Challenge: Taking Compliance to the next level

Cargill came to True Office Learning with two objectives:

1) Get better data

2) Inspire better employee decision making

“There's a huge difference between training 1.0 (which is essentially employees demonstrating to us that they remember what 'this word' means, and what 'that policy' means) and training 2.0. Because now, compliance teams don’t want to just see that their employees know a policy, but that they can apply a policy and make good decisions for themselves.” says Cargill’s Christopher Annand, Director of Operations for Ethics and Compliance.

True Office Learning and Cargill partnered to build out a training program that helped employees practice real-life scenarios and teach them when, how, and why to do the right thing.

The team felt strongly about getting more insight into potential behavior problems, knowing that if they could learn more about employee behavior and decision-making, they can root out the causes of any risky decisions, and predict and remediate issues long before any compliance failure happens.

Solution: Creating a compliance ecosystem

The True Office Learning solution for getting Cargill to "Compliance 2.0" was to create a full compliance training ecosystem - employing a set of products that work together to:

1) Guide every learner to topic mastery

2) Uncover any potential risk or blind spot

3) Shape the strategy for their future training program

To get started, the Scholar platform allowed the Cargill compliance team to construct its training program around specific behavioral issues and relevant scenarios while cutting seat time and guaranteeing topic mastery.  The I.Q. Analytics portal, which draws deep behavioral data from Scholar training, helped the team get to any problem areas quickly and easily, then use that insight to craft a subsequent training plan. 

Between the learn-by-doing methodology, adaptivity, and advanced behavioral insight within Scholar, Cargill was now able to see how employees apply policies in practice, and where people had misconceptions and were making incorrect, risky decisions.

Then, given all this new insight, the Cargill compliance team was able to sit down with their business partners and work together to determine what the root of any problem was, and put together an action plan to proactively detect and prevent it, which helps make future training strategies  purposeful and targeted. 

Outcome: predictive & responsive data CAPTURE

The right training data can help compliance teams make correlations with other data at their disposal. For example, if the only data at a team’s disposal is around completions, that data isn’t going to prompt anyone to check incident data or policy systems to see how many times someone accessed a policy, or the last time a risk assessment was completed. All that data is going to tell the team is that a requirement was met to complete training - and Cargill wanted to go beyond that mindset.

In the new world with True Office Learning data, Cargill had enough evidence to highlight issues and give direction on where to drill down - by geography, business line, function and more.

In one of Cargill’s safety-focused trainings, they were able to uncover that factory workers thought it was acceptable to try to fix a particular mechanical issue before reporting it to a manager.

“We had an indicator that something was going wrong -  we thought we were providing good safety information, but training data from True Office Learning showed us that something was amiss.We looked at other data sources. Are we seeing any incident data on this issue? How many employees have accessed the policy that speaks to this requirement – has no one reviewed it in a while? Do we need a communications campaign?

Then we investigated risk assessment data. What did this business identify as a top risk? Is it employee safety or proper procedure? Is not enough attention being given because it’s a low risk on the totem pole?” says Christopher.

All of these data sources flow in to what Cargill calls their Compliance Culture Dashboard which compares training data-points that may be a concern to all of their other data points. 

“Once we determined the issue, we had a Managing Director speak about it at the plant. We addressed the problem with really low-investment activities like repeated messaging and communications for a period of time, then planned on reanalyzing the data to see if the culture had shifted and if things had gotten better.” Says Christopher.

“When we identify this type of thing, we address it. But we were now able to make risk-based decisions on the issue. We made compliance a collaborator with the business…it’s ultimately to everyone’s benefit.”

Outcome: stronger customer trust 

Providing the business actionable intelligence is a huge part of the output of the compliance teams. Cargill used its training platform to influence and measure compliance behavior at their company. They were able to answer the question to the business “what do I get for that?”. Measuring compliance behavior is the next big step in compliance training…you have to have a platform that allows you to do it and report to the business leaders that need to know about it.

Cargill took this one step further by sharing their data driven approach with their sales organizations. For customers, knowing that they are hiring an organization that takes such diligent care in ensuring their people know how to do the right thing, is a tremendous confidence builder in trusting Cargill as a provider. 

Outcome: 30% seat Time savings 

True Office Learning was the first external firm that Cargill partnered with to create a curriculum. The shift in strategy came because of Scholar’s ability to analyze behavioral data and the ease of building out courses to meet specific goals by collaborating with a strong and proactive instructional design team.  

Cargill’s first year of Code of conduct training was coming in at 45-50 minutes, which was determined to be too long, and through True Office Learning’s adaptive platform and flexible design, they were able to reduce the seat time required by 30%, getting the time down to an average of 35 minutes in subsequent years and saving 10,000 revenue-generating hours for the company.

Additionally, Cargill leveraged the use of the Poet editing tool that allowed Christopher’s team the ability to make annual adjustments in the curriculum courses – largely based on the course data referenced earlier – through a user-friendly tool that also leads to time savings within the compliance team.

Parting words: A culture of responsibility 

While Cargill finds value across various elements of their engagement with True Office Learning, what is central to our ongoing success as partners is the focus on providing the data our clients need in order to make an impact on their businesses.

Christopher says “Making compliance a collaborator with the business is to everyone’s benefit. Compliance has a very specific duty to the employees of the organization...

When a compliance failure happens, and compliance didn't partner with the business to help employees make the right decisions, sure, the company suffers, but the person is the one that feels it… they are the ones that pay the price. In that sense, the compliance program fails the individual.

Those unintentional failures are where compliance has to look itself in the mirror and say ‘did we do everything we could have to equip that individual?’… if the answer is no, that’s on us.

Scholar Compliance Training is the solution to that, because we can use it to truly measure behavior. Together we can provide protection around employees.”