[00:00:00] Speaker A: Hi, everyone. The Business Ethics Leadership alliance has questions and we have answers. I'm your host, Bill Coffin. Welcome to another Bella Asks episode of the Ethicast.
One of the best benefits of being a member of the Business Ethics Leadership alliance, or bella, is is that if you have any questions at all about ethics and compliance, you can submit them to Bella's concierge service and one of our internal experts will provide an answer and direct you to a helpful resource for more information.
Many of these requests speak to broad challenges facing Bella members and by extension, the wider ethics and compliance profession. That's why we're using this show to thematically respond to high level questions from the Bella community. Joining us once again to answer those questions is Bella chair Erica Salmon Byrne.
[00:00:52] Speaker B: Eric.
[00:00:52] Speaker A: Erica, it's good to see you again. Thank you so much for joining us, Bill.
[00:00:55] Speaker B: It is good to see you again and to have an opportunity to answer a few more of these questions.
[00:01:00] Speaker A: Well, our next question is a training question and it reads what are appropriate consequences to set for failing to complete compliance training?
[00:01:08] Speaker B: Yeah. So Bill, this is a really good question that kind of fits into a little bit of the theme that you and I have been talking about when it comes to training design, training planning, training completion rates. Right. We answered a question not that long ago about what a good training completion rate look like.
And you know that that really went back to training planning because again, if you've planned your training well and people understand why it applies to their job, the likelihood that you're going to struggle to get people to complete their training goes down because you've given them something useful that they are actually, you know, going to want to take in from a content perspective. Now, that said, inevitably you're going to have people who fail to complete their training on time. And there are a couple things that you can that we see companies doing in this regard. Obviously, first start with the manager. So looking at the manager and saying, hey, you know, here are the four people on your team that have not completed their training in a timely fashion. We need you to help us chase these people. That's sort of stage one. You can tie it into their performance evaluation and promotion decisions. So to what extent can you include timely completion of training in the calculus of whether or not I'm eligible for 100% of my bonus? That is something that we see often because you save time, energy and money of the compliance team or the HR team chasing people if you have a built in incentive that helps them take their training on time.
Some of the Draconian places we see companies get to are things like shutting off your system, right? So, hey, you didn't complete your training, you've now lost your ability to access whatever systems it is you need to be able to get your job done. And so we see this a lot with some of, you know, data security training.
It will shut off access to particular systems that are sensitive and, you know, not allow somebody to access it because they haven't completed their data security training. We do also see this with compliance training as well, where, you know, we just shut off your ability to access the system because you have been so delinquent with your training that that's kind of the step that we get to. So start with the manager. Look at ways that you can build in training completion into your performance evaluation and bonus payment system. And then you can look at draconian steps like systems access. And are there pieces of the work that somebody might do that they need to be able to access? And you can put a roadblock there if they haven't completed their training.
[00:03:38] Speaker A: Is there one practice that you have seen to kind of spur the completion of training that struck you as especially novel or especially unusual? And what was your take on that?
[00:03:47] Speaker B: My favorite thing, Bill, is contests. So having a approach where you look at teams and you compare those teams to similarly situated teams and you celebrate the teams that get their training done first. So we've seen companies have a leaderboard, we've seen companies offer parties, right? So, like, hey, you guys completed all your training on time. You, you know, the company's going to send you lunch, right? Whatever, you know, you were the first one to completion. The company's going to send you lunch. It's funny, leaderboards actually work really well, particularly if you have a culture inside your organization that is moderately competitive. Being able to rank leaders based on speed to completion of training during the training window, right? And you can say like, hey, you know, congratulations, so, and so your team's at 100%. We've also seen that work with survey response calculations, right. Even here at, at the sphere, when we launch our engagement or our culture surveys, we have celebrated the first teams to get to 100%. And inevitably, when we post in the Slack channel, hey, congratulations to the, you know, Bella team you made, you know, you, you, you're at 100%. We inevitably see every other team's completion rate go up because there's that element of, oh, we gotta be next, right? We gotta be next to done. And so I would say, you know, if you're a compliance Officer, listening to this, don't discount the competitive nature of your people and, you know, use it as a way of getting people to do what you're asking them to do in the first place.
[00:05:18] Speaker A: I could not agree with you more. I feel the sting of that every single time those messages go out. I'm like, oh, gosh, even though I've completed it, I want to be part of that winning team. And if I had. If I had a personal motto, it would be gamify everything, because gamification is just such an effective positive spur, and it really kind of brings the best out of people from that competitive urge. So it's. It's glad to hear you say that because I was kind of wondering how well that that approach might work, and it sounds like it would. So that's great to hear.
[00:05:45] Speaker B: Yep, absolutely. And you could do it at the leadership level. You can do it at the manager level, you can do it at the team level, you can do it at the location level, you can do it at the function level. Right, like that. That there's so many different ways you can slice and dice the data that is available to you and celebrate the teams that are doing what you've asked them to do.
[00:06:01] Speaker A: Well, Erica, thank you very much for coming back onto the show and for answering this question. We really appreciate you weighing in on these questions from the Bella community.
[00:06:08] Speaker B: Oh, Bill, it is my pleasure. And as I say, at the end of just about every one of these Bella Asks episodes to every Bella member out there, please keep the questions coming so that I get a chance to come back and answer some more.
[00:06:20] Speaker A: To learn more about Bella, please visit ethesphere.com Bella to request guest access to the member resource hub and to speak with the Bella engagement director. And if you have a question that you would like answered on Bella Asks, be sure to use the Bella concierge service and we'll get to it as soon as we can. I'm Bill Coffin, and this has been a special Bella Asks episode of the Ethicast. For more episodes, please Visit the Ethosphere YouTube
[email protected] ethisphere and if this is your first time enjoying the show, please make sure to like and subscribe on YouTube, Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Thanks so much for joining us. And until next time, remember, strong ethics is good business.
