Six months ago, you hired a woman to work in your accounting office. Since then, she has not meshed with the company at all. She is mean and abrasive, and multiple members of her team have met with you separately to complain about her. She isn’t great at communicating with other workers on a project, which you suspect has caused a decline in productivity, but always has her own work done promptly. She’s been late a few times recently, the first seemingly actionable offense in her tenure so far. However, the subway system downtown has had issues in the recent weeks. How would you deal with this situation?
What is Corporate Compliance Training?
Corporate Compliance Training is teaches employees about situations like the one outlined above. The training manifests in the form of a series of lessons and tests that deal with various examples of difficult ethical situations and teach what the proper response in those situations are. Such programs are designed to educate the employee not just about business ethics in general, but also about regulations specific to their industry.
Reasons for Corporate Compliance Training
While “If it doesn’t feel wrong, don’t do it,” is a good place to start in the world of business ethics, it is by no means a comprehensive approach. Regulations can be incredibly complex, and not necessarily directly in line with an obvious set of morals, especially considering how much individual morals can vary from person to person. Therefore, an employee should not only be taught what is “right”, but what is allowable and what is forbidden by law. Furthermore, although not everyone is going to do the right thing even after such training, it does prevent culpability to the company in case an employee does break the law, by proving that the employee doing so was not due to the company’s negligence. Finally, since regulations are generally put in place for a reason, proper training can improve the state of the world from preventing harm that an employee might otherwise unwittingly cause.
So Who Really Needs Corporate Compliance Training?
Everyone. Low-level employees should receive the training because such employees are usually the primary point of contact between the company and the public at large, and thus, any potentially infringing actions that such an employee makes are generally the most visible. CEOs and board members have to make decisions that can affect thousands, sometimes millions, of people, so any ethical issues with their decisions stand to have the largest negative impact, both on society and on the company. Middle management and supervisors have to deal with intra-company issues most often, and have to navigate complex waters between employees without causing a discriminatory situation. Absolutely no one is exempt from needing corporate compliance training.
