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Every time there is a paradigm shift in any arena, a new vocabulary – either new words or new meanings to older words – emerges to account for a host of novel concepts. By way of a range of examples, consider:
- Parenting – the word discipline means something very different in my house than it did in the house where I grew up
- Culture – imagine, for example, how words like inclusiveness, diversity, tolerance and other contemporary memes would sound to someone arriving in a time machine from the 19th Century
- Science – all of the language of quantum electrodynamics would have been foreign – not to mention very troubling – to, say, Isaac Newton (not least of which would be the word uncertainty!)
The same thing is true in compliance, as I learned in the reader comments to my last blog post, in which I made reference to “low-bandwidth” compliance communications, a term which caused confusion for at least one reader. As the paradigm of compliance communications shifts away from long, burdensome elearning programs toward quick bursts of information delivered in an organized, structured fashion, a new vocabulary has emerged to account for its conceptual differences from “traditional” practices.
Here are some of the most important ones:
- Low Bandwidth Communications: Communications that require limited cognitive focus over short periods of time and are easy to understand.
- Multi-Channel Communication: Your company already communicates through a variety of channels – email, intranet sites, a Learning Management System, company publications, staff meetings, etc. An effective communication program leverages a variety of channels to connect with people from multiple angles.
- Multi-Modal Communication: Communication on a topic that comes in different forms – think videos, articles in a newsletter, manager’s meetings with staff, etc. People learn in different ways and no single communication style will do. Also, multi-modal approaches to communication make it easy to repeat messages several times but have them continue to appear fresh.
- Risk-Based Communications: Communications directed at specific audiences based on a reasonable assessment of the compliance risk associated with that audience. This is contrasted with a blanket approach to communication in which everyone gets the same training or other information regardless of risk profile, which often is an important cause of training fatigue. (I’ve heard the practice of “smearing” the same training across everyone regardless of risk profile referred to as “peanut buttering,” which I find very amusing).
- Training Fatigue: The feeling among employees that they receive too much training that is not relevant to their work and that is not appropriately matched to the risks they face. In most cases, Compliance Training is competing with many other kinds of employee training, and must be carefully considered in that context.
For a more complete Glossary of Compliance Communications, follow this link: http://bit.ly/1wIxcus
COMPLIANCE COMMUNICATIONS TIP: Just understanding the new vocabulary of compliance communications can go a long way toward shifting your current “compliance training and communications” framework to a much more effective approach.
