If your company’s compliance training has been falling flat, you can quickly improve things by thinking like a trial lawyer. Trial lawyers like people. We like talking to people, listening to them, and sharing ideas. Trial lawyers also take difficult concepts and boil them into key pieces of information to keep the jury focused on what is essential for our case. If we don't watch, listen to, and engage with our audience, we have no way of knowing whether they understand our position and what is important for them to reach a decision. If we cannot communicate our point of view effectively, we lose our case and our clients.
Corporate compliance training involves the same basic approach. Effective training is not easy. It's not reading a PowerPoint aloud or standing up and listening to the sound of your voice. Whether presented online or in person, training must be interactive—a dialogue of sorts. Even if your compliance content is spot-on, if your delivery is bad the message is lost.
While there is no one-size-fits-all model for effective compliance training, we have put together a few tips that should help in-house compliance lawyers with their training presentations:
1. Engage People
It is easier to learn through a conversation as opposed to a lecture. Think back to law school: The best law school classes stimulated discussion among students and posed tough questions from both sides. The worst involved students hiding behind their computers for the entire class and surfing the web.
Dialogue keeps students engaged, and the same concept applies to compliance training. The best training sessions involve audience interaction. If the training is computer-based, the interaction may be through questions related to the content and scenarios. If it's live training, the interaction may be real-world examples from the audience of difficult issues they’ve faced in the past. Too many compliance trainings spend 80 percent of their time on cookie-cutter slides about a particular subject matter and then leave scant time for questions or working through a practical scenario. Flip that upside down and your training will be far more effective.
