How different levels of the organisation feel about having a code of conduct at the workplace

About 90% of senior leaders indicated they believe leaders in their organisation follow the code of conduct. This number dips down the chart, according to a global survey.

Over the past two decades, organisations have been updating their codes of conduct, transitioning from dense, legalistic rulebooks in Word documents to more user-friendly and engaging digital PDFs. However, employees are not quickly adopting such code of conduct innovations — a recent study by LRN revealed that employees are 1.7x more likely to prefer traditional methods of accessing the code of conduct, such as a PDF on their computer. 

The full list of employees' preferences is as follows:

• PDF on my computer (46%)
• Read printed code (33%)
• Read as a PDF on my phone (27%)
• Navigate and interact with the code as I would a website (27%)
• Search the code and go directly to the section relevant to my question (24%)
• Read the code page-by-page, like a book (16%)
• Ask a chatbot embedded in the code for help with my question (10%)

More specifically, the most popular feature by far is providing links from the code of conduct to policies, procedures, training, and other resources. This feature is found in 58% of high- and medium-impact programmes. As the study highlights, this feature is crucial because a code of conduct cannot – and perhaps should not – cover all the details on how to comply with the requirements of particular ethics and compliance (E&C) risk topics.

At the same time, almost half of organisations with high- and medium impact programmes are implementing web-based codes and chatbots.

In further understanding users' preference, the study also showed variance in code usage by geography and industry. 

Most notably, employees in both India and China look to be the ones referring to their codes most frequently (47% and 40% respectively using it as a resource “very often”). On the other end of the spectrum, employees in the Netherlands reported never using the code the most compared to any other region, at 35%.

Interestingly, the study found a correlation with code of conduct training numbers; both China and India had the highest percentage of employees reporting that they received training on their company’s code of conduct – 97% and 91%, respectively – whereas the Netherlands had the lowest percentage for this question at 64%.

Disconnect with leadership 

Looking further into perceptions of ethical culture, the report found a wide discrepancy between top management versus middle management and front-line managers/individual contributors.

Particularly, 90% of senior leaders indicated they believe leaders in their organisation follow the code of conduct. This number dips for middle managers (81%) and front-line managers/individual contributors (69%). Similar gaps were also observed when asked if their manager talks about the code of conduct – 88% of senior leaders, 74% of middle managers, and only 58% of front-line managers/individual contributors.

There was also a deviation recorded between generations — Gen Z was 2.5x more likely to agree that it is okay to bend the rules where necessary to get the job done compared to work colleagues in the Boomer generation. 

Lead image / LRN