ATD Blog
Mon Jul 13 2015
More organizations are recognizing the impact organizational culture has on the bottom line. Consequently, they are adopting new strategies to leverage mid-level managers as vehicles for shaping workforce culture.
It should be no surprise that the middle management of an organization represents the most influential layer in a company. In fact, studies show that employees are more likely to escalate ethical concerns or observations of risk to their frontline manager before calling the company hotline. Likewise, employees are more likely to have regular conversations with their daily supervisor than dialogue with the CEO or top leadership.
Indeed, many studies indicate that direct managers often are considered the local “face” of the company—and the ambassador of what is acceptable behavior. This can be a great asset to some organizations, but it also poses risks at a local level, especially in high-risk profile countries and industries. After all, as the adage goes, people typically do not quit their jobs, they quit their managers.
According to LRN’s Ethics and Compliance Program Effectiveness report, the most effective ethics and compliance (E&C) programs don’t “do” ethics and compliance. They enable and assist their business units to do so. The study points to the marked importance of middle management playing a visible role in expressly addressing E&C risks.
Designing an effective education and communication strategy can be challenging in our largely global business environment. One size does not fit all, and social and cultural norms need to be balanced with practical guidance around policies. As an advisor on Ethics & Compliance program strategy for more than a decade, I’ve witnessed a shift in the last few years in a few specific areas of building effective E&C training.
Overcoming Training Fatigue
Organizations are attempting to re-awaken their workforce and eliminate “check the box” activities. As an advisor, I’ve witnessed a shift toward greater adoption of blended learning strategies. Organizations also are becoming acutely aware of the multi-generational dynamics and the need to adopt a more learner-centered curriculum.
As a result, companies are mixing learning tools and resources to create more personalized, dynamic, and relevant learning experiences. These strategies include promoting more adaptive, social, and collaborative learning, such as gamified courses and mobile learning. Blended learning keeps E&C training relevant, interactive, and promotes more ownership of the learning outcomes. The participant can truly shift from being a passive learner to an active decision maker.
Spotlight on Tone in the Middle
Managers are being encouraged or even measured around their role in driving regular discussions with their teams around ethics and compliance. Frontline management is in the best position to translate abstract and complex issues into relatable learning. Compliance policies and guidelines can sometimes be dense and difficult to process.
Information Overload
In our hyper-connected environment, employees are bombarded volumes of information. Having walked the halls of many organizations—interviewing and running focus groups on effective training—one resonating comment is the exasperation employees feel as a result of information overload.
Employees welcome guidance that filters the truly critical components relevant to their ability to impact the business. By providing the right tools to local management to engage a dialogue with their teams on risk-based issues allows employees to draw the linkage back to the purpose and mission and formulate relatable scenarios.
Why Have a Conversation?
First off, in the context of developing effective E&C education programs, a dialogue can “break the ice” and start a real conversation in the company. Ultimately, this helps reinforce important messages and surface potential risk gaps. Fear of speaking up is a real problem for many organizations. More importantly, though, there is a human element of intuition and emotive motivation.
Albert Bandura’s social learning theory asserts that at the most basic levels of human interaction, people learn from each other through observation, imitation and modeling behavior. Behavior change does not happen overnight. But as anyone can relate, when you are seeking to affect your own personal goals, it starts with recognizing the problem and becoming self-aware of the need for change. Understanding the steps to reach your goals and building the skills through “learning by doing” takes consistent practice and reinforcement. Regular dialogue, coaching, and feedback help sustain the behavior and promote newer and more efficient ways to properly handle difficult situations.
Consider how it feels when participate in or a group fitness challenge or teambuilding exercise. We are interconnected and motivated through social learning and the first step is to reach out and start a conversation. As organizations seek to build healthier, ethical cultures that mitigate risk and drive more sustainable business practices, the conversation should start at the top.
Manager-led guidance, peer interaction and feedback play a critical component in sustaining the dialogue. According to data from LRN’s Ethics and Compliance Program Effectiveness Index (PEI), highly effective programs demonstrate two major factors: 1) visible commitment from senior management and 2) senior-level motivation to middle management to expressly address ethics and compliance issues.
Here’s How to Get Started
Many organizations are developing toolkits—electronic versions of “meetings in a box”— that contain resources, case studies, facilitator guides, and other learning aids to help bring values to life. Discussion-based training that explores challenging, gray-area situations can have the most impact. Keeping these materials fresh and revised as a dynamic toolbox is critical to ensure the case discussions stay close to the relevant issues.
Similarly, some organizations collect real stories from employee participants to enrich the case discussion. Others drive promotional activities to nominate and recognize powerful stories of change, growth, mitigating risk, failure. Real stories help crystalize the message and align a global workforce around the organization’s core values and day to day operations.
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