Lesson 5: Training/Communication

Okay, it's a couple of minutes past the hour, so hello everyone, and welcome to today's webinar hosted by me, Stephen Taylor, Chief Commercial Officer at MyComplianceOffice. And Liz Hornby, Principal Learning Consultant at Eukleia. Today's webinar is titled The Senior Managers and Certification Regime: Five Lessons Learned from the Banking Sector.

So, I'll move on now to lesson five, which looks specifically at the training needs within the regime. I think one of the key lessons learned is that good training and good communication are really key to implementing the regime positively, as I said earlier, and well within the firm. And obviously, the idea of the regime is to bring around or bring about behavioural change within the organization. So, the way that individuals are introduced to the regime, the way that the regime is communicated is really key to that. I've identified the four, perhaps, separate stages to your training. And for those of you who are at the beginning of this process, you may well be at stage one or maybe moving towards stage two.

So, we've got, at stage one, is the communication of the basis ethos. It's important to make sure that people are aware of where the regime came from, what the regime is attempting to do, and what the key themes are. This may be something that you could do, I mean we've seen firms doing very creative things, using posters, using infographics, or using video footage, for example, to introduce those key messages to make sure that people know what's coming and what to expect. I think that's particularly important because there has been quite a lot of coverage in the press, and people may be concerned about some of the things that they've read and what's that's going to mean to them on a day to day basis.

That then moves you through to stage two, and your first sort of in depth training will probably be to senior managers, so you may want to have a board briefing. You may want to run some senior manager workshops, looking, as I was mentioning earlier, at things like the corporate governance structure, what the reasonable steps test means within the firm, for instance. And then there may be some specific pockets of employees that you want to speak to face to face as well. HR team will need to know about appraisals, about the employee recruitment process, about impacts on regulatory references, for example. They may also be involved in your conduct rule breach process, depending how that operates within your firm. Also, your compliance teams and anyone who's going to be involved, as I say, in the conduct rule breach process.

That moves you on to stage three, which I think is probably the training for your certified persons and also for your other conduct rule staff. Obviously both of those categories will need training on the impact of the individual conduct rules. And there will also be for the certified persons, some information around what the certification process looks like, what the expectations are around that process, about the fact that conduct rule breaches will be notified to the regulator on an annual basis, and also how the regulatory references will work.

And then we move on to stage four. Once we've done that initial roll out and the banks and other firms under the regime will be at stage four, now, this becomes an annual process, so there's manual mandatory training, the certification process with become business as usual, and this will be rolled out, not only as individual conduct rule training, but also more widely within the training that takes place within the firm. And I think it's important, once you get to stage four, to make sure that the conduct rules are referenced in other training and communication materials as well, to make sure that the regime just doesn't stand apart from everything else, that it becomes embedded and is, as a said earlier, a holistic approach to good conduct as business as usual.

This webinar was co-hosted with Eukleia.com