Imagine your compliance training program as a gleaming new pair of fancy running shoes. 👟 You carefully box them up and send them out to everyone in your org, all wrapped up in sparkly brand-colored paper. Now everyone has what they need to be healthy and active. Mission accomplished, right?
Hold on a sec. Let’s rewind. Have you achieved your goal of a healthy and active workplace because everyone received a trendy pair of trainers? Or do you wait to test whether those kicks actually hit the pavement, leading to positive health outcomes?
You guessed it … Proving that your training routine is working goes way beyond tracking how many people received their sneakers. The true measure of success lies in behavior change. The same goes for compliance training: You can distribute as many training materials as you want; the real indicator will be behavior change—the holy grail of risk reduction.
While these changes can take many forms, they’ll likely fit into one of these four buckets:
🪣Early Reporting: Are your people more likely to report potential issues after the training?
Increased reporting to managers, your team, and your helpline is a great sign they comprehended the training and know when to escalate issues.
🪣Inquiry Rates: Are folks reaching out proactively with more questions about procedures or special circumstances after training?
This shows they're engaged, know where to go for help, and want to do things right. They get it!
🪣Incident Rates: The ultimate goal—are there fewer actual incidents of non-compliance after the training campaign?
This is a clear indicator that teams are putting their knowledge into action. And that’s what your program is all about.
🪣Audit Findings: These go hand-in-hand with incident rates.
Fewer findings show your efforts are paying off, and they’re a great tool to show how you’re reducing risk exposure over time.
Start with the basics
First, recognize this is a marathon, not a sprint (running metaphors FTW!). You have access to a wealth of information but gathering it all, analyzing it, and formatting it in a way that is helpful to your team, risk owners, and senior leaders to decipher is no small feat. Take a breath, stretch, and start by putting one foot in front of the other.
Source: Paramount Pictures’ Forrest Gump
Here are some general pre- and post-training metrics to track that will help you answer the question, “Is my training working?”:
- Number of documented policy violations from risk owners
- Number of disciplinary actions taken related to compliance violations
- Number of regulatory requests and any resulting findings or penalties
- Number and severity of audit findings
- Number of issues reported to the helpline and whether they were substantiated
- Number of legal actions or settlements related to the topic
- Changes to your risk assessment
Keep in mind that these metrics alone don’t tell the full story. 🧩 For each, consider:
- Are employees who completed training involved in these incidents?
- Is more or improved training the best way to mitigate this risk, or is the root cause better addressed through internal controls, policy guidance, and performance management?
- Do you see any trends by employee type, business unit, department, or location, indicating more tailored training is needed?
And here are some fuzzy metrics to look at, too. I call them “fuzzy” because they shouldn’t hold as much weight as the things above. 🪶 They’re not, after all, measuring the true impact of your training efforts, but rather opinions, reach, and knowledge:
- Perceptions gleaned from culture surveys
- Engagement rates of compliance communications (e.g., email open rates, social media views/comments, time spent reading a newsletter article)
- Results of knowledge assessments such as test-out quizzes, compliance surveys, and focus groups
If all this still feels like too much, remember not to let perfection get in the way of progress. Start tracking a few key metrics for one risk topic you own, like conflicts of interest, and use that to pilot and refine your approach. Once you're comfy with how it’s going, start down another path. Eventually you’ll look back and be totally amazed at the amount of ground you covered. But also, there’s no reason to—and you shouldn’t—go on this journey alone.
Source: Paramount Pictures’ Forrest Gump
Partner up!
Think of your risk owners, legal department, and internal audit as your running group. They all have a vested interest in building a strong compliance program. 💪 By partnering with them, you’ll be able to identify the best metrics to track for each training to show if there’s improvement.
For example, if you're training your sales team on anti-bribery and corruption, sales team leaders might suggest looking at the number of reported suspicious gifts, monitoring conflicts of interest disclosures, tracking the number of disciplinary actions for anti-bribery policy violations, and inquiries from regulatory agencies. (Then, they can help you get the right info to the right people—but that’s for another blog post! All this to say: partnerships are powerful!)
By working with your compliance partners throughout the org, you can create a customized set of metrics that reflects your industry, compliance landscape, and unique culture for every risk you face. Over time, these will reveal historical trends, progress, and areas for improvement.
Keep making strides
The most rad part of measuring impact metrics is that the data you collect becomes a roadmap for continuous improvement. ♻️
Let's say the data shows a dip in early reporting for a specific risk. This could indicate a need for refresher training, a communication gap, or even a poorly designed reporting process. By keeping your finger on the pulse, you can pinpoint potential weak spots and address them. It's an ongoing cycle—measure, analyze, improve, repeat.
Effective compliance training is about empowering employees to actively manage risk in their day-to-day jobs. By focusing on impact metrics—those that indicate a change in behavior—you can prove your training program is working. 🏆
To help you out, we have a step-by-step guide that walks you through:
- What the government actually requires of your training
- How to design training for effectiveness
- How to implement training in a tactical, lean way
- How to measure if your training works (now that you know it's not through quizzes or completion rates!)
You can download it for free here or from our freebies page—where you'll find all of our freely distributed materials. Check it out!