A queer person, a Black person and a disabled person enter a coffee shop. No, that’s not the beginning of an off-color joke—it’s actually the scenario depicted in a compliance training video one New York-based company sent to its employees last fall.
The thing is, besides the odd and unrealistic setting in which these actors came together to share stories about microaggressions they’d faced at work, employees probably won’t recall any of the compliance details discussed.
“A static, 60-minute video, not high tech, not that much you can do with it. If suddenly it becomes really dated, you…toss the whole thing out and start over,” said Roxanne Petraeus, CEO and co-founder of compliance microlearning platform Ethena.
IRL experience. A former army engineer and civil affairs officer and McKinsey and Co. alum, Petraeus can draw a bold line from her experiences in the US Army and at the consulting powerhouse to the riveting world of compliance training.
In 2019, when she founded Ethena with CTO and co-founder Anne Solmssen, the thesis was simple: a microlearning training platform that emphasizes engaging, memorable content that addresses real-world scenarios while also meeting legal requirements will help companies build more inclusive workplaces and save HR pros time and effort.
Petraeus first “logged” the “missed opportunity” of effective and engaging training during her time serving in the US Army.
“We took a lot of what we called ‘check-the-box training,’” she said of her experiences with sexual harassment training—and what would become known as DE&I training—in the military. “The training was very bad, and it would often be so bad that soldiers would make jokes.”
Many soldiers wanted to do the right thing, but they didn’t know how to intervene, since the training material lacked “language they could use in real life,” she said.
She observed those same issues at McKinsey, where she herself experienced a form of harassment common among professional women: She was asked to “smile more.” While discussing with a male coworker, Petraeus found her colleague struggling to understand why she was upset.
“I realized: ‘This guy has taken hours and hours of risk training and harassment prevention training, and then when confronted with the very situation that this training is meant to, at least, give [you] a playbook for [addressing], he didn’t know what to do,” she said. “The training he had taken was kind of Harvey-Weinstein-style [propositions]…I’m confident that this guy would have known how to help me through that situation, but that’s actually statistically very rare.”
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Petraeus is the type to “get obsessed with the problem,” so Petraeus began to imagine a product that could deliver meaningful training with practical information in a fashion that was also digestible and usable.
The product she developed with Solmssen tackled IRL issues in digestible and usable modules and has since serviced clients such as Netflix, Zendesk, and Figma. Ethena closed its $30 million Series B round in late 2022 led by Lachy Groom with participation from previous investors including Felicis, Neo Ventures, and Homebrew. Ethena’s also boasted angel support from investors such as Jack Altman, Plaid’s William Hockey, and former Robinhood COO Gretchen Howard.
“Not your mother’s harassment training.” If compliance training is a “dusty, old Powerpoint,” employees will infer that it’s not important, but if businesses deliver an experience that is thoughtful, well-designed, and well-resourced, employees receive a different signal from HR.
“You put effort into things that matter,” she said. “And kind of half-ass things that do not.”
Ethena’s trainings are designed as if employees were consumers, aiming to deliver content that has a high-production value and is not simply the same recycled material from those dusty Powerpoints.
It works with lawyers and compliance experts to ensure its content meets the state and federal “check-the-box” requirements, while acknowledging there’s “lots of room within those requirements…and spend as much time as possible on the gray, nuanced areas.”
Training is delivered via microlearning, rather than a scripted actor-played scenario-based training video and subsequent quiz. This approach also allows for customization based on the needs of clients’ own cultures and compliance requirements.
The training scenarios are also developed to be contemporarily relevant. In a post-pandemic world, for instance, Ethena trainings now address Zoom- and Teams-based scenarios that might come up in the remote or flexible workplace. Companies are also able to quickly update training when new issues arise, introducing, for example, AI-bias training after generative AI rapidly became table-stakes for many businesses.
Additionally, HR professionals who deliver a smaller, digestible training program can focus more on handling major issues that need to involve HR, and Petraeus hopes encounters like “gendered feedback” can be handled “in the meeting” by those inside the room, she added.
“Compliance really is just about having a really strong, healthy culture, communicating that and then having mechanisms for when mistakes and egregious issues happen, because they absolutely will,” she said.