Compliance &Ethics - Compliance Wave

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Compliance & Ethics

Professional

August

2016

a publication of the society of corporate compliance and ethics

®

www.corporatecompliance.org

Meet Joel A. Rogers CEO of Compliance Wave

Red Bank, New Jersey

See page 16

31

35

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43

Retaliation: The reality Keith Read

Stop, look, and listen: Essential skills for driving effective E&C programs Vlad Kapustin

Data privacy: Structuring an effective employee training program Daniel A. Cotter

India: Corporate social responsibility and corruption Sulaksh Shah and Steve Oroho

This article, published in Compliance & Ethics Professional, appears here with permission from the Society of Corporate Compliance & Ethics. Call SCCE at +1 952 933 4977 or 888 277 4977 with reprint requests.

FEATURE

Meet Joel A. Rogers CEO of Compliance Wave Red Bank, New Jersey

an interview by Adam Turteltaub

Meet Joel A. Rogers Compliance & Ethics Professional®  August 2016

Joel A. Rogers ([email protected]) was interviewed in May of 2016 by Adam Turteltaub ([email protected]) VP, Strategic Initiatives and International Programs at SCCE.

AT: Although we are a young profession, you have a long history in Ethics and Compliance. Your first job in it was back in 1999, working as an ethics trainer and writer in the public sector, and later you were the Director of Ethics Training & Education for the City of New York. What were you doing at the time you took that first job, and what attracted you to the position?

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JR: I guess I came to Ethics and Compliance the way a lot of people do. I kind of fell into it. I did have some interest in Ethics—I had spent some time studying Philosophy, both as an undergraduate and a grad student—but the years leading up to that first job were a little aimless for me. I had been an ESL [English as a Second Language] teacher in Korea for a while. I tutored students in Formal Logic, and I was tending bar and managed a couple of restaurants in Brooklyn. When I found the gig with the City of New York, I was feeling pretty lucky just to find a “real” job doing something interesting.

FEATURE

AT: Tell us a bit about what that job entailed. JR: That was some of the most intense work I’ve ever done. New York City has a workforce of 300,000 employees. My job was to get out and conduct live training for as many of them as possible. Can you imagine that? Conduct live training for 300,000 employees? We had no budget for the obvious stuff like e-learning or other tools that most companies would consider basic needs, so it was all classroomstyle training. I traveled throughout the city several days each week, conducting ethics training for every imaginable municipal audience. One day, I was at a homeless shelter in the Bronx. The next, I was at City Hall training the Mayor and his staff. The following day, I was at a high school in Staten Island talking to administrators and teachers. I wore out several pairs of shoes wandering around New York. Some weeks would be dedicated entirely to a single City agency. Once a year, I would spend a week with the Buildings Department conducting 25 classes; I’d give them 50-minute sessions, starting a new session at the top of every hour. After a while, I couldn’t remember which jokes I had told to which group, or what material I had covered. It was pretty ridiculous, really. This was the Stone Age for ethics training.

different kinds of messages to see what would get the most favorable responses, and I became really fascinated with what kinds of compliance communication would really get the best results. I started reading about this and looking around at who was talking about how to create real behavior change in the area of Compliance. In general, it seemed to be the training vendor community (which was a natural fit for me), although most of them were primarily focused on the question of driving “culture,” which struck me as important, but also kind of nebulous. I also doubted that the products the vendors were selling were really likely to have any impact on corporate culture, to be honest. But, there was one small consulting firm, not too far from where I was living and working, that appeared to be doing really interesting work. They were applying the behavioral science principles popularized by social psychologist Robert Cialdini to corporate compliance products and approaches. I was amazed by the theories they were working from, and the practical results they seemed to be getting. I was very fortunate to land the opportunity to move from my role in government to work with them on the corporate side. It was like working on a social science experiment and making a positive difference in the world, while doing something commercially viable and financially satisfying. So that was, you know, nice.

AT: You left the government to work in the compliance and ethics training industry. What led you to the switch? JR: Good question. You know, I spent so many countless hours talking directly to audiences about ethics—it became a sort of informal laboratory for me. I would try

AT: Can you give an example of what kind of behavior-change principles you’re talking about? +1 952 933 4977 or 888 277 4977   www.corporatecompliance.org 

Compliance & Ethics Professional®  August 2016

New York City has a workforce of 300,000 employees. My job was to get out and conduct live training for as many of them as possible.

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FEATURE

JR: Sure. For example, behavioral science understands very well that many behaviors—and this is as true for humans as it is in the animal word—result from the playing out of patterns of conditioned responses to particular stimuli. We are conditioned for all kinds of behavioral responses that we don’t necessarily recognize as conditioned behaviors at all, which are designed (so to speak) by our nervous systems to help us avoid pain and gain pleasure. Here’s an example: When you were growing up on the playground, there were a hundred names you’d get called if you informed a teacher that a classmate had done something against the rules. You’d be called a “snitch,” a “tattletale,” a “rat,” and possibly be ostracized by the rest of the class; and notice that you can’t even think of a positive playground word for telling on a classmate—kids don’t have the equivalent of “whistleblower.” So how do we think employees might respond, after all that conditioning, when we tell them they are supposed to “report” wrongdoing if they see it? For many employees, the first response— the conditioned response—is to push that requirement away. Reporting causes pain! So, in order to cut through the conditioned behavior, we need to present the employee with what’s called a “pattern interrupt”—something unexpected—maybe a question that gets the individual to think in a different way or maybe something funny or otherwise emotionally stimulating. These are not attributes, by the way, of most compliance training I’ve seen.

The role of the pattern interrupt is to disrupt the conditioned response and free up some psychological space for the employee to start to see things differently. Like, in this case, that greater and sometimes quite serious pain can be associated with not reporting non-compliant behavior and that reporting can result in longer term pleasure—like the feeling of helping the company remain healthy and free of enforcement issues— even if at first it doesn’t feel so good. Once an employee comes to associate more pain with not reporting than with reporting, and more pleasure with reporting than with not reporting, you have effectively begun to change a conditioned behavior.

Compliance & Ethics Professional®  August 2016

The role of the pattern interrupt is to disrupt the conditioned response and free up some psychological space for the employee to start to see things differently.

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AT: It sounds like the things you were working on in those days were directly related to the work you are continuing to do today. Am I right to think that? JR: That’s right. That small firm was acquired in 2008 by a much larger company, and as a result of that acquisition, I enjoyed some great corporate opportunities. I ran their Ethics & Compliance training business and had the privilege of spending some time as their Managing Director for Europe, working in the London office. But during those years, I started to hear more and more from compliance officers and managers about their desire for short-form tools that they could put in front of employees, instead of the traditional 30- or 40-minute e-learning modules most of the vendors were offering. They weren’t necessarily saying explicitly that they wanted to bring behavioral science

FEATURE

to bear on compliance, but they were getting obviously hungry for ways to communicate on an ongoing, repetitive basis, with stuff that was really engaging for employees. So, sometime shortly after I returned from the UK, I decided that it was time to resume the work we had been doing before 2008. I approached Jay and Cathy Sullivan (my old friends and industry pioneers) and asked them to be my partners in the new venture. We launched Compliance Wave in 2013. AT: Before joining SCCE, I spent seven years in the compliance training world, as you know, working at LRN. I think you and I were even competitors there for a while. One of the great challenges back then, and I imagine now, is keeping the message fresh. Is that still a big problem? JR: Well, I definitely think that continues to be a serious concern, but I also think that a compliance professional could solve that problem, and still not deliver effective training and communications. For example, you could deliver up a brand new Code of Conduct training program every year and feel proud of your program, because you provided “fresh” content each year. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that, halfway through the year, anyone will have remembered any of the information offered in the training. For that, you need a very different approach, I believe, and in fact, sometimes you’d be better served by not providing content that’s completely fresh.

JR: Well, look—I’ve written about this—you can read this thought all over my blog. In my view, a successful training and communications program is really a marketing program for your compliance message. What I mean is this: If you were going to market a message—any message (it could be a new product you were trying to sell or maybe a political candidate you wanted to promote)— the one thing you would probably not do is serve up 45 minutes’ worth of training, once a year, on how to use that product or vote for that candidate. So think, for example, about McDonald’s. Whether you do or do not love McDonald’s, one thing’s certain. Unless maybe you worked there, you never received training of any kind on any of their products, and yet you probably know a thousand times more about things like Big Macs, FiletO-Fish sandwiches, Ronald McDonald, and the Hamburglar than any of your employees knows about your compliance program. Why is that? It’s because McDonald’s has been wildly successful at providing all of us with bits of memorable information, through every possible media channel, on a highly repetitive basis. If you’re older than, I don’t know—45 maybe?—you still know that a Big Mac is made with two all-beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles, onions, on a sesame seed bun. Not because every time they put content in front of you it was fresh, but rather because they put memorable content in front of you again and again and again until you knew it— permanently. Now, to be clear, I’m not saying that keeping compliance content fresh is not

AT: What do you mean by that?

+1 952 933 4977 or 888 277 4977   www.corporatecompliance.org 

Compliance & Ethics Professional®  August 2016

In my view, a successful training and communications program is really a marketing program for your compliance message.

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FEATURE

important; I do think it is. But I’m just pointing out that freshness is not the most critical attribute of effective communications. Anyway, the broader point I’m making is about marketing your compliance message, and I’m not unaware that the word “marketing” can connote something crass and commercial for some people. But, while there are important differences between product marketing campaigns and compliance programs, what I’m really talking about is harnessing the enormous power of proven behavior-change techniques—like hitting your audience with multiple messages through a variety of channels and formats on a repeated basis— and the incredible impact that can have. Marketers have learned a huge amount about how to communicate in ways that dramatically alter people’s behavior, and we can leverage that information to great effect in compliance.

deck that laid out all of the arguments for approaching compliance communications from this perspective: Here’s what the DOJ is saying about repetition; here’s what the DPAs [deferred prosecution agreements] issued over the past three years are requiring of those companies that received them; here is the evidence that “lots of little messages,” as you say, can be way more effective in terms of stickiness—all of that. I was very proud of that deck. Turned out, I never showed it to anyone.

Compliance & Ethics Professional®  August 2016

To a person, these compliance professionals want to move away from the long-form training approach and further and further toward what is now called micro-learning.

AT: One of the related problems is that people can forget messages pretty quickly. Dan Ariely, a behavior economist whose work on cheating is really illuminating, has shown that people really do tend to forget moral and ethical reminders really quickly. To me that further argues for thinking beyond the onehour, once-a-year ethics course and to lots of little messages. Are you seeing much demand for that approach? JR: Well, yeah, absolutely. I’ve said this to a lot of people, but it bears repeating here. Back in the summer of 2013, I spent about two months perfecting a PowerPoint

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AT: Why is that? JR: Because every time I meet with a compliance officer or manager, this is the story that they all tell me, before I have the chance to tell it to them. To a person, these compliance professionals want to move away from the long-form training approach and further and further toward what is now called microlearning. It’s an extraordinary thing to hear this same pain over and over from every compliance professional that I talk to.

AT: Is there a best practice you see in balancing longer, in-depth training with shorter, reminder training? JR: You know, Adam, for a long time I thought so; what I was seeing was that the shorter, reminder-style messages were being used to complement the longer training. In other words, you’d do annual Code training—and it would still be a long-form e-learning module, maybe—and then you would firm up understanding and a commitment to that material throughout the year through the use of, say, short videos

FEATURE

or training modules, articles, cartoons, and other visually appealing stuff on an intranet page, newsletters, etc. But it’s interesting. I’ve started to hear something a little different lately. Several compliance officers and managers have said to me (independently of one another and without prompting from me), “Well, look, if I give Code of Conduct training once a year, then during that training course, I’m only really going to talk about any given topic—say, conflicts of interest, or bribery, or fair competition, or whatever—for about six or seven minutes each. So why wouldn’t I just push out a six- or sevenminute module on each topic periodically through the year? It isn’t actually any less training on the individual topics; it’s just way less unpleasant for employees.” I do think, of course, that there will still be an important place for longerform training when a risk associated with your job role warrants it. But, it looks like for general training, like Code of Conduct training, this landscape is really shifting quite rapidly, and there is more and more appetite for this micro-learning approach—much more than I would have predicted, really.

whiteboard video series that is very enjoyable to watch. But it’s enjoyable more because the drawings are very skillful and clever, and less because they are funny per se. But that said, I do think there is a place for humor. Humor, of course, can be one of the best pattern interrupts! Clearly the work that Second City has done in this area is genuinely funny and attention grabbing. But it’s important that humor never overshadow the real calls to action in a training or communication piece. If you’re going to attempt to use humor in your program, it should be used to cut through the cloud of distractions that we are all subject to every day, but should very quickly give way to a more serious treatment of the subject matter, with real attention given to the intended takeaways. This balance is really critical to strike. If humor is too central to a message, it can be a distraction. I’ve seen more than a couple of humorous compliance videos and wondered what I was supposed to walk away knowing. That isn’t good.

AT: I believe that some of your offerings at Compliance Wave use humor, a teaching technique many are not yet comfortable with. When does humor work, and when maybe not so well? JR: We actually use humor much more sparingly than you might think at a glance. Of course, we created a very popular

AT: One thing that has shaken compliance training up a bit is increasing calls by prosecutors for in-person training. They’ve pointed out that they feel managers at high risk for a Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) violation should have in-person training, not just web. Do you see the pendulum swinging back more towards face-to-face learning? JR: I don’t really know about this, but I must admit that I’m always skeptical +1 952 933 4977 or 888 277 4977   www.corporatecompliance.org 

Compliance & Ethics Professional®  August 2016

Humor, of course, can be one of the best pattern interrupts! Clearly the work that Second City has done in this area is genuinely funny and attention grabbing.

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FEATURE

when anyone says you have to go back to doing face-to-face training. I think what they’re really saying—or what they should be saying—is, “You need to find a more effective way of doing training,” and I can totally agree with that. But there are lots of ways of very effectively reaching people and genuinely changing their behavior without getting in front of them in a classroom. To be sure, classroom training can be great and can be extremely effective. But, depending who delivers it, it can also be deadly. That’s not to mention that every study of attention spans suggests that employees are becoming less and less able to absorb more than a few minutes of information at a time. Who’s going to conduct in-person training that lasts five minutes? I don’t think this is going to be the answer.

this micro-learning approach. Compliance programs have begun embracing this trend at a rapidly accelerating pace, so I think that’s something to seriously watch. On the other hand, one thing that I am not so convinced about is gamification. I feel like we hear it all the time, and there are definitely those who would like to see this become the next powerful trend. And, while I do think gamification can be great for many kinds of training, I’m not really convinced that this is going to take hold in Compliance. Frankly, I kind of think that compliance professionals are, for the most part, way too busy to effectively manage and implement “gamified” training, so I suspect that that’s going to remain a fad for a while and then go away, at least in the area of Compliance. And I know I’m going out on a limb saying that; maybe in five years someone will show me what I said here and laugh at me. The last big prediction I made about our field was that in the tug-of-war that seemed to be happening ten years ago between Ethics and Compliance, Ethics would win, and even that E&C would merge with stuff like sustainability and corporate social responsibility. I can’t be more wrong about this gamification thing than I was about that, can I? And anyway, if it happens again, that’s cool. I can take it.

Compliance & Ethics Professional®  August 2016

On the other hand, one thing that I am not so convinced about is gamification. I feel like we hear it all the time, and there are definitely those who would like to see this become the next powerful trend.

AT: Let me close by asking how you see compliance and ethics training evolving. What’s going to be the next trend? JR: Well, as I’ve already suggested, this move towards using multiple short-form training interactions in place of longer-form training for things like Code of Conduct awareness is interesting. I hadn’t expected that to develop so quickly, but I’m hearing it more and more. The Wall Street Journal just did a piece two or three months ago confirming what I just mentioned—that with the proliferation of gadgets and on-demand entertainment, people’s attention spans are vanishing. As a result, companies are moving aggressively toward

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AT: Thank you, Joel for your candor in sharing your experiences with us. ✵