The High Value of Training's Intangible Value

Hi, I am Dr. Lindsey Lee, and I co-founded Lynch Learning with my partner Natalie Lynch. And I've got some thoughts today on compliance, as it relates to your organizational culture. So many times in our line of work, we find that compliance is not valued per se by executives and leaders in organizations. And it's often not valued because, when it's done right, the outcome is that nothing happens and there's no immediate payoff. And prevention is intangible. We can't know how much we've saved ourselves in lawsuits, for example, if we have implemented effective anti-harassment training that provides employees with the expectations around behavior and knowledge of your policy and reporting mechanisms. We can't know how much we've saved financially. We can't know how much we've saved from a safety perspective. So that's why we often see the value of compliance just not where it is with other more tangible cost to organizations or tangible savings to organizations. But I do wanna paint a little bit of a picture for you around what the effect of complying with anti-harassment law has on your work environment. And it does, however, hinge on, not only training your employees so that they're aware of what harassment looks like in your environment and how to bring their concerns to you, but then you also have to follow through on remedies when there are actions and activities and behaviors happening in your work environment that violate your policies. And so sometimes that may look like terminating people who are found to have violated your policies. It may look like remedial training. It may look like performance improvement plans. It may look like any number of different types of interventions, perhaps individual coaching. And so you have to follow through on remedies when policy-violating behavior is found to have occurred. And what that does is it demonstrates to your employees that you take those concerns seriously and you're gonna manage them appropriately. And so that effectively builds up trust in you, as an organization, and goodwill among your employees, which fosters, ultimately, loyalty. And we know loyalty helps reduce turnover in your organization. It makes the risk of lawsuits less likely. And so there are plethora of outcomes that can be quantified that are in this chain of events that all stem from providing your attention to a compliance strategy and a compliance program that all ultimately has this overall impact on improving the positive culture in your work environment. And we know those are the things that encourage employees to stay.