Completing annual ethics training doesn’t mean the training has effectively influenced employees: Some rush through the standardized training, which defeats its purpose.

Some employees don’t view the ethics training as a serious learning experience and just want to turn it in before the Nov. 12 deadline.

“A lot of employees can skip over it. … You can just let the time run and then click a bunch of buttons and pass the ethics training test,” said Monique Lincoln, senior music administration major and event planner for the Holmes Student Center.

While the test’s questions and the scenarios it presents change, some employees neglect to read the revised questions. As a result, taking the test is a waste of their time if they don’t learn something new.

“There are new examples or new explanations each year, but it’s really the same law. It’ll give you an example and you’ll have choices about what’s the right thing to do … if you answer correctly, it will tell you, ‘Yes, you answered correctly,’ if you answer incorrectly, it’ll still give you the answer. So, you could just click and not read … but that’s unethical behavior,” said Deborah Haliczer, assistant ethics training officer.

To make sure every question is read, the training shouldn’t allow employees to continue on to the next question if a question is answered incorrectly. Restricting the training until an employee answers each question correctly will increase the chances of participants learning something about ethical behavior.

The training should also be rewritten to make scenarios more relatable to NIU by providing examples of unethical behavior that have occurred on campuses.

Beyond teaching employees about ethics, the training has other benefits: It provides resources if employees need to discuss incidents with professionals who provide information on human resources.

“In the ethics training, the one good thing that comes out is that they give you contact information of whom you need to talk with to clarify,” said Kelli Vogeler, a supervisor at the Holmes Student Center’s bookstore. “When I first started here, I had no idea how to deal with situations, or when you think that a coworker is mishandling something or doing something that is inappropriate with their time or with some of the resources … that’s the biggest thing I’ve learned … who to contact and how to approach things like that.”

Although ethics training isn’t as successful at reinforcing ethical behavior for employees as it should be, students should take their time when completing it and attempt to understand its important message.