Social media is a powerful tool that can have a profound impact on how people see your business. In the right hands, social media provides numerous opportunities to promote your company’s culture and ethics, develop customer relationships, and build a positive reputation in your industry. When it’s misused by an employee, however, it can present many risks that your company would rather avoid.

So what can your company do to minimize the challenges posed by these widespread communications channels? The first step is understanding where these platforms can put your company at risk. After that, it’s simply a matter of creating a well-defined, proactive strategy that helps you manage employee social media usage effectively. Or at the very least, lays down the rules for employee behavior while using these social platforms.

What Are the Risks?

If HR and learning teams are to minimize the risks of employees using social media, it’s important to know what you’re up against. Here are just a few of the risks associated with social media misuse at work.

Company Time & Resources

Employees that use social media at work not only risk wasting company time, they sometimes use company resources – like laptop and desktop computers, smartphones, and tablets – to access these platforms. This can lead to overuse or misuse of company equipment, as well as the potential for misuse of company branding, intellectual property, and email accounts, which can all impact your company’s reputation.

Security & Privacy Issues

Despite the efforts of social media platforms to beef up their security, criminals still seem to find a way around it, making social media one of the easier targets for hacking, phishing, and other malicious online attacks. What’s more, data privacy issues can arise when an employee shares or posts information about a colleague, client, or vendor without their permission, even if it’s unintentional.

Unhealthy Online Behavior

Social media provides lots of opportunities to engage an audience with positive stories and interactions. But it can just as easily be used to criticize your company, employees, clients, or the industry itself.

In addition, these platforms pose a unique risk for online harassment, like when an employee discusses something hurtful or personal about a colleague, or shares content that is meant to be insightful or amusing but is actually disparaging in some way.

Conflicts of Interest

Social media can blur the lines between personal and professional opinions, and it may draw your company into the conversational crossfire if people link an employee’s message with the brand they represent.

While conflicts of interest can take many forms, any time an employee leverages their position, company resources, or anything that conflicts with their duty or loyalty to the company while using social media, it can present certain organizational risks and challenges that will need to be addressed.

Managing Social Media in the Workplace

One of the best things HR and learning teams can do to ensure employees use social media effectively is to create a social media policy that guides employees to the right behaviors. If you haven’t put together a social media policy yet, or it’s time to review your company’s current policy, here are some points that should be included.

Raise Awareness

Using social media carelessly can lead to lots of potential hazards for your company and employees. While most of us have a habit of posting whatever is on our mind, it’s important to let employees know how some posts can impact their personal, professional, and company’s reputation – and in some cases, even their careers.

Include a Statement of Purpose

As with any new policy, it’s important for employees to understand why your new or improved social media policy is taking place. A statement of purpose helps define why the company engages on social media and how it should be used. This is also a good time to lay out the details of what this policy covers, as your organization may want to go beyond common platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram to include things like blogs, message boards, chat rooms, and video websites like YouTube.

Set Recommendations and Guidelines

What your employees can communicate on social media – whether it’s about the business, its clients, or other employees – should be spelled out plainly in your company’s policy. Can they discuss company downsizing or the acquisition of a new client? Can they post about industry challenges or problems at work? Your social media policy’s recommendations and guidelines should answer these questions and more to ensure everybody is on the same page.

Provide Training

Instead of simply sending out your company’s social media policy and expecting employees to read it and comply, provide additional education and training around the subject to ensure the information is solidified.

All too often, employees give codes of conduct and policies a quick scan before hitting the delete button. With supplementary training, however, you can reinforce the motivations that drive your company’s policy, and provide employees with the skills and understanding to enforce their own positive behavior online.

Review Your Policy Frequently

The social media landscape is constantly changing, so your policy should be too. To ensure your policy is making a real impact and is always up to date, send out employee surveys to gauge how everything is working, then readjust your policy based on your findings. Some businesses also monitor employee accounts connected to the organization (e.g. LinkedIn) as part of bolstering company and employee privacy. But it can also help you identify items that may be missing from your policy.

When it comes down to it, your social media policy should be most concerned with minimizing your legal liability, as well as protecting your employees, your brand, and your company’s culture.

Interactive Services is a leader in helping organizations create and strengthen ethical cultures through our award-winning ethics and compliance training solutions. Discover how we can help your business by signing up for our free 7-day trial!

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Every company wants to have an ethical culture. After all, there is huge commercial advantage in having a workforce that thinks and behaves in an ethical way. But, while having an ethical culture is a competitive advantage, getting there – and staying there – can be challenging.

With learning teams having such a big influence on how a company culture operates, it puts a lot of pressure on these teams to deliver ethics and compliance training programs that shift company cultures in the right direction. For organizations on the lookout for ways to instill the knowledge and skills that create this type of culture, learner-centered training is the most likely solution. And it all starts with the learner persona.

What is a Learner Persona and Why is it Important?

A learner persona is a fictional profile created for targeting a specific user or group in a training program. Designed to provide deep insight into a target learner’s demographics, job responsibilities, skill level, training goals, and more, a learner persona paints a clear picture of a training program’s ideal user or audience.

The purpose of a learner persona is to help learning and development teams create and finetune a training program strategy in order to meet learner needs and program objectives. More than that, however, learner personas help enhance training programs by pointing learning teams to the tools, knowledge, and day-to-day scenarios that are the most engaging and effective for the learner and the organization.

In an article from our VP of Client Success, Gabriel Szaszko, he explains why Interactive Services uses personas to create our custom training programs, “Learner personas help clarify who we are telling our stories to, and remind us why that audience needs to listen to the stories we are telling. Carefully outlining who you’re reaching with your training, what their emotional “hooks” will be, and what will be meaningful to them allows you to frame the story you want to tell in an eloquent way.”

How to Create a Learner Persona

Developing a learner persona requires a lot of research and analysis. However, once a learner persona is created, it can guide learning teams to the right pathways for instilling the knowledge and skills that help create an ethical company culture.

With this in mind, here are some steps you can take to create learner personas at your organization.

Explore Your Audience

The first step in creating a learner persona is gathering all the information you can about your targeted audience. A few examples of the information you might need to develop a learner persona include:

• Basic demographics, such as age and gender
• Education and skill levels
• Specific roles or departments
• Preferred devices or platforms
• Psychometric information, such as needs, motivations, frustrations, and attitude toward learning

Information used to create a learner persona can be gathered in several ways, including surveys, interviews, focus groups, and through human resources. What’s important is to get as much information as you can to create a comprehensive view of learners to deliver training more effectively.

Analyze and Leverage Insights

After gathering information on your learner audience, analyze it for trends or unique characteristics. For example, you may have a group of learners that prefer using a mobile device and working through real-life ethics scenarios to develop their skillset. Using this information, your team can develop a training program that offers mobile capabilities and engages learners through interactive storytelling.

The more you dig into what learners need and what motivates them to make good decisions, the better off your training program will be. Ultimately, it’s about creating an ethics and compliance training program that is fun, impactful, and helps employees gain valuable knowledge and skills efficiently.

The Advantages of Learner-Centered Training

Here’s how your organization can benefit from leveraging personas to create a learner-centered training program.

Learner-Centered Training Fuels Participation

One of the key goals of learning teams is to help employees feel motivated instead of required to complete training courses. With a learner-centered approach supported by strong personas, learning teams can create personalized content that speaks to learners’ needs and delivers it in a way that makes it convenient for learners to participate.

By paying attention to what employees want from their training program, your training program will be engaging and meaningful to learners, and learning teams will have better opportunities to inspire staff to make more ethical decisions, laying the foundation for greater participation and a more ethical workplace.

Learner-Centered Training Improves Knowledge Retention

Instead of a “one size fits all” approach to training, a learner-centered training program often uses microlearning to bring forward two important aspects of building knowledge retention: relevance and engagement. Derived from cognitive science, microlearning has been proven by researchers to enhance skill acquisition and development.

As training strategies go, microlearning is one of the best ways to boost knowledge retention and engagement. In this type of learner-centered approach, employees access small, interactive pieces of content derived from scenarios they might confront during an average day, making courses more flexible, stimulating, and impactful for learners.

Learner-Centered Training Empowers Performance

Adapting your training program to become learner-centered involves providing a well-rounded approach to course content. Instead of offering one or two training options, a learner-centered program may include a full range of delivery methods.  For example, a strong learner-centered program might consist of interactive scenarios, case studies, videos, role plays, and other training methods that not only engage and educate employees, but also help to reinforce learning weeks or months after formal training is completed.

As our Director of Sales, Neil Cullen, points out on our blog, “Through making [training] fun, your staff enjoys being at work and will get more work done. That means more productivity, more profit, and more progress.”

Interactive Services is a leader in helping organizations create and strengthen ethical cultures through our award-winning ethics and compliance training solutions. Discover how we can help your business by signing up for our free 7-day trial!

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Measuring the ROI of ethics and compliance training programs has always been difficult for learning teams. Unlike investments in sales, marketing, IT, and logistics, the money a business spends on ethics and compliance training is hard to translate to a positive impact on the bottom line.

U.S. companies spent around $83 billion on employee training in 2019. Considering this number, and the fact that mid- to large-sized businesses spent anywhere from $3.7 to $13 million on their own training in 2016 alone, it’s safe to assume that ethics and compliance training is a big line item in the budgets of enterprises year after year, and worthy of careful measurement. Even so, figuring out the ROI puzzle has been daunting.

While evaluating these programs’ ROI effectiveness may be a challenge, there are many advantages to doing so. And it all comes down to using a better approach to measuring a program’s success.

ROX: The New ROI of Ethics and Compliance Training

In an article by digital communication and social media expert Jonas Bladt Hansen, the author makes a strong case for having companies measure return on experience (ROX) in addition to, or in place of, ROI. Quoting from the article directly, Mr. Hansen argues that “ROX measures … correlations that have decisive influence on the customer and employee experience – and which can ultimately have a positive effect on the bottom line”.

In simpler terms, while the financial advantages of ROX aren’t as obvious as they are with ROI, measuring your company’s ROX can still result in a positive financial impact. This is especially true when you consider the costs that surround common issues like company culture, behavior, employee retention, and other areas critical to a company’s success.

But with ROX, the question of how to find and measure qualitative data then turn that data into actionable items for learning teams remains. Fortunately, the solution to this problem is something your organization is already doing – or can implement quickly.

Measuring ROX in Your Training Program

Here are a few things to look at when measuring your company’s ROX and how it can ultimately have an impact on your bottom line.

Employee Turnover and Productivity

If your company has experienced high turnover or poor productivity, it’s probably a sign that employee morale is suffering. Ethics and compliance training programs affect company culture, making it all the more important for teams to look at whether these programs help employees enjoy their jobs and work more collaboratively, or don’t quite deliver.

Low employee morale comes at a high cost for businesses. In addition to the expense of hiring, onboarding, and training new employees, the losses a company experiences by having a disengaged workforce can be significant. In fact, a report by SHRM states that replacing a departing employee can cost companies anywhere from 60-90% of the employee’s annual salary, and that total costs of a single turnover can push it near 200%, which only drives home the importance of taking into account employee experience – both in training and when calculating ROI.

Knowledge, Skills, and Abilities (KSAs)

An employee’s knowledge, skills, and abilities (KSAs) are a key metric for HR and learning teams, helping to assess an employee’s qualities and how they relate to their position. The goal of ethics and compliance training is to raise KSAs through learner engagement, providing employees with new knowledge, skills, and abilities that translate into more productivity and better workplace behavior.

In terms of measuring ROX, learning teams have several options. Beyond using general or role-based competency and knowledge recall assessments, learning teams can incorporate integrity tests, situational judgment tests, and emotional intelligence tests to identify gaps in training programs and evaluate learner engagement. As KSAs improve, employee output generally improves as well, which can also have an added effect on creating a more positive – and ethical – company culture.

Company Culture and Values

Does your company offer a recognition program that sheds light on how well employees embody the organization’s mission and values? If not, you could be missing out on a key ROX metric that provides deeper insight into your company culture.

By developing lead measures of employee behavior, and providing incentives to employees that openly practice integrity-based and team-based skills at work, employee performance is maximized, company culture gets a natural lift, and your organization’s bottom line should experience the ROI results it’s looking for. And it can easily be measured by comparing the number of incentives given to employees, whether that’s month-over-month, or even year-over-year as the training and incentive programs mature. As numbers go up, you can be sure it’s paying off with a more positive and engaged workforce.

Interactive Services is a leader in helping organizations create more ethical cultures through our award-winning ethics and compliance training programs, which are designed to inspire employees to do the right thing, even when nobody’s watching. Discover how our training programs can help your business boost its ROX and ROI by signing up for our free 7-day trial!

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The role of ethics and compliance training in businesses is getting a lot of attention lately. While it’s always been an important part of any mid- or large-sized organization, COVID-19 and the Black Lives Matter movement have forced many companies to get more introspective on how effective and enlightening their training programs really are.

With that in mind, here are some signs your ethics and compliance training program needs an update, which can ultimately pave the way for employees to feel more engaged, motivated, and on the same page as leadership.

Rules Change

Compliance laws are constantly emerging and evolving, making it a continuous challenge for learning teams to stay on top of the latest legislative initiatives and regulatory changes. But when a business is unable to adopt new compliance practices quickly, it puts itself at risk of sizable fines, the threat of legal action, and damage to company reputation.

While some rule changes might only require a simple markup of your existing training program to fill in gaps, others like GDPR or CCPA, for example, may involve helping employees learn all-new concepts and complex legal topics.

Learning teams that stay well-informed on changes in business, their industry, or even within society are better able to respond as things evolve. By paying attention to what’s happening in government and around the world, courses can be adapted, training materials can be added, and learning gaps can be bridged effectively as new issues or regulations emerge.

The tricky part, however, is having a learning program that can move just as quickly.

You’re Not Using the Latest Training Tools

Evolving with new regulations can put a lot of pressure on learning teams to act at the right moment. Yet, not every organization is equipped with the right tools to develop and launch new ethical principles and corporate practices in a timely way.

As businesses become increasingly digital and mobile, ethics and compliance training programs that lag behind could stand out for all the wrong reasons. If training is outdated and lacks the digital sophistication to get updated quickly and regularly, now is the time to shift your program from its traditional training roots and plant the seeds for a more modern way of learning.

With state of the art eLearning, your organization can harness the latest technologies to deliver innovative learning experiences that are easy to access from any device and boost learner retention. But an added benefit for compliance teams is that eLearning solutions make updating training modules easier, meaning learning teams can spend more time staying close to the legislation and internal policies that shape and impact the organization, and less time whittling away at out-of-date programs.

Employees Seem Bored During Training

One thing learning teams understand all too well is the difficulty of creating an ethics and compliance training program that is both engaging and motivating for everyone in the organization. As employee needs and expectations shift with advances in training delivery, even the latest tools aren’t going to make an impact if your training content doesn’t keep their attention or inspire positive changes in workplace behavior.

When it comes to content, traditional training programs haven’t been exactly user-friendly. Whether they’re bursting with complex legalese, text-heavy modules, or unrelatable scenarios, these types of training programs are no longer delivering learning effectively – or compellingly – and it’s one of the main reasons why ethics and compliance training has earned its somewhat lackluster reputation.

While equipping your team with the innovative tools is a great first step in modernizing your training program, taking a new approach in how information is presented will result in a better payoff. And here’s where storytelling comes into play.

Powerful and meaningful lessons can be taught and learned through storytelling. It’s something we learn at a very young age and carries on through adulthood. The problem is that many businesses forget this important lesson when it comes to training – or at the very least, neglect to make it the core of their program.

Whether we’re speaking about quizzes, videos, simulations, gamified training, or any other type of content found in today’s modern training regimen, stories help employees make the connection between what’s happening inside a training scenario and within their own workplace. It teaches valuable lessons. But more than that, it educates employees on company rules and federal regulations in a more entertaining and much subtler way.

For learning teams, applying storytelling elements to a training program can be challenging. One way to make the transition successful is to find the story in the content needing to be leveraged. Instead of focusing on the content itself, look for ways to communicate important principles through real-world scenarios that employees may encounter at work. By doing so, you will get their full attention, and have more opportunities to instill the lessons that guide them to better behavior.

Interactive Services is a leader in helping organizations develop creative, story-driven ethics and compliance training programs that inspire employees to do the right thing, even when nobody’s watching. Discover how we can help your business create a more ethical and compliant workplace while driving new levels in employee engagement by signing up for our free 7-day trial!

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Whistleblowing has enjoyed a long history of protection in the United States, with the first whistleblowing legislation taking place on July 30, 1778 – just seven months after the Declaration of Independence was signed. But over that time, the term “whistleblower” has experienced a swing in public perception, causing both positive and negative reactions from society and businesses.

Today, despite high-profile whistleblower cases over the past decade that rocked the government, the financial services industry, and global healthcare, perception of whistleblowing has been mostly negative. And it’s the main reason why many companies are changing how they refer to it.

With whistleblowing taking on such a negative meaning in business and government circles, many companies have stepped up to remove – or in some cases, simply reinvent – the intimidating and often insulting whistleblower label.

Instead of speaking of disclosures in corruption, harassment, or cybersecurity as mere whistleblowing, organizations are now framing it as “speaking up” at work, encouraging employees to be more proactive and vocal in bringing ethical issues to the company’s attention, and establishing a framework that makes it easier to do so.

Why We Promote Speaking Up vs. Whistleblowing

We at Interactive Services support the speak-up culture movement, viewing it as essential to running an ethical business, and effectively promoting employee awareness and courage. Where whistleblowing often refers to the social and legal issues that arise when an organization is thrust into the public eye for poor handling of compliance issues, we see speaking up as the antidote for potentially harmful business practices.

As allegations of whistleblowing come under the control of reporters and PR teams, speaking up is what happens before whistleblowing comes into public view. And unlike whistleblowing, the effects of having a business where employees feel empowered to tell their story makes a much better headline than a list of allegations that follow a breaking story.

Whether it’s whistleblowing or speaking up, both actions require unprecedented courage from the employee that brings issues to a company’s attention. But by reframing these conversations as speaking up, it turns the negative aspect of whistleblowing on its head, helping employees feel less like they are ratting out their colleagues, and more like they are upholding the ethical standards the company has set forth.

Yet, speaking up is only possible if an organization – and more specifically, its culture – creates an environment where these courageous conversations can take place.

How Organizations can Help Employees Speak Up

Creating a workplace culture that encourages speaking up is the best-case scenario for compliance teams. Getting there, however, requires a hard look at the training programs and company processes that impact employee behavior.

When an organization puts too much emphasis on ticking the regulatory boxes during training, employees are only educated on the mechanics of reporting compliance issues, such as how, when, and where issues should be reported. But this sort of training can make company efforts seem insincere, as they don’t take into account the great difficulty of coming forward if or when a situation arises. And as one expert suggests, not being authentic could turn employees against the business, instead of inspiring them to live by company values and ethical standards.

To truly change behavior and encourage courageous conversations, compliance teams must humanize the training process, focusing less on the technicalities of reporting, and placing more effort on education that supports open dialogue. One of the most effective ways to do this is by helping employees put policies into practice through real-world training scenarios, where they can see the impact of non-compliance first-hand, address the mental and emotional aspects of speaking up, and learn effective ways to address these issues with management.

In addition to building a training program that helps build employee confidence, compliance teams must work closely with HR and other company leadership to make speaking up a positive experience. This can be achieved in the following ways:

Give and Receive Feedback Regularly

Speaking and listening go together, so it’s important for leadership to engage employees frequently outside the bounds of whistleblowing topics. When employees feel their input is valued, and they have more opportunities to participate in company decisions, connections with leadership will be strengthened, and employees will feel more comfortable stepping up and speaking out.

Bring Support Forward

If reporting vehicles haven’t been updated in some time, or policies on speaking up can only be found inside employee manuals, they could get forgotten or ignored. Making information on speaking up more visible, in the form of company posters, emails, and newsletters, can go a long way in not only reminding employees that support is available, but also that leadership is encouraging them to use these outlets. names of people they can turn to in leadership when a violation occurs.

Reward ethical actions

Rewarding employees for “doing the right thing” at work can go a long way in promoting a speak-up culture. While it may seem counterintuitive to incentivize ethical behavior, giving rewards sends a strong signal about the importance of ethics and compliance in the business. After all, incentives are handed out regularly for performance and productivity, so it only makes sense to reward employees who have the courage to speak up instead of looking out for their own self-interest.

Handle Issues Immediately

To create a speak-up culture, you must build employee trust. When an issue is reported, be sure to commend the employee for their courage, and then follow up by investigating their claim thoroughly. While it isn’t possible to disclose the full details of an internal investigation, it’s important for a business to keep employees informed throughout the process. This can help assure employees the company takes their claim seriously and that they will have their back every step of the way.

Instill Employee Confidence

In addition to handling issues in a timely and transparent fashion, it’s important for businesses to reassure employees that they are protected from retaliation whenever a red flag is raised. After all, federal whistleblower protections exist for good reason, and company policies and training should reflect them. Doing so, employees will know that if they decide to speak up, they won’t have to worry about any repercussions for doing the right thing.

Interactive Services is a leader in helping organizations create effective speak-up cultures through our award-winning training solutions and custom learning programs. Discover how we can help your employees get the courage and confidence to speak up by trying out our free 7-day trial!

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Imagine a business where every employee worked together towards a common goal. A workplace so inspired by the company’s core values that everyone made a conscious effort to put aside their self-interest to build an organization and culture driven by integrity.

While it is unlikely any business could ever achieve this level of perfection, there are many global companies that are working towards this effort, and transforming their business for the better – especially in the face of COVID-19 and the Black Lives Matter movement.

How are these companies doing it so effectively? As Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh explains, much of it comes down to company culture, “Our number one priority is company culture. Our whole belief is that if you get the culture right, most of the other stuff like delivering great customer service or building a long-term enduring brand will just happen naturally on its own.”

If your organization is challenged by how to get employees to do the right thing, even when it’s difficult, making these foundational principles a priority at your business is a good first step towards creating a rock-solid – and ethical – company culture.

Build a Framework of Ethical Action

It’s difficult for employees to act with integrity if they don’t understand what’s expected of them. If a business is to create an environment that both facilitates and supports ethical behavior, it needs these standards written explicitly across a company’s mission statement, as well as other key manuals and training materials. But the work doesn’t end there.

Establishing an ethical framework for employees should also include taking action and speaking up when ethical issues arise. If harassment, data privacy issues, or corruption or abuse of power take place inside an organization, employees need to know these violations of company standards won’t be tolerated, and any offenders will be dealt with swiftly and uncompromisingly.

Enforcing the ethical standards set by an organization isn’t designed to create fear. Instead, it shows employees that adherence to ethical business practices is critical to developing a company culture that “walks the walk” in terms of its values. And as employees see integrity in action, it propels the company culture in the right direction.

Become an Ethical Influence

Few things are as disruptive to a business, or as damaging to company culture than an unethical workforce. This makes it even more important for leadership to not only establish the standards by which the organization should operate, but also set an ethical example for employees.

Successful educator, author, and business leader Dr. Stephen Covey once said, “You can’t have trust without being trustworthy.” As leaders, part of building employee trust and creating an ethical workforce is making professional integrity a priority for c-suite executives and frontline managers. After all, if a leader is unable to commit to the standards they set, it invites others in the organization to follow in their footsteps.

In addition to being an ethical influence, leaders should also consider bringing in experts to offer employees broader and different perspectives. These experts can provide more guidance on acting with integrity at work, reinforce the values that executives have established, and open the conversation up to sensitive topics that employees may not feel comfortable discussing with direct leadership.

Take Advantage of the Tools that Build an Ethical Culture

An ethical workplace culture won’t happen on its own – and it certainly won’t happen overnight – but it can be achieved with values-driven decision-making, deliberate effort, and the right support.

As support options go, ethics training programs have been proven to be one of the most effective ways to reduce unethical behavior in the workplace next to establishing a code of ethics. However, ethics in itself is an all-encompassing matter, making it critical for learning teams to break the subject down into microlearning sessions that target different areas of ethics a business wants to focus on, such as:

• Ethical workplace conduct
• Anti-harassment and discrimination
• Respect in the workplace
• Anti-bribery and corruption
• Cybersecurity and data privacy
• Antitrust compliance
• And many other ethics-related topics

Providing employees with periodic ethics training sessions, as well as ongoing refresher courses, makes a big impact on employee behaviors over the long term. It’s also one of the more meaningful ways a business can create a real shift in its culture. As employees become more aware of what behavior is expected of them, and are given the training to see the impact of their behavior, the values that inspire everyone at the organization to push company culture in a positive direction are instilled.

Interactive Services is a leader in helping organizations create values-driven, ethical cultures through our award-winning ethics and compliance training solutions, which includes our newly launched “Workplace Diversity” training module. Discover how we can help your business – and your employees – live by the values that drive your organization by signing up for our free 7-day trial!

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According to a Clark School study at the University of Maryland, a cyberattack occurs every 39 seconds in the United States. This might come as no surprise to people who follow the latest security trends, but to those who don’t, it’s a signal that cybercrime is a pressing concern and isn’t going away any time soon.

For companies of every size, cybercrime has been a major issue that’s only escalated as more employees work from home due to COVID-19. But even with companies ramping up their cybersecurity efforts, many find there’s still a lot of room for improvement when it comes to protecting business and customer data.

In this article, we take a look at the latest numbers on data privacy and security- and offer compliance teams helpful tips on how to avoid becoming a cybercrime statistic.

Over 65% of Companies are Non-Compliant

In a speech given at InfoSec World 2020, Kevin Ricci of Citrin Cooperman revealed that more than 65% of companies made zero or minimal effort to comply with U.S. state data privacy and security regulations. Of the companies that remained, another 27% said they were only partially compliant.

What’s even more frightening is Kevin Ricci’s discovery that 48% of organizations didn’t even offer data security and awareness training. At a time when data security is mission-critical, businesses that fail to provide cybersecurity training are putting themselves in the firing line for fines, lawsuits, and untold damage to a company’s reputation.

How to Avoid Becoming a Statistic

If your company hasn’t implemented a cybersecurity or data privacy training program already, it’s time to get started. For companies that have a program in place, take a moment to review your training materials to ensure they meet the requirements of current federal regulations and guidance.

67% of Data Breaches are from Credential Theft, Human Error, or Social Engineering Attacks

Verizon released its 2020 Data Breach and Investigations Report in May, detailing a number of surprising statistics on security preparedness at 81 organizations. After reviewing nearly 4,000 confirmed security incidents, Verizon discovered that credential theft, human error, and social engineering accounted for 67% of data breaches – and 22% were the result of human error alone, which is up from 2019.

Data breaches caused by human error are nothing new, but the incremental – and sometimes exponential – increase in cyberattacks puts your employees and company at a greater risk every day. Left without training, employees have a much higher chance of falling prey to phishing scams and other types of cyberattacks. Whereas, effectively training employees consistently helps companies reduce the likelihood of a successful attack by 40-50%, based on information from the InfoSec Institute.

How to Avoid Becoming a Statistic

According to The Online Trust Alliance, 95% of all data breaches could have been prevented by following best practices in cybersecurity and data protection. Since human error causes such a high number of data breaches and privacy concerns, it’s not only crucial for your organization to make security and awareness training a higher priority, it is also vital to keep your team educated and informed regularly with supplemental training and refreshers that remind them to be on a constant lookout for threats.

Attacks on Cloud Services Have Increased by 630%

In mid-June, Microsoft released an article highlighting research on COVID-19’s impact on internal cybersecurity. While many organizations were happy to learn that cyberattacks at Microsoft had decreased since their peak in March, when the pandemic forced most businesses to go remote, the article also points out that the company still sees around 12 million attacks every day, a 20% increase over February. And they’re not alone.

In addition to banks, which have seen a 238% increase in attacks from February to the end of April, cyberattacks on healthcare companies accounted for 51% of all breaches in Q1 of 2020, making them the most breached industry this year. And cloud-based services may be partly to blame.

Companies that use cloud-based services like Microsoft 365 and Salesforce have increased by 50% this year in response to work-at-home mandates. But as they did, the vulnerability of these services became evident. In the first four months of COVID-19, cloud-based services saw a 630% increase in overall attacks. And as more people continue to work from home, these numbers are expected to climb, unless data security and awareness training becomes a key part of an organization’s business strategy.

How to Avoid Becoming a Statistic

Many companies were unprepared for the move to an at-home workforce when the COVID-19 pandemic escalated in March. Yet 41% of cybersecurity professionals say the businesses they work for still haven’t responded adequately to the increase in threats.

As Osterman Research reports, companies that offer security awareness training to employees are much better at spotting – and stopping – security threats than those who don’t. Plus, it delivers an ROI that should make any large business take a second look.

Ready to get your organization up to date on the latest cybersecurity and data privacy best practices? Contact our team to learn about our award-winning solutions and how we can customize training to your company’s data security needs. Or check out our free 7-day trial for a more hands-on experience!

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Business magnate and philanthropist Warren Buffett once said, “It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it. If you think about that, you’ll do things differently.”

Last year, the world watched as scandals involving major companies like Facebook, KPMG, Mobile Telesystems, Swiss Bank and multiple other businesses made headlines for failing to address compliance-related issues within their organizations. After the legal battles ended, millions in fines were issued, and the companies took a huge hit to their reputations that would lead to even bigger losses.

Most companies won’t experience ethics and compliance issues at this scale. Even so, if violations like these do happen, the costs can be just as harmful in terms of legal fees, fines, and even worse – damage to business reputation.

If ethical conduct is to drive your company culture and be the norm at your business, a robust and effective ethics and compliance training program is your best bet to protecting your company’s reputation. Here are five ways ethics and compliance training can help reduce risky behavior at your business and give your team a solid footing for creating a more ethical workplace.

1. Ethics & Compliance Training Inspires Good Decision-Making

Your code of conduct is one of the most valuable assets at your organization; it provides guidance on how employees should behave at work, treat colleagues, and represent your business. But on its own, a code of conduct is often viewed by employees as “rules to work by” instead of “values to be driven by”.

As part of ethics and compliance training, code of conduct training reinforces expectations laid out in your company’s code of conduct, not only reaffirming your company’s commitment to operating ethically at every level, but also equipping employees with the knowledge and skills to make decisions that protect your company’s reputation.

2. Ethics and Compliance Training Helps Make Your Business More Competitive

At a time when a single ethical misstep can cost your business its reputation among customers, vendors, and government agencies you work with, it’s important they know your company takes compliance-related issues seriously. In fact, a recent survey from Edelman, a global communications firm, found that consumers view ethical drivers such as integrity, purpose, and dependability as three times more important than a company’s competence or business ability.

A robust and effective ethics and compliance training program gives those who purchase your products or are invested in expanding your organization confidence in your ability to make good business decisions and lead a team that cares about how its perceived in the marketplace. What’s more, it significantly reduces business risk as your company explores and takes advantage of new revenue streams.

3. Ethics and Compliance Training Helps Boost Employee Loyalty

It shouldn’t be surprising that employees are less likely to remain loyal when they haven’t bought into your company’s mission and ethical standards. It also may be why 33% of executives consider improving employee loyalty and faith as their second-highest strategic priority over the next year, according to a study by The Predictive Index.

While retaining talent isn’t always easy, ethics and compliance training can make all the difference in creating loyal employees and helping your company look more appealing to others in the industry. Ethics and compliance training helps create a more aspirational workplace, providing additional value to the employee experience, which leads to happier employees and less turnover. Additionally, as the expense of hiring and training new talent is reduced, your company enjoys more costs-savings benefits.

4. Ethics and Compliance Training Helps Leaders Be More Engaged

Your company’s leadership has a big influence on employee behavior and how they feel about the business. If leadership isn’t up to date on the latest compliance guidelines and regulations, they may not act in full support of a compliance team’s initiatives, causing employees to view ethics and compliance training as less important than it should be.

When leaders understand the internal and external problems that can result from a non-compliant workforce, such as the financial, reputational, and cultural costs that can arise, they’re much more likely to see the value of training and voice their support openly. And as leaders become more engaged, they motivate the behavior that builds a stronger, more united team and helps them embrace the standards that bolster your company’s reputation.

5. Ethics and Compliance Training Creates PR Opportunities

When an employee acts unethically or goes against company policies, it can cost your business a lot of money. More importantly, however, it can thrust your business into the spotlight for all the wrong reasons, hurting it even further.

Today’s customers expect a lot from the brands they do business with, as evidenced by a range of recent studies and articles that show how much customers value authentic, transparent, purpose-driven brands that share their personal values. In this sort of climate, it is vital for organizations to do more than speak to their company values. In order to build trust with customers and create meaningful connections, brands must demonstrate a level of integrity that leaves no stone unturned – meaning everyone, at every level, needs to understand the values that drive your business, and have them instilled in such a way that it influences their day-to-day behavior and decision-making.

In addition to creating a company culture that customers respond to, an effective ethics and compliance training program helps your business prevent a PR nightmare, enabling marketing and sales teams to focus their efforts on building the brand instead of responding to bad press. What’s more, since word-of-mouth advertising is so valuable to running a successful business, ethics and compliance training helps employees adopt the kind of behavior that helps future customers – and their communities – react positively instead of negatively whenever your business is mentioned.

At Interactive Services, we help protect your company’s reputation with our award-winning ethics and compliance training solutions. Every one of our solutions can be tailored to your organization, ensuring your business provides employees with the right training to create a more ethical culture. Discover how we can make a difference at your business with our free 7-day trial!

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The Black Lives Matter movement has inspired businesses to take a hard look at their diversity and inclusion initiatives to identify gaps and build stronger, more ethical workplaces. Yet many compliance teams are challenged with how to address the issue effectively and make it part of their company’s DNA.

While celebrating diversity should be the goal of every organization, getting there requires everyone at the company to be on the same page – and not just at the higher levels. As leaders that implement training on diversity and inclusion, compliance teams have a unique responsibility to develop the skills that unite the workforce in championing the cause.

Here’s how compliance and learning teams are successfully guiding and supporting diversity and inclusion initiatives, helping employees acquire new skills, and creating more ethical company cultures as a result.

Cultivate Soft Skills

In 2018, LinkedIn released survey results showing soft skills as the number one priority for talent developers, executives, and people managers. Yet teaching the soft skills that help employees develop the emotional intelligence that leads to long-term behavioral changes can be challenging. One way learning teams have found success in helping employees learn these soft skills is by taking a hybrid approach to ethics and compliance training.

With hybrid learning, compliance and learning teams can educate employees on key diversity and inclusion topics, then reinforce these learnings by having employees hone these skills using real-world scenarios during training. Compared to traditional classroom learning, which often emphasizes knowledge over practice, hybrid learning asks employees to use their knowledge in everyday situations, thereby strengthening their empathy, understanding, and ultimately their behavior.

In today’s climate, it’s not enough to simply educate employees. If companies are to evolve, employee behavior must improve – and teaching soft skills is one of the most effective ways to not only identify discrimination in the workplace and prevent it from happening, but also to remove the unconscious or implicit biases that keep teams from being truly integrated and inclusive.

To see what hybrid learning looks like in action and how Interactive Services is leading the charge in helping businesses implement smarter, stronger approaches to creating ethical company cultures, explore the comprehensive Workplace Diversity Training Course we recently launched.

Educate, but also Listen

One of the primary goals of compliance teams is to make training more engaging for employees. Yet this can sometimes take a backseat in the pursuit of organizational goals, and the assurance that training principles are taught, and benchmarks are being met. But as most learning teams discover, knowledge retention and engagement go hand in hand.

In a study by Deloitte, the company discovered a unique connection between engagement and listening to employees, and how it impacted businesses. Here are some of their findings:

• US businesses lose $300 billion annually in productivity due to disengaged workers
• Employees are 57% more effective at organizations with engaged workers
• Organizations with highly engaged employees grow 2.3 times more than the average over 3 years

What’s more interesting is how well companies are doing at implementing meaningful diversity and inclusion initiatives and how employees view this lack of engagement:

• Only 11% of companies were considered to have a highly inclusive culture by employees
• 1 in 4 Millennials rated fair treatment/loyalty/employee satisfaction as the number one value supporting a company’s long-term success

When compliance teams take active steps to listen to employees needs and concerns – especially around such topics as diversity and inclusion – and adjust training based on these outcomes, they can:

• Build trust and affinity between employees and their managers
• Help CCOs create more employee-centric training programs
• Assist in developing skills that are important and unique to an organization, culture, and team

Employees who feel heard create opportunities for compliance teams to boost engagement and satisfaction – not just in training, but across every aspect of an organization.

Take the Right Actions

Organizational changes are happening at a breakneck pace in response to the growing Black Lives Matter movement, COVID-19, and other major events taking place around the world. In this type of environment, compliance teams are tasked with tremendous challenges: finding the best approach to educate employees effectively and ensuring these programs are built for long-term impact once they are implemented.

If we want employees to do the right thing as conversations on diversity and inclusion arise in their day-to-day experiences, we need to deliver the right kind of training to support them. While a seminar or workshop might spur an employee – or a whole company – into critical thinking, it won’t necessarily lead to a more diverse workforce, or help build a stronger, more ethical culture.

For good thinking and behavior to stick, and for companies to evolve towards better hiring and promotion practices, companies must address the problem head-on by implementing training and policies that continue long after the call for change fades. Here are a few things that can help:

Educate and Empower Management

Buy-in that happens at the top is then passed on to the rest of the business. Start every diversity and inclusion initiative by training management first, so they can communicate their insights and the need for this type of training to their teams more effectively.

Evaluate Your Policies

It’s not enough anymore to simply follow EEOC guidelines in developing or adjusting workplace policies. Companies need to make a more proactive effort to reach out to and promote qualified candidates of different groups, cultures, and beliefs – and make it a bigger part of their overall business strategy by putting these actions into writing.

Create an Employee-Led Task Force

Management may have the biggest influence in ensuring policies are implemented, but these policies won’t be adopted if they aren’t meaningful to employees. By creating a small task force of people with direct lines to upper management and whose purpose is to develop a richer, more inclusive culture, organizations can have confidence that changes will achieve broader acceptance.

Interactive Services offers a series of award-winning training solutions specially designed to help businesses create more diverse, inclusive, and ethical cultures. In addition to our training modules on Anti-Harassment & Workplace Harassment and Respect in the Workplace, we’ve launched a new, in-depth learning solution on Workplace Diversity, which covers key topics being discussed in businesses today. Discover how we can help your company make the leap to a better and more sustainable culture with our free 7-day trial!

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Employee training has evolved considerably in recent years, ushering in new approaches to learning and innovating training delivery. This modernization of workplace learning, whether in ethics and compliance training or onboarding and job training, has transformed businesses around the world, making them more agile and productive in an increasingly competitive environment.

Deciding which training processes to enhance and which technologies to implement can be a tough challenge for any enterprise. But with mobile device usage on the rise, businesses evolving due to the COVID-19 epidemic, and more tech-savvy professionals joining the workforce, the case for adopting a device-agnostic mobile learning (mLearning) solution grows stronger.

The Case for Device-Agnostic Training

When it comes to training, ease of use is all-important to compliance and learning teams. And this is where device-agnostic solutions make the greatest impact.

From teams to individuals, employees use different tools, operating systems, and devices to stay in touch and be productive. Device-agnostic software bridges the gap created by different devices, enabling employees to access content no matter what type of device they’re using.

Companies that make intelligent use of these different devices in training gain a big advantage. In addition to helping employees start training on one device (such as an office computer) and pick up where they left off on a smartphone or tablet, a device agnostic program ensures the training experience and information is seamless across every device. In other words, it’s a win-win for the company and employees alike.

Organizations are Making the Leap to Mobile Learning

Study after study shows why executives and compliance teams view mobile learning as a business advantage, and how enterprises implementing this training strategy are benefitting.

• A study by T-Mobile found that 63% of global enterprises view mobility as the single biggest contributor to their company’s competitive advantage, with 7 out of 10 saying it was a top priority for their business
• Chief Learning Officer Magazine data showed that 52% of CLOs expected to invest in content for mobile learning
• The same study also found that 76% of eLearning was delivered via mobile devices in 2018 versus 12% just four years prior
• Moreover, 54% of CLOs said they chose mLearning for its ability to reach a large audience with few resources
• At Merrill Lynch, employees using mobile devices finished compliance courses 45% faster than computer users, contributing to an estimated 4,270 hours of extra productivity

Why a Device-Agnostic Training Solution Matters

Mobile devices like smartphones and tablets have reached a point where they’re more powerful and versatile than some of today’s PCs and laptops. Add this to their intrinsic portability plus their wider connectivity, and you get an ideal scenario for businesses to improve everyday processes through the technology.

Here’s why companies around the world are taking a device-agnostic, mobile-friendly approach to ethics and compliance training.

Training Flexibility

One of mLearning’s greatest strengths is that it enables employees to complete training tasks anywhere, at any time, and on any device of their choosing. Compared to in-person training, this learner-centric approach not only minimizes the time employees spend away from their desks, it also enables them to learn at home, on their commute, or during breaks at the office.

Bite-Sized Learning

Microlearning, or learning in short and digestible modules, improves the efficiency of learning transfer by 17 percent. This approach fits naturally into the mLearning environment, where interacting with bite-sized content is normal and expected.

Collaboration

Another benefit of mLearning is that it shortens the feedback loop by giving compliance teams quick insights about employee training challenges and facilitating easier collaboration due to its easier integration among staff. Armed with this knowledge, compliance teams can use information to see where training needs improvement and can give employees faster feedback throughout the training process.

Future-proofed Training

With Millennials and Gen Z making up more and more of the modern workforce, there’s a growing need – and expectation – for businesses to use mobile technology in the office. By working more closely to the expectations of incoming talent, mLearning can extend the shelf life of your compliance program and provide training that integrates better with your employees’ lives.

Gamification

The functionality of mobile devices makes them the ideal platform for game-based learning, which is shown to boost learning retention, engagement, and participation. Through immersive experiences and interaction with real-world scenarios, gamified mobile training can test employee knowledge and inspire competition by offering badges, scores, and other types of rewards for completing training modules.

As a leading innovator of ethics and compliance training, Interactive Services has helped hundreds of businesses worldwide benefit from our device-agnostic mobile learning programs. Experience these advantages at your organization by signing up for a free 7-day trial of our award-winning solutions.

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