Chief Learning Officer - August 2007 - (Page 24)

learning solutions in practice: Integrating Integrity: Strategic Compliance Training at AOL The legalities of doing business are rarely riveting, but companies have a legal and moral obligation to educate their employees on the laws and ethical issues related to their work. To make their compliance training more than an annual rehashing of facts and figures, companies need to engage their employees on the issues, provide a place to turn for advice and explain how these topics link to the organization’s strategic goals. The compliance training at AOL covers everything from discrimination to anti-trust laws, which can make it difficult for employees to absorb every aspect of each compliance issue. To help all employees understand the regulations and principles surrounding their jobs, AOL issues them a copy of “Standards of Business Conduct (SBC)” and makes the information readily available online. These standards tell employees how to maintain a professional workplace, protect company records and information, prevent conflicts of interest and conduct business in a global marketplace. Showing its workers the right way to conduct business helps AOL keep up its reputation in the marketplace, said Kimberly Strong, vice president of business conduct and compliance. Running a reputable and responsible business helps the company meet its strategic goals of growth, engagement and monetization by creating strong and trustworthy relationships with its business partners, customers and employees, she said. “Because we have a good reputation, that lends itself to having good morale, and it allows us to recruit good people to become employees of the company,” Strong said. If employees feel their company shares their personal values and is truly dedicated to ethical business practices, they are much more likely to dedicate themselves to their work, she explained. Having strongly supported standards also ensures workers are more aware of the risks involved with their projects and helps them take the necessary steps to do quality work. “We look at how we build our processes, how we build our procedures and how we build our internal controls,” Strong said. “They should all come back and tie in to our Standards of Business Conduct. That way, you know you’re building a system where everybody understands how things tie together.” Yet, for this to be more than just lip service, employees have to feel their company is truly dedicated to these standards. This can happen only by getting commitment and support from people at all levels of the organization, Strong explained. This starts at the top, with the senior leadership going through the same compliance training as every other employee. CEO Randy Falco also makes it clear in his companywide communications that conducting business the right way is one of his top priorities for AOL, Strong said. The company also shows its sincerity by continually communicating its goals through quarterly compliance themes. Each quarter, AOL focuses on a topic from SBC, addressing the theme in corporate communications, providing managers with talking points to cover in their reports and training volunteer SBC advisers to talk with people in their business units. Personalizing employees’ interaction with AOL’s standards helps integrate compliance and business-conduct issues into their daily work, Strong said, and integration helps people see how good decisions add value to the company. “Our SBC advisers are embedded in the business units and are a resource for employees, so it’s not just the business conduct office or the lawyers or HR talking to employees — it’s people in their business units whom they walk around with every day who are talking to them about this subject,” she said. “We take a very integrated approach.” —Tegan Jones, tjones@clomedia.com The Compliance Progress Survey found only 28 percent of respondents felt fully confident that they were complying with applicable regulations. Senior managers said the most challenging aspect of compliance was the cost to manage it. Indeed, a study by AMR Research reported that organizations were projected to spend more than $7 billion in 2006 on labor associated with compliance. Interestingly, only 30 percent of the ControlPath respondents said they were leveraging a unified compliance process to deal with multiple regulations. The conclusion: Businesses are not treating compliance as a holistic business issue but as disparate processes with different owners and redundant costs. Most organizations look at achieving compliance as onedimensional — get 80 percent of our business to be compliant, and we’re through. But if you want to truly change behaviors and norms, you need to plan and execute an educational, context-setting initiative and instill an ongoing reward/reminder/punishment element, using influencers (for example, our kids and seat belts). So, as you consider how to execute the change regulations require, first be very clear about what you’re trying to do. You can legally comply and do it with no expectations, or you can try to drive behavioral change in your organization at an aggressive pace, adjust your business practices and look at this with a systems view of true change. Four Steps to Strategic Compliance Training If you really want to change norms, there are four things you should be doing to paint a holistic picture that will really help to change people’s behaviors. 1. Create “the why.” Before getting into the details of the new norms and behaviors, we need to ground people in the why of change. There is an old saying, “People will tolerate the conclusion of others but will act on their own.” Exploring “the why” of change in a meaningful way will accelerate the behavior change. For seat belts, one primary factor would be the opportunity to save thousands of lives. 2. Explain “the what.” To maximize the money you invest in compliance training, paint a holistic picture of what the change is. In the seat belt case, this would be changes in the law and the consequences of not abiding by it. Communicate through August 2007 I www.clomedia.com I Chief Learning Officer 24 http://www.clomedia.com

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