True Office Learning Blog

Well, we made it to 2021.

I think most of us came into this year just happy we turned the page on 2020, and were cautiously optimistic for something – err, anything – better than the personal and collective hand we were dealt last year. But with the disturbing events that have occurred within the first week of January, the bar is still quite low.

So how do you focus to set up a winning formula for 2021? Here are five things to do right now:

A restaurant gift card was all that separated me from my strait-laced corporate image and an orange jumpsuit...

Okay, I am prone to drama, but jest aside, I was at risk of violating company policy and I didn’t even know it. The incident I am referring to happened prior to my role as a compliance practitioner who knew where to find our corporate policies – and that there may even be one relating to gifts and entertainment (aka business courtesies)!

I received a call from my mother-in-law yesterday. She wanted to know if we were planning to come over for Thanksgiving. Not unusual. But the conversation that followed was so…2020. Upon my affirmation of ‘yes’ (we would never miss her cooking and company!), she proceeded to lay out her COVID-19 friendly Thanksgiving Strategy, centered around our family self-quarantining from now until then if we wished to enter her home:

Analytics. It has become the go-to (and let’s face it, often overused) word for compliance practitioners who seek to evolve their programs in a meaningful way by leveraging data. Compliance training is a powerful source of this type of transformational data for teams to leverage, as it is one of the most substantive interactions the organization has with every employee. But that data often falls short. The challenge with much of the data that comes out of compliance training is that it’s not truly insightful...despite many vendors best efforts, the “data” that comes out of most training platforms is completion and quiz data. This just is not deep enough insight for most teams.

With less than 30 days until the general election, let’s face it, the political climate in 2020 makes Game of Thrones intrigue seem tame, regardless of your leanings. Not to mention everything else that makes 2020…unique!

On June 1, 2020, the Department of Justice updated its guidance document, Evaluation of Corporate Compliance Programs (the “Guidance”), superseding previous guidance from April 2019 and February 2017.

The Guidance, which is intended as a reference of information and questions for prosecutors – think of it as an framework – to ask companies when evaluating their compliance programs amidst investigations and subsequent charging decisions, provides us a lens into how we should be structuring our programs. You can view the key takeaways of the 2019 guidance updates here. 

COVID-19 has changed so many things about our lives, both personally and professionally. Many of us are acclimating to a new normal of remote work and virtual meetings amongst competing priorities like family and finances. One thing that it hasn’t changed, is the importance of doing the right thing.