Innovation in Compliance with Tom Fox Getting Employees to Pay Attention with Peter Grossman
Peter Grossman comes from a publishing and entertainment background, having worked at US Weekly and Rolling Stone. Given this background, he and his partner initially targeted the entertainment industry when they co-founded their production company, Labyrinth Training. However, they were offered the opportunity to work with AB InBev to create compliance training that their employees would actually pay attention to. Since that time, Labyrinth has focused on creating training for the compliance industry. Peter joins Tom Fox on this week’s show to talk about the innovative ideas, strategies and techniques in training and communications that his company brings to the compliance space.
Fixing What’s Wrong With Compliance Training
People love learning, Peter says, but they generally do not like school. The problem with compliance training is that it’s usually built by test takers, with little to no emphasis on engaging learners. Oftentimes you have a situation where compliance training is done in December when employees are the least engaged. That’s not the time to try to shove information down people’s throats, Peter argues. Training should be something that makes a difference, that changes behavior. As such, it should be something people want to do, not just have to do. You need to attach creative and innovative ideas to what you're trying to convey to grab people’s attention and make it memorable. Essentially, your training should be about engaging your workers year round in a culture change.
Memorable Storytelling
Whenever you roll out a training, it should feel like a cool office party, Peter says. The goal is to have people talking about it afterwards by attaching your policies to storytelling. Tom asks him how he applied this strategy at AB InBev. Peter shares the attention-grabbing narrative they developed for AB InBev’s compliance training program. It was so memorable and relatable that it became a company inside joke. What’s most important, he says, is that workers now remember what to do in certain moments because of that training. “The idea is that when you create characters that resonates with everybody, that’s what sparks the behavior change and gets people remembering it throughout the year,” Peter comments. He advocates bringing storytelling to everything - from broad topics to the most nuanced - because people will remember it.
A New Podcast
Tom mentions that Peter will be joining the Compliance Podcast Network with his new podcast. He asks him to give listeners a preview of what is to come. Peter says the name of the podcast is In The Lab. It’s going to be a very loose, conversational show. He will bring his storytelling background to the show as the format will be about talking to people and hearing their stories.
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