[00:00:00] Speaker A: You've got questions and we've got answers. I'm Julia Boyes and this is BELA Asks.
The Business Ethics Leadership alliance, or BELA, as we like to call it, is a community of organizations committed to maturing their ethics and compliance programs and strengthening their speak up culture. They do this a myriad of ways, from events to resources to data. And whereas we believe that every organization out there could benefit from being a BELA member, we know that there is no competition in compliance and we are not interested in gatekeeping best practices.
So we developed Bella Asks as a part of the Ethicast podcast. BELA members can submit their questions through their concierge service, in which we look at the questions and we curate answers for each individual question.
Today we are honored to be joined by Ethisphere's Chief Strategy Officer and Executive Chair of BELA, Erica Salmon Byrne. Erica, it's so good to see you again.
[00:01:07] Speaker B: Oh, Julia, it's good to see you. And it's exciting to be back with yet again another amazing BELLA Ask questions. 2026 has just been a banner year so far for great inquiries from our BELLA community.
[00:01:23] Speaker A: Yes. And today we have a great question that I think speaks to people's wanting to really get going with their trainings. In 2026, we had a BELA member ask us what is a good number and type of knowledge assessment to include within code trainings? And they even gave a little more context. They said, is 22 activities or quizzes in a 30 minute course too much material?
[00:01:46] Speaker B: Yep, yep. No, it's a great question and I'm really glad that they asked both about the number and about the type because you should be asking yourself both of those questions. But I want to just take a step back for a quick second, Julia, and talk about why we have assessments in training in the first place. So because that really determines what feels like too much.
So the purpose of doing assessments throughout the course of a training course is really twofold. One is make sure you're bringing your learner along. So, so as you transition from topic to topic, have you covered what you had previously covered in the. In the prior chunk?
And then also to make sure that they are developing a command of the materials. So a little bit of the answer to this question is going to be it depends on the type of assessment you're talking about. Right. What is the purpose of the assessment that you are utilizing in the course?
I have, for example, taken training courses over the years that have been almost completely assessment driven. So here's a scenario. Pick the right course of action. Great. Way to learn if I'm a learner that already has a rough sense of the material. So in that case, you know, in a 30 minute course, it could be almost entirely assessment, technically assessment driven. Because you keep presenting me with short little fact based scenarios.
Often these are in the, in the, you know, kind of best case scenarios. These are based on things that have actually happened inside your organization. I love to see this in, in company training where the company is custom building a training course that says like, hey, it's time for conflicts of interest training. Let's pick our five most commonly presented conflicts of interest issues from the last two years, turn them into fact based scenarios and ask people to choose the right course of action in response to that fact pattern. That could be a training course potentially that is entirely assessment driven. Right? Short little fact pattern, choose the right course of action.
On the flip side, I have seen trainings where they're full of quizzes or assessments and I can't figure out what purpose the assessment is serving because it's not really measuring whether I paid attention in the prior segment and it's not going to be necessarily giving the compliance team any meaningful information on whether or not I understood the material.
So the question that I would encourage this Bella member and anybody else listening to you and I to ask is, why am I assessing at this moment in time? And is the type of assessment that I'm doing here measuring the thing that I want it to be measuring? And can I get the data in such a way that I can actually do something with it? Because if your answer to those questions is yes, kind of across the board, then it doesn't really matter how many assessments you put in your training course.
If it feels intentional to the learner, if it's bringing a learner along, if it's giving you data you can do something with, then you're not going to disadvantage your audience by including them.
If it feels not intentional, if it feels like I threw a quiz in here because I had to, then you're going to lose your employee base. You're going to lose your learner in that moment in time. So the question to be asking is less what's the right number? And more what's the purpose? What's the purpose of this assessment? What's the purpose of putting it in here? And am I varying the types of assessments in such a way that I am capturing the variety of the employee base that I have? The types of learners that I have in my employee base? Do I even know what my employee base is? Made up of in terms of learners. Right. So that's another gating question to be asking yourself.
And then what am I going to do with the data?
If my data shows me that everyone is failing this particular topic A do I have the data to know that that's happening? So am I able to get the data out of the training course in the first place and am I able to do something with that data? Because if I'm not, then don't ask that assessment.
[00:05:49] Speaker A: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. It reminds me of a conversation we recently had about sort of test out training and just, you know, these trainings really should be intentional like you said. And that data piece, I don't know, could you speak a little bit more to like, if I am trying to capture data, what are the top things I should be trying to glean from these trainings?
[00:06:10] Speaker B: Yeah, great follow up question, Julia. So if I, you know, if whoever you're working with, right, if you're working with an external training vendor, if you're working with your internal L and D team, really understand what your learning management system. This is all, of course, assuming online training, if it's in person training, it's a slightly different exercise. But assuming online training, what is the data that my learning management system can give me about the learner experience? Can I understand how long it took somebody to answer the quiz? Can I understand the number of attempts someone had to take before they got the right question? Can I understand which was the most commonly wrong answer chosen? So like, you know, is there an answer option where a certain subset of my employees chose the wrong response? Where are those people? Are they regionally located? Are they divisionally located? Are they located in a particular role where they struggled with a particular issue? Because that data can then help me customize my follow ups.
One of the things that I have seen over the course of the last several years that has really heartened me about this work is is increasingly ethics teams are asking themselves about the year long or multi year long plan for employee engagement as opposed to saying, well, this is learning and then we're done really leaning into no, we need to communicate, right?
Adult learning research tells us that people need to hear the same message repeatedly before it actually engenders a change in behavior. And so pairing your training with communications efforts is becoming increasingly common. And one of the best things you can use the data from your training course for is figuring out what do people need additional resources around? What did people struggle with? Even if eventually I got the right answer and was able to get credit for completing the course?
What topic did I struggle with? Which answer options were most likely to be chosen as the wrong answers? Which where were the scenarios where people had to replay the video or revisit some piece of the training course? Those are the kinds of things that are going to give me insights into what other activities my team has to engage in over the course of the period of time, from that training to the next one.
[00:08:31] Speaker A: That's wonderful advice. Thank you so much, Erica.
[00:08:34] Speaker B: Oh, it's a great follow up question.
[00:08:37] Speaker A: Well, we really appreciate the time that you take to to really answer these questions in such a holistic and comprehensive way. So thank you so much for joining us today.
[00:08:47] Speaker B: Oh, absolutely. And to all those Bella members out there listening, I know I say that at the end of every Bella Asks episode, but I really do mean it. Please keep the questions coming. It is not only a wonderful thing that we can do for the Bella community to answer these questions directly to you when you send them to us, but it allows us to keep a pulse on what the community writ large is thinking about and worrying about and talking about. And to be able to bring those answers out to the ecosystem more broadly is one of the reasons we're here. So please, please, please keep the questions coming.
[00:09:20] Speaker A: Thanks, Erica. Take care.
[00:09:22] Speaker B: You too.
[00:09:23] Speaker A: For more conversations like the one you heard today, subscribe to our YouTube channel or wherever you get your podcasts. To find resources surrounding today's topic or other ethics and compliance topics, visit ethisphere.com/resources and to learn more about a Bella membership and what that entails, write to us
[email protected] and like Erica just said, if you have questions, please send them our way. We love to answer your questions and we love to provide the community with information that will help all of us grow together.
Thanks for joining us today. I'm Julia Boyes and this is BELA Asks.
[00:10:09] Speaker B: It.
