If you want to create a great workplace culture and a great place to work, you need to have a carefully designed code of conduct that includes your mission and values and the company story.
A good code of conduct serves as a compass for the organization by stating the corporate mission, clarifying expectations for professional conduct, and stating the standards and guiding principles by which the organization follows legal and ethical guidelines and avoids conflicts of interest.
When top-performing executives are looking to drive employee engagement, especially when scaling fast or managing a large or remote workforce, they need more than just a compliance policy. That’s why we help companies transform their Code of Conduct into a Code of Culture. To do this we focus on:
- setting the tone at the top and manager responsibility
- creating a baseline expectation that each employee will be treated with respect and dignity
- open and honest communication, including asking hard questions when necessary
- substance over form in dilemma situations
- doing the right thing for the right reasons
Everyone in the organization should be familiar with the Code. New employees should receive it within the first few days of hire, longer term employees should review it as a part of an annual training, and all employees should sign an acknowledgment that they’ve reviewed the content and commit to following it. To ensure a successful Code of Culture, the content needs to be authentic to the company, championed by executive management, and enforced equally across all employees.
As with anything, it’s easier to start with a template than re-create the whole wheel on your own, which is why we’ve created this template to get you started! Our Sample Code of Conduct is comprehensive: it contains all the basics you need to have, plus the language savvy employers need to connect the policy to a healthy workplace culture.
Emtrain also offers a Code of Conduct (Code of Culture) online course that uses video scenarios to educate, and enabling your policy to be distributed, tracked and updated efficiently.
