Most compliance and ethics officers are fairly confident about the content of their ethics training programs. It's delivering it in a way that doesn't put employees to sleep that is the hard part.

To meet that challenge, more companies are looking to Hollywood for inspiration. They are creating their own ethics movies and company-tailored television series to capture the attention of their audience. Others are seeking help to jazz up ethics training in unique places.

Steve Johnston, president of Second City Communications, says more than 100 corporate clients have worked with the comedy troupe's business offshoot, including using its Real BizShorts—short, funny videos that incorporate humor into ethics and compliance training. “These are mostly Fortune 1000 companies, but also a lot of mid-cap companies.”

The idea behind RealBiz Shorts is not so much to train people on ethics, but to engage employees to focus on already-existing issues in a catchy way, Johnston explains. “What we've heard consistently is that people get it. Everybody likes to laugh, and they appreciate the fresh approach.”

Companies have used videos and other materials to train employees on ethics and compliance for decades. But many are tossing out the dry, canned programs that cause employees' eyes to glaze over. When Joel Katz assumed the chief ethics officer role at CA Technologies in April 2009, he says the employees complained about the training. “One of the things I was hearing from employees was that a lot of the compliance awareness training that preceded me was very dry,” he says. “It was not engaging.”

In the process of brainstorming how to make CA's compliance training stick, “one of the first things people talked about was humor,” says Katz. “We talked about different scenarios we could possibly do, or which subjects we wanted to tackle first and how we could make them funny.”

That's how the idea came about to create a video. A film agency then provided an actor and helped write the scripts for the first two films, which focused on the subjects of insider trading, and confidentiality and competitive information. A YouTube sensation among employees, the main character, Griffin Peabody, has since been incorporated into much of CA's training.

Following the first two videos, CA began to play a much more hands-on role, including conducting casting calls within the company to get employees involved, which sparked further interest, says Katz. “When they learned that their peers had a big role in the production, more and more people wanted to watch it,” he says.

“I get hundreds of e-mails from employees and people stopping me in the hall to say how much they like the video, how fun it is, and that it's the best training they've ever watched,” Katz adds.

BearingPoint's Story

When Russ Berland, former chief compliance officer of management and technology consulting firm BearingPoint, set out to redesign the company's ethics and compliance training program he also wanted to use an unorthodox approach. “We were looking for something that would be beyond the boring, check-the-box kind of experience,” he explains.

The end result was a television sitcom modeled after The Office that focuses on a fictional consulting company called Aggrieva. Berland says the goal was to make it feel like a TV series of 5-9 minute episodes, each building upon the other. “We didn't need 20 minutes of video to get three or four points across,” he says.

Berland signed on filmmaker Marc Havener, of film production company Resonate Pictures, and set about writing the script. BearingPoint shot an entire season of 10 short episodes over the course of a weekend. Each episode incorporated such issues as conflicts of interest, diversity, and harassment.

“People loved the training, they actually raved about it,” says Berland. Prior to the official release of each episode every Monday, employees quickly figured out that the company would post a new episode on its staging server the preceding Friday and would start tracking them down. As a result, thousands of employees would watch the videos before they were even released.

The series changed the way employees talked about compliance. “You really could see the culture changing as a result of the training,” says Berland. Employees began to express greater awareness of the code of conduct and less concern about fear of retaliation, he says.

Katz says he's noticed similar results at CA. In the weeks and months following the awareness videos, employees invariably would ask a lot more questions, “which is always a good thing,” he says.

“You can reach and engage an audience in short durations over a course of a year, as opposed to just going through the big-bang certification process,” stresses Johnston. “That's where a lot of other video formats fall short, because they tend to be too long.”

Engaging Emotions

That doesn't mean longer training films can't work. Global professional services firm Marsh & McLennan has had plenty of success with a training documentary it produced that runs a full 50 minutes. It's resonating with people in a very powerful, emotional way,” says Scott Gilbert, chief risk and compliance officer of Marsh & McLennan Companies.

Threaded throughout the film in a very subtle way are really specific messages about such issues as insider trading, contractual limitations of liability, and the importance of individual responsibility. “It conveys this underlying message that each of our actions has the potential to enhance—or take away from—the quality, professionalism, and reputation of the corporation,” says David Nadler, vice chairman of Marsh & McLennan.

“The film is all about reaching people's hearts,” explains Gilbert. “Fundamentally, it's about emphasizing the work that we do as a company.”

The Chilean earthquake occurred in the middle of making the film, and Marsh decided to incorporate it into the movie. Being able to film the natural disaster in real-time helped drive home the message that the difference between having insurance in place or not “really stands between recovery and disaster for clients,” says Gilbert.

“The film is all about reaching people's hearts. Fundamentally, it's about emphasizing the work that we do as a company.”

—Scott Gilbert,

Chief Risk and Compliance Officer,

Marsh & McLennan Companies

The movie helped Marsh & McLennan Companies convey the idea that the work employees do is important, and each individual employee has a responsibility to behave in an ethical way, “I thought it was very important to bring out a new Code of Conduct for the firm, and to really make that come alive to people in the way that we communicate about it,” says Gilbert.

Many perceived the old Code of Conduct as too “U.S-centric,” explains Gilbert, so one aim of the new Code was to give it global relevance, “and the film has hugely contributed to that.” Subtitled in 12 different languages, the film spotlights the daily experiences of employees in London, Santiago, Tokyo, Dubai, and New York.

Gilbert and Nadler say that response to the film has been overwhelming. In fact, a number of employees enjoyed the film so much they've requested copies to take home and show their families.

Gilbert credits a large part of the film's success to the magic of cinematography, which director, Ryan Fenson-Hood, used “masterfully,” he says. In addition to carefully thought-out and deliberate camera angles and editing, all the music was “tailored exclusively to the action of the film to make sure visual imagery was aligned with music, which creates an emotional impact on the audience,” he says.

Supplemental Training

Compliance and ethics officers stress that the ethics videos aren't the only form of training that they use, but rather part of an integrated strategy. At Marsh & McLennan, for example, the documentary is followed by guided discussions about how each issue applies to employees' daily work activities.

In addition, employees must certify through an online test that they understand the Code of Conduct, says Nadler. “The use of face-to-face training in combination with the innovative use of media is important.”

BearingPoint took a similar approach. Each episode would be followed up by a senior-level executive within the company to discuss relevant corporate policies and values and what to do in such real-life situations at BearingPoint. “The videos were just part of the instruction,” says Berland. “This was just spotlighting the issue and showing what it looks like in a funny way.”

At CA, employees must take certain compliance training courses throughout the year, including online and live training. One of last year's goals was for every in-house lawyer to conduct at least three training sessions on a compliance subject in their local language. “Every single one of our lawyers met that challenge,” says Katz.

Lights, Camera, Ethics!

Compliance and ethics officers conclude that what effective training boils down to is relating to employees on a personal level. “To have an effective compliance program, you need to tailor it to your industry and your employee population so that you can make it relevant, interesting, and useful to your employees,” says Katz. “If you can give them something that's memorable and engaging, they will walk away and remember the lessons much better.”

“You want people to be able to identify with it. If they identify with it, you engage their emotions,” says Berland. “You'll start to see that people will not only want to take the training, but absorb and apply it and talk about it.”

In the process of writing the scripts and designing the program, Dave Farrell, chief compliance officer of Yahoo says he “cannot overstate the importance” of having employees from all the various departments and functions as part of the test audience, “because that will give you a pretty good gauge of how it's going to be received when you roll it out,” he says.

“The challenge with videos is keeping them fresh,” says Farrell, “because things change so much and so fast that almost as soon as you produce one and get it out the door, the world has moved on in a lot of ways.”

Audiences today are “very sophisticated and very used to seeing high-quality media,” says Nadler. An off-the-shelf training approach is not going to resonate with them.

“The bottom line is that you try to find a way to reach the employees on their level and things they're receptive to,” Farrell adds. “You hope they come out of it and say, ‘that was really worthwhile.'”

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