communication’.

With a growing number of enforcements today, compliance has moved from the back-office into the Board Rooms. The truth of the matter is, while a company can have all the possible policies, practices, and procedures in place, if they are poorly understood and executed and, as a result, do not change the behavior of the organization, what then is the point?

Companies need to find ways and means to engage and communicate their message across employees, while also eventually being able to measure the effectiveness. With that respect, training today can prove to be vital in creating a solid foundation towards establishing an effective compliance programme. Training helps employees understand what is expected of them and, if required, how to escalate and respond (to a situation).

While the costs of such programmes can be significant, they have to be set against the likely counterfactuals, i.e., the escalating costs associated with recruiting externally or, in the absence of investment in the required skills and capabilities, the prospect of ever higher financial penalties for both individual and corporate misconduct. The importance of making that investment towards compliance therefore should not be looked at as a cost today.

Web-based learning is emerging as an excellent option. Not only is it cost effective but, with the influence of technology on today’s work-force, it has become vital to replace the traditional classroom training set up, with the mouse click and the screen tap. Web-based trainings are interactive and engaging. It becomes even more exciting with the confluence of gaming–imagine imparting compliance training based on a game that allows you to choose your own Avatar!

We have understood these requirements and created learning modules that are fun, have real life scenarios, and are developed by experts in the field–all of which is accessible on a web based platform. E-learning will not only help result in higher knowledge retention, appealing to a wider range of learning styles, but will also allow learners to go back and refresh their memory at any point.

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