Our Blog Archive for February 07, 2007

A few months back, I wrote a post regarding the State of Illinois’ ethics training debacle. In short, thousands of training certifications were yanked because employees were able to blast through the State’s online course too quickly. (The training program was purchased through an external vendor.) Some employees spent less than 10 minutes completing the State’s annual ethics training, which requires 58,000 employees to review approximately 80 screens, including five “self help” questions, and an end-of-course quiz.

Obviously, this is hardly the result an employer is looking for when it invests significant time and resources in an online ethics training program.

But the plot has thickened …

Yesterday, two tenured professors from Southern Illinois University at Carbondale (SIUC) filed a lawsuit to protest the requirement that they take supplemental training, or risk losing their jobs. The mathematics profs (Marvin Zemen and Walter Wallis), two of the many thousands of state employees who completed ethics training too quickly, are crying foul. According to Zemen, who serves as President of the SIUC Faculty Association, “”I believe that taking the additional training and signing the certification would be an admission that I was non-compliant, though I was not. It would be unethical for me to sign this document.”

Zemen and Wallis are arguing that the training invalidations cannot be supported “solely on the basis of some unspecified time.” Commenting on SIUC’c training, program, Zemen is arguing that “…it’s ludicrous to suggest that highly educated people cannot grasp, within a few minutes, the nuances of a document prepared by a subcontractor hired by a state bureaucrat.”

It may seem ludicrous, but the professors’ jobs are on the line.

“It’s almost comical, until you realize I could be fired as a result of this capricious action,” Zemen said.

And so ensued the lawsuit, which seeks to bar the Inspector General from imposing a minimum time that employees must spend on ethics training. The suit would also bar the State from imposing discipline on employees who fail to take a minimum time to complete the online course.

Doesn’t this make you glad the issue of training time is crystal clear under California’s sexual harassment training regulations? The Fair Employment Housing Commission has taken a firm stand. Training must take no less than two hours to complete. Period.

And there are lessons to be learned here, that go beyond Illinois’ ethics training, as well as the sexual harassment training standards in CA:

• Training programs on important compliance issues shouldn’t be a few minutes in length. (Isn’t this common sense?) Anything less than 30 minutes starts to look suspect – to regulators, to judges and to juries.
• A training program designed to be 30 mins, 60 mins, 180 mins – whatever – needs to contain sufficient content and interactivity that makes those “estimated” times real. Don’t be fooled by program specifications and slick marketing collateral. Ask vendors about their user testing stats regarding average completion time. Then do some of your own spot checking. It’s worth the investment of time, especially if you’re rolling out an online ethics training or harassment training program to hundreds or thousands of employees.
• Make sure the program is of a high quality, using realistic scenarios and hypotheticals. Screens of boring text followed by a “mini quiz” is what causes situations like the one we’re seeing in Illinois.
• If employees can blast through the training quickly, they will. It’s human nature.