The survey also found similar training for boards declined by an hour in 2015 to 2 hours.
At the same time, ethics and compliance training for employees not in management roles increased by about 60 minutes to 7.1 hours, and middle-manager training remained the same at 6.5 hours.
“A decline in training for senior leadership is very concerning, particularly in a time when risks are growing more complex and employee cynicism is also a chief concern for survey respondents,” said Ingrid Fredeen, J.D., NAVEX Global’s vice president of online learning content and the report’s author. “Employees grow cynical when they think the rules don’t apply to everyone fairly. And if your employees are cynical about management support of integrity and culture change efforts, your training efforts will be significantly undermined.”
Survey respondents indicated their top goal in 2015 — creating a culture of ethics and respect — is the same as in 2014. Nearly half of respondents, 46 percent, said this year they were most focused on improving their culture, following by complying with laws and regulations (31 percent of respondents).
“Limited hours available for training” was the most common challenge associated with ethics and compliance training reported by survey respondents (21 percent), followed by “difficulty covering all topics important to our company/industry” (14 percent), “measuring effectiveness” (13 percent) and “not enough budget” (12 percent). Additionally, a quarter of respondents said they do not have a training budget at all.
NAVEX Global is an ethics and compliance software and services provider. NAVEX Global’s team provides program and risk assessments, training, code of conduct authoring and consulting services to companies seeking to improve their compliance programs.
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