Training Synergy: Insights from Compliance & HR Integration with Lori Stahl

Yeah, sure. Lori Stahl, I'm the chief people officer at Synaptics. I'm based here in California. I have over 25 years of experience in HR. I've directly or indirectly led all of the functions throughout my career. On the personal side, I'm a mom as well to two daughters in college, a wife. Can't forget the furry dog as well. Very important. Yes. And so, luckily, I'm at work. Otherwise, you would hear her probably snoring in the background as well. So, I understand that we have to do every day.

Yeah, I think it's a great question and it's often a hot potato in a company that people are passing around. And so I think in the most effective companies it's where certainly led probably by the people function along a deep partnership with the legal function but also when it's owned by all of the leaders and managers.

Yeah, absolutely. This is actually really important to me. So, I do actually like to own it from the people function because I think first and foremost about the employee experience and I think that if you get a disjointed compliance strategy, it very much looks and feels like that to employees. And so, one of the things that I try to do from our people function is really just to pull it all together with all of those functions. And so even if they might be owning the content because certainly they're the subject matter experts, we want to build it in one platform with one strategy with one time compliance time cadence. A component to ensure that employees aren't being overloaded. We don't want employees to tune in. It's important information that they need to know to run our business effectively. And so we want to make sure that strategy is seamless across the company. So does that answer that?

Yeah. And I have an employee experience team that's just thinking about that. We put together a content calendar. We solicit information from around the business to make sure that messages aren't being stepped on by another team and so everything gets the spotlight that it's due but then you know we're not overloading employees. I think that overloading is so crucial. I've heard a lot of complaints about hey it feels like we're taking too much time away from our core business function because we have 6, 8, 10 hours. You recently have done a roll out and a revamp. You brought us on or I guess recentlyish. I feel like all things blend together in my memory of time. Could you talk about how you thought about the right balance of using the right topics and ideas out but not overtraining?

Yeah, it was certainly something we thought a lot about because training there are so many requirements that are time-based and so if you add up all of the amount of time that it takes in a quarter or a year to train employees, it's significant. And so what we really tried to do is evaluate the content to make sure that it wasn't overlapping, that it was relevant, but wasn't the same messages over and over again. We count literally the minutes that employees are spending doing training. And that was one of the biggest goals of our program was to make the content relevant, engaging, and certainly from a time perspective to make sure we're not taking too much away from employees and their need to do their day job.

Yeah, I think one of the main things is remaining compliant and it's really hard to stay current and relevant on all of the relevant industry and regional and local laws around the world. Even when it's a country or area you live in, it's hard to stay on top of. And at Synaptics, we're in foreign countries. And so, we really need a partner like Athena to help ensure that we are on top of the compliance and the ever-changing laws. And that was probably the top thing. The other thing is just again the employee experience. And we were doing a lot of homegrown videos and training modules that were really outdated 5 minutes after we made them on platforms that if somebody left, we had no idea how to actually change the content. So we were recreating things again. So we really needed a seamless platform that would allow the content to stay current and refreshed all the time. And I always just try to take the approach of keeping it simple. I don't think we need to customize everything. I don't think that we have to over-orchestrate it. We can simply buy off-the-shelf relevant content to deliver to our employees and just make it easy administratively and really ultimately make it easy for the employees. And I think Athena really helped us accomplish that task. And sorry, the last thing I would add because otherwise my system team will say you forgot about me is your systems team rocks. They absolutely do. The integration with our HRIS is really important and our learning management system. So we're lucky enough to have one whereas lots of companies don't which then Athena can of course stand on its own. But with ours, modules and our courses were breaking. So we were getting hundreds of tickets and employees complaining about the way that it works and the sound and it would cut off and all kinds of things. And after we went through one full year of cycle, our tickets were greatly reduced to almost nothing. More user error things. Don't tell the employees. It's never user error when it's a suite. Right. Yeah. And so again, we don't need training to get in the way. They're frustrated already, unfortunately, that they have to take it. And so we really needed a system that just works. And I feel like we also accomplished that with Athena.

Yeah, absolutely. And again, one of the challenges is knowing the content, knowing the... going to go back to knowing the regional and industry laws. We not just having a small team, but you really have to have experts. And I'm also super fortunate that we have really great in-house employment counsel and not everybody is also lucky enough to have that. But it's hard to stay current on all of those. You can talk about the tactical aspects of just producing content right and making it work which I also don't have a whole team of people to do that. But then also ensuring that you've got the content right and also thinking about it from a regional perspective. And I don't also think that one size fits all around the world. And so some of our content, we need to think about how do we tailor it to the local culture or language. And certainly we're not experts in that. And so what I want to stick to is what are the messages that we need to reinforce? What are the compliance or training if you will to help move our business forward and then leave the hard stuff to the experts.

Yeah. So again, I kept saying to the team, try not to customize anything. So really tried to take that approach. Realistic. Yeah. Yeah. I think what was nice is we were able to if we needed if we wanted to start with maybe a personalized video. I think it's important when the leaders and the CEOs are certainly reinforcing the messages, right? That they're actively modeling and discussing compliance issues and really turning into champions. And then also what I think is nice is you can do really small customizations. And again I find this unique with Athena is we can link employees back to our own intranet or to our own policies. And so while we don't have to specifically embed the Synaptics for example information into the content, we can certainly link them to that information. So it draws the connection between sort of the generic I hate to use that word but you know the vanilla version of the compliance and then how does that relate to your role here at Synaptics?

Absolutely, and among other things obviously which started with you but there's lots of reasons why I became a fan of Athena. And it is sad. You meet with vendors and it's all of HR tech. I'm sure it's outside of HR tech too, not just to pick on HR side, but you know, you hear about all these great platforms and the services they provide. And I have truly not had a vendor that really delivers that after implementation. Even during implementation, you can start to see cracks of it. And with Athena, I think what's been really important is that we've had that partnership throughout the process. Not only at the beginning when we were discussing our goals around compliance and how we wanted to enhance the program and really build it into the fabric of our company but then implementing the platform and then afterwards the constant check-ins asking how we're doing. We can call and get a real person and it makes a difference and we're not left to as I have been in lots of other places create materials, figure out how to fix things. And Athena has been a really great partner from that perspective and it is very unique. And I certainly can't diagnose why it happens. I know it's hard especially with small companies to have that customer service arm of your company and how do you make that scalable right so you can offer the same type of service but I think it's absolutely a differentiator in the industry.

Oh, no. I could nerd out on HR tech and innovation all day long. There's a I have several things, but there are probably a couple things that come to mind. I'd love to see things evolve into being a little bit more personal, right? Making a direct connection between the employee's role and the content. I don't necessarily think one size fits all. So something that is more role specific or scenario-based adaptive learning could also fit in there as well like speeding up to slow down based on employee skill. Yeah. Another thing that comes to mind is more real time microlearning. So like little bite-sized contents delivered in multiple avenues and channels. Learning that old theory of just for me just in time. Like I think about it in terms of a Slackbot, right? Where it might send a short compliance nudge to or a quick ethics reminder to somebody before your contract is signed. Totally. And then sorry the last one again I could talk about it all day for all of it. If we think about AI might have two more. I think AI can of course play an important role in compliance as well like AI compliance coaches or chatbots. So maybe an HR leader could ask 'Can I ask a candidate about a previous salary?' and they get a quick accurate response, a safe place to practice their skills, inserts the compliance part of that of are you allowed to ask that what are the rules around it so it's giving them real time practical application while inserting the compliance component. Totally. And then one of the things I think you already do well is the storytelling. And instead of using legal jargon and things that employees don't necessarily understand or frankly are boring, you're using stories, interactive silly roleplaying, ways to illustrate compliance challenges in a non-traditional way, which I think engages people differently.

Yeah. And there's so many things that managers deal with on a daily basis and they make these judgments and they do have implications or consequences for the company from a compliance perspective. And so, if there was a little bit of an easier way for them to get that customized right at that moment coaching, I think that would be amazing.

Yeah. Agreed. Agreed. Again, you're not going to walk into the airport most likely and somebody's going to hand you a bag of money and say, 'Can I have your code from your company about these?' That really apply to managers and help them on things that are actually happening in their day-to-day basis, day-to-day life. I should 100%.

I'm thrilled. I love what you guys are doing. So, I'm just happy to be a little bit a part of it.

Yeah, for sure. Absolutely.