It’s the memo every new employee dreads: “We need you to go to a drab, windowless conference room for a half-day session on compliance. During the meeting, we’ll bore you with details about our company’s policies on IT security, sexual harassment, confidentiality, and the like. If you don’t show up, you’ll be fired. Have a nice day.”
Obviously, that’s not a real memo, but it may as well be, says Adam Sodowick, the CEO and founder of New York-based TrueOffice. His one-year-old company, which was founded in Boston, is developing desktop and mobile games that companies can use to train their employees on internal corporate policies. The games are not only meant to make such compliance training more fun and appealing, they’re also designed to help employees actually remember what they learn. The games, he says, are based on “teaching through stories, which is how the brain is hardwired to learn.”
Sodowick hit on the idea through his previous company, 50 Lessons, an online database of 1,200 business-themed courses taught by more than 250 executives. The company, which was based in the U.K. and backed by the BBC, was bought by Skillsoft in 2011.
But before that happened, 50 Lessons got big enough that Sodowick had to implement compliance training there, and he was not happy with his choices. “What I found is that [compliance training] is a big old market, extremely unsexy, literally littered with bad products, and ripe for modernization,” he says.
Most companies offer compliance training in live sessions with PowerPoint presentations, Sodowick observed, or on the intranet in a multiple-choice testing format. “Often people will put the test on a separate screen and flip through it in the shortest amount of time possible,” he says. “There’s no retention.” Sometimes companies try to spice up the presentations with videos, Sodowick says, but he’s not impressed. “They use B-list actors or comedians to try to make a joke out of it or exaggerate it,” he says. “It tends to feel very self-conscious.”
TrueOffice offers a variety of games that can be tailored to each company’s own internal policies. The most popular game, he says, condenses 45 minutes of compliance training into a 15-minute, role-playing video game. The object of the game is to
