6 Tips for Leading an Annual Day of Compliance Training
In this Compliance Clip, Adam uses his years of presenting live compliance seminars to share with you six tips for making your annual day of training go well - especially if you are involved in the training or preparation. In addition to the six tips, be sure to pay attention for a few extra nuggets (like how important good food is in making a successful training day).
Video Transcript
The following is a transcript of this video.
This Compliance Clip is going to provide six tips for leading an Annual Day of Compliance Training.
I know a lot of you have to conduct annual days of compliance training for some or all of your staff. It can be overwhelming, it can be challenging, and it can be boring at times. So I want to provide you with some tips for making your annual day of compliance training a little better, both for you and your team. So here are some tips that I've come up with that I use when I conduct annual days of compliance training.
Tip number one is to know your audience. If you're just conducting training to a compliance team, you want to make sure that your efforts are focused there. If it's just lenders, your efforts are focused there. But what happens on an annual day of compliance training is you have everybody from your maintenance team to your President or CEO, maybe even your directors to your tellers and lenders, and everybody's there. So it's really important to understand your audience and to make sure your audience is getting pieces that apply to them throughout the day. Of course, you're not gonna be able to have everything applied to tellers or everything applied to lenders, and certainly not everything applies to your maintenance team, but you should really make a concerted effort to make sure there are pieces that apply to them and to incorporate them one way or another throughout the day. It makes things better for everybody and helps to keep everybody engaged.
Number two is to understand the expectations. What are the expectations? What does your management team want out of this? What you will find is when you conduct an annual day of compliance training, it is a very, very expensive day for your organization. When you add up the cost of salaries for everybody who is there for that day, add in the cost of the food, any giveaways you do, and giveaways are a great tip, by the way. Having the right food is a great tip too, I'm not really getting into that, but believe me, the day doesn't go well if you don't have those two things. The cost of renting the space, everything else involved, it can be a very expensive day. So it's important to understand what the expectations are so you can design your program to actually meet those expectations. And every time I do annual compliance training, my number one priority is to make sure I understand the expectations so that I can deliver exactly what is needed. It's key in conducting training.
Also, when you're conducting training to a broad audience, it's important to keep it simple. There may be a lot of things you have to cover, but finding simple ways to present the training is really key. And one of the ways you can do that is to teach in stories, to give examples. I love to give personal examples of how things have applied to me personally, or how it's applied to a client I've worked with, or how it could hypothetically apply, or a news piece that applies, or my brother. I use all kinds of stories. My kids, I've used all kinds of stories. I don't have time to share now with you, but I pull in personal stories and then I relate them to regulatory compliance in one way or another. And what I have found is teaching in stories helps you to tip number five, have fun!
If you're not having fun, they're not having fun. I always try to have fun in my presentations as much as I can, and I found that breaking up your training really helps to make things more exciting. In fact, I did one presentation a while back where I taught on 60 top violations in 60 minutes. If you can imagine that is just pounding in information. And I knew the only way to make that not overwhelming was to break it up. So I actually took the theme of world records. I took this theme of world records and was kind of joking that this was a world record by talking about 60 top violations in 60 minutes. And then I gave examples of things that we could be doing with our 60 minutes. The most number of ab crunches, the most burgers made, the most number of pushups, you know, those types of things. And the numbers were just crazy. It took me literally five seconds to explain that. But what it does is it breaks it up for your audience, not only from a flow perspective, but mentally. I found when you mentally break up what you are saying, it helps for their minds to reboot and then they can refocus. It's unbelievable how that works. And you've probably seen me do that in many of the training videos that I do, especially the compliance classes, the longer programs that I put together.
Tip number six, what I like to do is practice like it's the real thing. Of course, this is a video. I am literally in an empty room, in front of the green screen, talking to a computer with a microphone that's right here that I am trying to deliver this, and I do this all the time. I pretend like I'm in front of a real audience. Especially early on, this was important for me where I would go out and I would visualize the room. The first time I spoke in a big venue, I knew the number of audience that was gonna be there. I visualized it being two or three or four times bigger than what it actually was. Went through my presentation several times and by the time the day came, I actually was very comfortable because it was actually smaller than what I had been practicing in my mind for. So practice like it's a real thing. It just really helps for the day to go well.
I hope these six tips help you in leading your annual day of compliance training. Some of you may be looking for a change because what happens when you do this year after year after year, it's nice to break things up. So if you're interested in bringing an outside speaker, I do a very limited number of training, but still have some availability. So if you're interested, reach out to me. My email is adam@compliancecohort.com if you're interested in having me come in and conduct your annual day of training
That's all I have for you in this Compliance Clip.
