Board members are under mounting pressure to keep their organisations aligned with new regulations and ethical expectations. According to PwC’s 2025 Global Compliance Survey, 85% of C-suite executives say compliance has grown more complex in the past three years owing to the pace and volume of regulatory change.
Compliance training is often seen as a repetitive, one-size-fits-all exercise that can fail to provide meaningful learning. This is a common complaint among staff. Over half (55%) of employees feel their company’s compliance training is not specific to their team or roles, according to a 2022 study by HowNow, an e-learning platform. Another 34% admit to only skim-reading content, while 15% candidly confessed to clicking through compliance courses without reading or listening at all.
The lack of tailored teaching, known as sheep-dipping, can lead to disengagement, knowledge gaps and frustration among workers. It’s also a huge compliance risk.
What is sheep-dipping?
To farmers, sheep-dipping is the practice of dunking sheep into pools of insecticide to protect them from infections and parasites. It’s all about speed and efficiency; every sheep goes through the same treatment at once, ensuring the job is done swiftly and uniformly.
In a corporate context, sheep-dipping means putting employees through identical, generic training sessions, regardless of their role or experience. This style of training treats learning as a tick-box exercise, designed to meet compliance requirements rather than to truly build capability.
Examples of sheep-dipping are annual compliance courses pushed to every employee, identical onboarding materials for every new hire or mandatory slide decks delivered without context or follow-up. Everyone is given the same training, whether they need it or not. Staff watch the videos, take the quizzes and click complete. Certificates are filed and no-one thinks about it again until the following year. It’s fast, broad – and largely ineffective.
A costly mistake
When compliance becomes a mere task to get through, the real goal – changing behaviour and reducing risk – gets lost in the chore of it all. From a business perspective, sheep-dipping can negatively impact productivity and revenue.
Employees who are unprepared thanks to poor training techniques may harm operational efficiency and increase their firm’s risk of receiving huge regulatory penalties. If staff fail to handle customer data correctly, for example, the company can be fined millions of pounds under the General Data Protection Regulation.
Not only that, sheep-dipping is a waste of money and fails to support workers’ growth in real, measurable ways. And this could lead to lower employee retention rates. According to LinkedIn’s 2023 Workplace Learning Report, 78% of employees say they would stay longer at a company that invests in their development.
Instead of chasing colleagues to complete uninspired training, companies may benefit from shifting to a more role-specific approach, which tailors compliance training to the learner’s unique needs and challenges. This approach not only demonstrates respect for employees’ time but also rekindles engagement, fostering a culture of ongoing improvement and greater confidence across the business.
Treating workers like a herd of sheep, so it seems, is of no benefit to anyone.
Board members are under mounting pressure to keep their organisations aligned with new regulations and ethical expectations. According to PwC’s 2025 Global Compliance Survey, 85% of C-suite executives say compliance has grown more complex in the past three years owing to the pace and volume of regulatory change.
Compliance training is often seen as a repetitive, one-size-fits-all exercise that can fail to provide meaningful learning. This is a common complaint among staff. Over half (55%) of employees feel their company’s compliance training is not specific to their team or roles, according to a 2022 study by HowNow, an e-learning platform. Another 34% admit to only skim-reading content, while 15% candidly confessed to clicking through compliance courses without reading or listening at all.
The lack of tailored teaching, known as sheep-dipping, can lead to disengagement, knowledge gaps and frustration among workers. It's also a huge compliance risk.
