Online Code of Conduct Training: Success Story

A Code of Conduct Manual or a Code of Conduct Handbook are a common tool used by successful organizations to ensure their employees are aware of the acceptable and unacceptable actions and business practices.

It can be helpful to reference what other policy managers have done to manage their training to get an idea of a starting point, the process, and some of the benefits.

Background Information

Janet is an HR Manager in an organization with just over 100 full time employees. She looks after the company's policy management. They have a Company Code of Conduct manual that is a 60 page Word document. For the past three years they have been delivering a face to face presentation to new hires several times a year. This method left some people waiting for long periods between scheduled training since it is not very economical to do with individuals or small groups. Janet has been looking at a way to move the process online and allow employees to do the training on more of an on demand basis, anytime from anywhere.

Online System Requirements

Janet's conduct manual includes a lot of sections of content specific to each policy and procedure. This means there are frequent revisions to the master version of the document. The ability to have one master version as well as seeing each previous approved version is important. The ability to easily make changes to the content or the option to have someone make changes for her is also an essential requirement.

Each employee needs to review the content and ideally is able to do this online anytime from any location. There also needs to be a way to monitor people's progress or lack of progress. One of the concerns is that people will not get the training done. In this case time is also a factor, there are about 20 employees waiting for this training so there is some urgency to get the training material from the Word doc into an online training system.

Challenges to Overcome

The first challenge is to get the training materials from Word into an online format or online management system. There are several options here. The simplest is to convert the Word document to a PDF which can be uploaded as a part of the training material. It is fast, simple, and if you have a nicely formatted Word doc it will engage and appeal to employees. Another option is to convert the Word document to a set of text pages in an online training delivery system, this can be as easy as copy and paste from Word to the course builder tool in the online policy management system. Once this is done Janet can test what this will look like and how the employee training experience will be. Janet opted for the second option with a PDF version as a resource attachment for anyone who wanted to download or print the manual locally.

This setup portion of the project was completed in 4 days. The next challenge was to get the 20 employees to review the materials and sign off on their acceptance of the code of conduct after reading the materials. Janet emailed us a spreadsheet with the list of names and their email addresses, and department names which we imported into her Employer Account. After that all it took was a couple clicks and the system created unique logins called Access Codes and emailed a notification to each employee.

Janet watched as some employees logged in right away either just to see what it was and some actually completed the training on their first login. They can logout and back in as many times as they want and resume where they left off until they finish the training. There were a few that needed a reminder or two which Janet was able to send from the system easily. It made it effortless to keep on top of it until everyone had completed the training.

Benefits of an Online Solution

The main benefits of an online management system is the centralized policy management, and the online policy training delivery.

The centralized management ensures that each version of the handbook materials is stored preserving the history of changes made over time. An Admin user can login and view the content, make revisions and manage the materials as needed.

The online training delivery is so easy to schedule which means there is no waiting for a group, as each new hire is confirmed they are sent a login and can complete the training within their first few days on the job. The employees appreciate the ability to do the training on their own schedule which means it gets done faster with less push back.

If you have a Code of Conduct manual, handbook, or policies you are interested in having your employees be trained on, or review online, contact us with your questions, we look forward to hearing from you.