I Once Ran a Compliance Circus.

I Once Ran a Compliance Circus.

Complete with a dunk tank.

There was a "Go Phishing" game designed to teach people about cybersecurity and phishing attacks. There were prizes. There was, at some point, an administrator sitting above a tank of water while employees lined up to ask compliance questions and earn their throws.

It was one of the most effective compliance training events I have ever run.

I know what you're thinking. That's not compliance training. That's a carnival.

Exactly.

The problem with most compliance training is not the content. The rules are real. The risks are real. The need to help people understand both is genuinely important.

The problem is the delivery. A 45-minute online module, assigned in October, due by December 31st, completed in the fifteen minutes before the deadline by someone who has four other browser tabs open and a meeting in twenty minutes — that is not training. That is documentation. And documentation, as I wrote recently, does not change behavior.

What changes behavior is engagement. Relevance. Repetition. And — this is the part compliance professionals don't say enough — a little bit of fun.

Here's what I've learned works, built from years of actually trying things and watching what happens.

Make the boss the trainer.

The single most effective thing I ever did for compliance training was not a module, a video, or a workshop. It was a toolkit.

We developed monthly compliance scenarios — short, realistic situations based on actual issues we'd seen on campus — and gave directors scripts to walk their teams through them. Ten minutes in a department meeting. A real situation. A real conversation. Led by someone the team already respected and listened to.

The research on this is consistent: people learn more from someone they trust than from an anonymous online module. A compliance scenario that your director walks you through, asks you questions about, and discusses with you is worth twenty repetitions of the same annual module. It also signals something important: my leader takes this seriously. And that signal changes culture in a way that a completion rate never will.

Bite-sized beats annual.

We hear a lot about microlearning and most of it is true. A five-minute scenario-based module, delivered monthly, is more effective than a sixty-minute comprehensive course delivered once a year. People retain what they encounter repeatedly in small doses. They forget what they consumed in one overwhelming sitting.

If your current training program is built around annual modules, I'd encourage you to ask a simple question: what would happen if you broke each one into six ten-minute pieces and spread them across the year? Your compliance coverage would be identical. Your retention would not be.

Let people test out.

If an employee can demonstrate — through a short assessment — that they already understand the material, require them to complete the assessment but not the full module. Respecting what people already know is not lowering the bar. It is treating adults like adults. And it reduces the resentment that comes from being required to sit through training you genuinely do not need.

Track the results. If someone consistently tests out of a particular training, that's useful data about both that person and that training. If almost everyone tests out of something, ask whether the module is teaching at the right level.

Give people a choice.

Online or in-person. Synchronous or asynchronous. Group or individual. Not every option has to be available for every training — but where you can offer a choice, offer it. People complete training faster, retain more, and resist it less when they have some agency over how they engage with it.

Make compliance visible outside of training.

This is where the circus comes in — and the scavenger hunts, and the newsletters, and the awareness weeks.

We ran annual compliance awareness weeks where employees had to find things: locate the ethics hotline, pull a specific policy and answer a question about it, find the person responsible for Title IX on campus. There were prizes. There was competition between departments. There was, occasionally, a dunk tank.

It sounds silly. It worked. People who could not have told you where the ethics hotline was in September knew exactly where it was in October. And more importantly, they knew it because they had gone looking for it themselves — not because someone had told them in a slide deck they weren't reading.

We also sent monthly compliance newsletters. Short. One topic. One real scenario. One action item. Not a compliance lecture — a compliance conversation. Something a person could read in three minutes and actually think about.

The goal of all of it was the same: make compliance a normal part of how the institution operates, not a box that gets checked once a year and forgotten.

None of this is expensive.

The director toolkit costs staff time to develop — but once it's built, it runs itself for months. The awareness week scavenger hunt costs the price of whatever prizes you can find in your discretionary budget. The newsletter is a few hours a month. The bite-sized modules, if you already have content, can often be built by recutting what you have.

What all of it costs is creativity and intention. The willingness to ask: are we doing this because it works, or because it's what we've always done?

Effective compliance training has a few things in common regardless of format:

It's relevant to the person receiving it. Not generic — specific to the situations they actually encounter in their actual job.

It's repeated. Not once a year. Regularly, in small doses, in different formats and contexts.

It's modeled by leadership. When a director takes ten minutes in a team meeting to walk through a compliance scenario, they are saying something more important than anything in the module: this matters to me, and it should matter to you.

And it's measured honestly. Not by who finished it. By whether it changed anything.

The compliance circus was not a stunt. It was a philosophy made visible: compliance doesn't have to be punishing. It can be something people engage with willingly, even eagerly, when it's designed with them in mind rather than designed around institutional documentation needs.

Build the toolkit. Run the awareness week. Send the newsletter. Let someone test out. Break the annual module into six.

And if the budget allows — rent a dunk tank. You will be amazed what people will learn when they're having fun.