For the last five years, NAVEX Global has been proud to provide the industry’s best and most statistically accurate hotline benchmarking data. Our annual reports are a trusted resource for ethics and compliance officers, executives and boards of directors who have program oversight responsibilities. Given the eagerness in the space for data relating to the industry’s biggest challenges, we thought it would be prudent to do some research into the number one area of compliance spend – ethics and compliance training.
NAVEX Global has just completed a survey of over 700 key decision-makers and individuals responsible for ethics and compliance training. The responses revealed surprising insights about their top ethics and compliance training priorities and challenges—as well as information that is vital to organizations that benchmark their own training programs. Some of the many key insights that the Training Benchmark Report will include are:
- How much training and what type of training are organizations doing?
- What topics are organizations training on most frequently?
- What pressures and challenges are compliance professionals dealing with?
- What troubling training gaps exist in E&C programs?
- What are the key metrics for measuring program effectiveness?
- What are the top training trends for 2014 and beyond?
Surprising Key Findings About New Approaches to Effective Training
A really important finding is that culture has finally edged out compliance as the top objective for training. Perhaps the continuous flow of headline scandals has finally caused organizational leaders to ask their compliance officers, “Why don’t employees just comply with the rules?” And compliance officers know the answer—culture wins over the rules every time. This realization opens the door on many activities that compliance officers can advocate to better support a culture of integrity.
Another interesting finding is that online training (71 percent) is the most commonly-used training format, nosing past live training (68 percent). Even for organizations that have the ability to offer blended learning on topics, e-learning is an effective way to drive large volumes of learning, provide consistency of content, and auto-track completion. Live training likely remains a highly utilized method for targeted audiences and for specific risk areas because it works so effectively for small audiences, for high-risk or complex topics and it can be delivered by a locally recognized expert (in local language).