I recently sat down with Amanda Sessions at OpenSesame for an episode of their Future of Compliance series, alongside my longtime collaborator Mary Chlopecki, an employment lawyer who spent years at the EEOC before moving into investigations and training.
We've been building courses together for almost twenty years, ever since Mary first called me about Ouch! That Stereotype Hurts.
This conversation gave us a chance to talk about where compliance training is headed, and why the organizations that get it right treat it as culture work, not paperwork.
We've been building courses together for almost twenty years, ever since Mary first called me about Ouch! That Stereotype Hurts.
This conversation gave us a chance to talk about where compliance training is headed, and why the organizations that get it right treat it as culture work, not paperwork.
Mary talked about how she checks the EEOC's charge data every year, and what she's seeing right now should get every organization's attention. "In the most recent charge data, which is for 2025... retaliation is 61% of all charges being brought to the EEOC."
She also pointed to a steep rise in disability-related charges, now at 41% of all claims, up five percent in just two years, much of it tied to how employers are handling return-to-office requests for employees who'd been managing their work, and their health, from home. Numbers like that can sound abstract until you remember what's underneath them.
Mary said it plainly: every one of those statistics is a person who experienced something painful enough to file a charge. That's the whole case for proactivity. By the time a complaint reaches HR or a courtroom, the damage has already happened.
My own work lives earlier in that timeline. I talked with Amanda about what it actually takes to help someone speak up in the moment, when a joke or a comment is heading somewhere it shouldn't. Studies show that the biggest reason people don't speak up when they hear a stereotype or demeaning comment is because they don't know what to say... without making it worse, without making someone look bad, or without opening themself up to retaliation.
What I've seen work is giving people a few simple, rehearsed phrases ahead of time, so they're not trying to invent courage on the spot. I described culture as something closer to a garden than a grid: it's not a list of things you can't do, it's an environment you tend so people are willing to grow and speak honestly in it.
Mary brought it back to where she always does, which is proactivity. In her words, the future of compliance is "building a strong community where our employees feel safe to speak up, they have the skills to speak up," and where that training isn't a once-a-year box to check but something people practice and revisit until it becomes second nature.
That's really the takeaway from this whole conversation. Mandated training gives everyone the same floor of knowledge, but it's the culture built around it, the trust, the repetition, the vocabulary people actually have in the moment, that determines whether any of it gets used when it counts.
Compliance that waits for a complaint is already too late. Compliance that invests in people before that point is what actually changes outcomes.
She also pointed to a steep rise in disability-related charges, now at 41% of all claims, up five percent in just two years, much of it tied to how employers are handling return-to-office requests for employees who'd been managing their work, and their health, from home. Numbers like that can sound abstract until you remember what's underneath them.
Mary said it plainly: every one of those statistics is a person who experienced something painful enough to file a charge. That's the whole case for proactivity. By the time a complaint reaches HR or a courtroom, the damage has already happened.
My own work lives earlier in that timeline. I talked with Amanda about what it actually takes to help someone speak up in the moment, when a joke or a comment is heading somewhere it shouldn't. Studies show that the biggest reason people don't speak up when they hear a stereotype or demeaning comment is because they don't know what to say... without making it worse, without making someone look bad, or without opening themself up to retaliation.
What I've seen work is giving people a few simple, rehearsed phrases ahead of time, so they're not trying to invent courage on the spot. I described culture as something closer to a garden than a grid: it's not a list of things you can't do, it's an environment you tend so people are willing to grow and speak honestly in it.
Mary brought it back to where she always does, which is proactivity. In her words, the future of compliance is "building a strong community where our employees feel safe to speak up, they have the skills to speak up," and where that training isn't a once-a-year box to check but something people practice and revisit until it becomes second nature.
That's really the takeaway from this whole conversation. Mandated training gives everyone the same floor of knowledge, but it's the culture built around it, the trust, the repetition, the vocabulary people actually have in the moment, that determines whether any of it gets used when it counts.
Compliance that waits for a complaint is already too late. Compliance that invests in people before that point is what actually changes outcomes.
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