Immersive Compliance Training And How To Incorporate Interactive Videos
In 2017, Deutsche Bank was fined over $600 million by financial regulators for failing to stop $10 billion in suspicious trades between their offices in Russia, the US, and the UK. According to the New York Department of Financial Services, Deutsche "…missed numerous opportunities to detect, investigate, and stop the scheme due to extensive compliance failures[1], allowing the scheme to continue for years". On top of the fines, Deutsche was required to maintain an independent monitor to review its compliance programs.
As mentioned above, compliance is a vital issue in business today and maintaining it can be more of a serious challenge too. When new regulations and limitations enter the corporate environment, the playing field changes and everyone has to adapt instantly. Imposing new limitations on high-performing employees is like asking them to drive with the emergency brake on—it increases their cognitive burden and creates fertile ground for errors.
How Can Training Rise To The Challenge Of Ensuring Compliance?
A popular quote, often attributed to Aristotle, goes like this:
"We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit."
Whether or not Aristotle actually said this is beside the point. Instilling good habits in your employees, rather than asking them to periodically memorize new regulations, is the key to changing behavior.
The best way to do this with training is to immerse the learner in an environment where good habits become second nature. When the regulatory environment changes (or compliance is already weak) and consequences of failure are high, immersive compliance training is required. Simply reading a manual or sitting through a PowerPoint session won't do the job, and standard off-the-shelf solutions tend to fall short as well.
What Makes Training Immersive?
Immersive training creates a world where learners can acquire knowledge, pick up good habits, and develop skills to do the right thing even in novel situations. Immersive training environments tend to do the following:
- Engage emotions to underscore the importance of the subject matter. In a healthcare training module, a welcome video showing heartfelt testimonials from expectant mothers establishes the critical nature of prenatal genetic testing. This gives learners a vivid picture of what’s at stake and helps them relate to the subject matter on a personal level.
- Speak the learner’s language by working closely with Subject Matter Experts to strike the right tone. Few things will make a learner’s attention vaporize faster than content that feels like it’s for someone else. This malpractice avoidance training incorporates scenarios and questions that have been painstakingly crafted to speak directly to highly accomplished experts. As a result, the physicians who completed the training felt empowered to improve their decision making and improve patient safety.
- Use a multi-media approach that includes audio, video, real-life case studies, complex scenarios, challenging decision points, and more to boost retention and give learners a complete, three-dimensional view of their environment. This helps establish the larger context and root the training in reality.
What Are The Best Learning Techniques For Creating Immersion?
Within the multi-media approach, 2 techniques stand out:
- Interactive videos create a very engaging experience, since they give the learner a strong sense of involvement in a scenario. Personal interactions generate strong memories, and when you attach those memories to a realistic video, the effect is multiplied. In an interactive video training for Domino’s Pizza, learners observe the pizza-making process and then get to practice what they’ve learned—just like they’d do in a real kitchen.
- Immersive scenarios give a learner the chance to live in an alternate environment for a little while. When you exercise their decision-making muscles while immersed in this environment, learners can internalize critical processes and will begin to develop problem-solving heuristics on their own. In the malpractice example above, a series of realistic scenarios drives home its point by placing the learner right in the doctor’s role.
How Important Is Immersive Compliance Training?
For an example of immersive compliance training with measurable results, let’s look a little outside the corporate world to aviation. Modern flight simulators place pilots in totally immersive scenarios that are hard to distinguish from reality. They prevent accidents by giving pilots "experience" in critical situations that are unlikely to happen in the real world—but that might happen, and must be handled correctly.
In many industries, compliance failure can cause loss of life just like a plane crash can. Simulating business processes in lifelike detail would be an ideal way to prevent these failures—but unfortunately, holodeck-style simulations for business aren’t expected until the mid-24th century.
When failure is not an option, employees must comply with regulations perfectly and must anticipate risky, potentially non-compliant situations. Compliance training that incorporates interactive video, immersive scenarios, tough decision points, and a strong personal connection to the subject matter is, by far, the best tool we have to achieve these goals.
References
1. Deutsche fined $630 million for failures over Russian money-laundering
