The Pointless Ritual of Annual Compliance
If everyone is trying to bypass your system, your system is broken.
The first time I went through the annual compliance training, I approached it with good intentions. I worked my way through the material — Work, Health & Safety, bullying and harassment, diversity policies, the usual list. It wasn’t exactly riveting, but the topics were important.
The second time around, I couldn’t help but notice something: this wasn’t training, it was an endurance test. The instructional design was poor, the delivery was uninspired, and the process felt more like a battle against cognitive fatigue than an opportunity to learn.
By year three, someone pointed out an efficiency hack: you could skip straight to the multiple-choice quiz. If you got an answer wrong, the system would let you keep clicking until you got it right. Voila — 100% compliance, minimal effort. A process that once took hours was now a 20-minute exercise in strategic clicking.
Ironically, this shortcut might have been more effective than the training itself. At least you had to think about the questions instead of zoning out through the dull slides.
Then came the Reflections.
At some point, the system added a new requirement: before my training record could be marked as complete, I had to submit a written “Reflection” for each module.
I had plenty of reflections, but none that I thought the system would appreciate. I resisted the urge to write “I looked in the mirror and liked what I saw.” Instead, I went with the simplest, most efficient response: “I have reflected.” It worked. The system marked my training as complete, proving once again that the process valued compliance over engagement.
I’m not against training. It’s essential that people understand workplace safety, ethical conduct, and diversity awareness. But training should be meaningful, engaging, and designed to actually teach something. If people are bypassing the system to get through it faster, that’s not a failure on their part — it’s a failure of the system itself.
If you’re in a position to design or influence training, make it worth the time. Otherwise, don’t be surprised when people start looking for the fastest way to tick the box and move on to something that actually matters.