The most important element of an effective compliance training program is constant communication, according to speakers at Compliance Week 2010 taking place this week in Washington.

“It’s never enough,” said Stacey Babson-Smith, vice president and chief ethics and compliance officer for Terex Corp., a U.S. industrial company. “You can never stop talking about it.”

Mary Beth Taylor, assistant general counsel for compliance with U.S. Steel Corp., said constant messaging to employees is critical, regardless of their function or level within the organization. “It’s about people keeping compliance top of mind, all the time,” she said.

At Bertelsmann, a European media company, one of the challenges in developing an effective training program was to reconcile the best ideas in how adults learn with the nature of compliance, said Carsten Tams, a senior vice president and ethics and compliance executive for the company.

Adult learning theory says training should be self-directed, experience-based, interactive, and participatory, said Tams. Compliance, on the other hand, involves mandatory content that is predetermined by regulatory requirements and bright lines that are non-negotiable.

Ultimately, Bertelsmann worked through those differences to come up with a program that is interactive and relies on multiple methods and multiple media. It involves printed, online, and live training, with both passive and active elements. And it provides some “drilldown functionalities,” said Tams, where some content is mandatory for all participants and then some features give trainees options about what to pursue further.

Online training is the most common method employed at Bertelsmann, said Tams. Some 60 percent of the company’s staff is trained via online programs, and it’s the method most preferred by employees as well, he said. “It’s particularly useful in an office environment,” he said. “In our experience it is the most expedient form for participation.”

Terex uses online training as well, but the company also sees a lot of success with its series of business practices summit meetings, said Babson-Smith. Top officers including the CEO, CFO, general counsel, and chief compliance staff meet with 40 to 50 employees at a time several times a year. “It makes a huge difference to people when they see their CEO standing before them and talking to them for eight hours,” she said.

The sessions typically end with a game of “Jeopardy” modeled after the popular television game show, quizzing employees on what they’d learned. Babson-Smith said Terex chose the format because the game show is known and liked in many countries, so it works well in many different cultures.

Taylor said U.S. Steel also relies a great deal on online training, with two online courses annually, but it also presents 50 to 100 live programs annually. “We look for opportunities to do things informally,” she said. The company finds employees are especially receptive to messages that are delivered through less formal channels or processes, she said.

U.S. Steel’s compliance managers routinely provide live training to employees throughout the company. And before the economy tanked, they routinely attended live sessions at the company’s home base in Pittsburgh as well. But with the downturn in the economy, those sessions for compliance managers have migrated to town hall meetings attended both in person and by video conference, Taylor said.

The company also provides weekly written materials through its “Ethics & Compliance Reporter” news bulletin, covering business news that ties in with compliance. “We haven’t had any lack of things to (write about) to send this out on a weekly basis,” she said. “It’s been a good communications tool, a training tool for our compliance managers to use in their discussions with their staff.”