2018 Ethisphere Global Ethics Summit. Photo: Ben Hider.

Sometimes it takes creativity to make a compliance message stick with employees, even if it results in sending them to pretend jail. That was one of the takeaways from Thursday's discussions at the 2018 Ethisphere Global Ethics Summit.

Speaking on a panel at the event, Kimberlee Yapchai, chief ethics and compliance officer at global manufacturing company Tenneco Inc., said in her previous jobs she liked to train employees on compliance through a game.

In the game, employees are tasked with chief financial officer responsibilities at a fictional company, and the goal is to see who can make the most profit.

Yapchai explained that the questions asked of the players are designed to mislead them into making wrong choices if they want more points, or “profits.” After one of the team members makes a few questionable choices, they are told their unwise decision made it into newspaper headlines and, eventually, a divider in the room is removed to reveal a fake jail.

Yapchai recalled hearing at a recent compliance training session an audible “oh shit” when the curtain was lifted.

Leaders among the teams might then be sent to jail. “That leader could have stopped the decision. I don't care if the leader made it or not,” Yapchai said.

Conference-goers got a kick out of that story and even gave a round of applause to Yapchai.

Although it's just a game, she said it is something that resonates with people.

“It is so impactful,” she said. “You've just put them through something and marked them, marked their hearts and minds, so that they go back to business the next day and they're going to remember that.”

Other memorable methods of educating employees on ethics and compliance include sharing case studies, often taken from real-life scenarios that are close to home.

Compliance leaders at 3M and U.S. Bancorp shared in a separate discussion at the summit how they take case studies from real situations that occur throughout the company and make them into lessons.

3M's VP and chief compliance officer Veena Lakkundi said the company puts out case studies every quarter taken from actual examples. “We share so people can see this is not just in the headlines, this is not just another company, this is not just in emerging markets … this is 3M,” she said.

Lakkundi explained that the case studies were at first distributed to the company's 200 top leaders but eventually posted on 3M's intranet site so more people can access them and have dialogues with other employees.

Katie Lawler, SVP and global chief ethics officer at U.S. Bancorp, said the financial services company similarly puts out case studies from real situations that have occurred within the company. Sometimes they will be on topical scenarios such as giving gifts around the holidays or abiding by the proper dress code in the summer.

Other times, “we will take a case from our hotline and we sanitize it, and we post it in our intranet for everybody to see and people get to comment on it, which is interesting,” Lawler said.