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.6 A well-prepared code of ethics plays a crucial role in creating an ethical culture by serving as a useful and easily accessible tool employees can use to guide their decision-making as they face workplace challenges. All employees from entry-level to senior executives face situations in which they must make decisions on behalf of the organization including decisions about how to use the organization's resources and how to interact with customers, beneficiaries, or other stakeholders. A well written code of ethics will help employees recognize the ethical implications of these decisions and learn a decision-making procedure that is likely to produce results the organization endorses. While a well-prepared code of ethics will do a great deal to help an organization foster an ethical culture, a poorly prepared code will do little to advance such a culture. In fact, codes that lack clarity or that focus on the wrong things can be counterproductive. .2 The purpose of this course is to provide you with a framework you can use to develop a code of ethics that inspires and empowers your employees to consistently meet high standards of ethical conduct. It is important to note that this course simply provides a quick overview of this complex process and will not provide you with the level of knowledge held by ethics professionals. However, in cases where your organizations lack resources to support and ethics office or to bring in ethics professionals, this training will provide you with an overview of how to write a code of ethics that resonates with your employees and clarifies your organization's expectations for how they should make decisions. Some topics we will cover include some benefits of a well-prepared code of ethics, an overview of a process you can use to develop an effective code of ethics, and a description of the sections that are usually seen in effective codes of ethics. We will start with a discussion about the benefits of a well-prepared code of ethics. .7 Before preparing a code of ethics, one should understand how a well-written code can promote ethical behavior among employees. This understanding will help you approach your code preparation in a way that is likely to yield these results. To this end, let's review some of these advantages. First, a code of ethics can build consensus about the organization's ethical standards. It does this by specifying the organization's mission, core values, and other standards; and clarifying their meaning by using organization specific examples illustrating how these standards should factor into employee's decisions during ordinary and extraordinary circumstances. In the process, the organization also clarifies the organization's expectations of employees and teaches them how these standards should guide their decision-making. When employees understand that the mission and core values of their organization and are provided with concrete examples that illustrate how these things should guide their behavior, it prevents confusion about what behaviors the organization sees as unacceptable. Doing this also teaches employees decision-making processes that are likely to yield results the organization will endorse. .9 When a code of ethics clarifies what resources the organization provides that empowers employees to behave ethically, it provides a foundation for building trust. It does this by providing employees with information about the support systems available to them when dealing with ethical challenges and providing them with reassurance that they will be supported when they make decisions guided by the organization's standards. This, combined with keeping its promises to support such employee decisions, will build trust between organizational members. Ethics codes also promote good governance and accountability and provide a basis for enforcing behavior. They do this by documenting the commitments of organizational members at all levels and making them available to both employees and the general public. When employees and other stakeholders are aware of the organization's ethical standards, it puts them in a better position to recognize when employees fail to meet those standards and to hold them accountable for their actions. .5 By providing employees and stakeholders with information about the ethical commitments of the organization, a code of ethics also encourages the reporting of misconduct, which puts the organization in a better position to enforce its standards. This is significant because employees determine what really matters to the organization, not only by the standards it documents but also by the behaviors it measures, punishes, and rewards. Also a well-written ethics code combined with ethics training programs and other methods of reinforcing the code will make ethics a regular topic of discussion, encouraged employees to seek guidance when they are unsure about the proper course of action, and raised awareness about the ethical dimensions of workplace challenges. When organizations provide clear expectations about the values that are supposed to guide employee decisions, it provides them with the vocabulary to meaningfully discuss workplace challenges, and it legitimizes their interest in ethics. By showing how the organization standards apply to challenges specific to the organization, a code also helps employees hone their skills in recognizing how the organization's mission, values and other ethical standards can guide their behavior in ordinary and extraordinary circumstances. .9 Finally, a code of ethics can inspire employees to behave ethically. It does this by describing an aspirational culture employees want to belong to and showing the role employees can play in creating that culture. To review, an effective ethics code can make the following contributions to an organization's effort to foster an ethical culture, building consensus about ethical standards, clarifying organizational expectations, teaching desirable decision-making processes, building trust, promoting good governance, encouraging accountability among leaders at all levels, encouraging reporting of ethical misconduct, giving the organization a basis for enforcing ethical behavior, making ethics a regular topic of discussion, encouraging employees to seek advice, raising awareness about the ethical dimensions of workplace challenges and inspiring ethical behavior. Now that you understand some of the most important goals a code of ethics should achieve, let's review a process you can use to develop a code that achieve those goals. .3 Before developing your code, you should sketch an overall plan for how you will develop it and what role it will play in your overall ethics strategy. Let's review a model process for code development. Well not all of these steps are absolutely necessary, each will add value to the process and help ensure both that it produces a high-quality code and that the code has a significant impact on the organization's culture once it is completed. The first step in producing a high-quality code is to gain the support of the organization's leadership. Without leadership support, even the most well-written code will do little to promote an ethical culture in your organization. The second step is to understand your organization's actual culture; that is, you need to understand what standards your organization succeeds in communicating to your employees, how your employees actually behave in both ordinary circumstances and during critical events, and what motivates employees to behave as they do. .6 You can gain this knowledge by carrying out an ethics assessment using the framework provided in the previous course. Understanding your organization's actual culture is crucial at this stage because it will help you determine the root causes of ethical make misconduct and come up with a targeted set of goals that address these problems. The third step is to determine what you want the code to achieve, that is, you should decide the behaviors you want to encourage and discourage and what outcomes you hope to see. To create a clear and realistic set of goals that your employees will be willing to endorse, you need to understand the aspirational culture organizational members would like to belong to. You can also gain this information from your ethics assessment. The fourth step in developing a well-written code of ethics is to assemble a team that will carry out this project. This team should include a group of individuals who can represent the most significant stakeholders of the organization including the wide range of individuals employed by the organization and the wide range of customers, beneficiaries, and members of the broader community that are affected by the organization's activities. If you are preparing a code for a very large organization that includes many business units and has many groups of people in the community that count as stakeholders, you may not be able to include a member of each group in your team. However, you should make sure to select a diverse group of individuals who together have a strong understanding of the organization's stakeholders and can represent the interests and demands of all of those stakeholders. .7 The fifth step in code development is to create a mission, vision, and value statement. A mission statement is a declaration of the purpose and goals of the organization. A vision statement clarifies what success looks like in achieving this goal. While a mission and vision specify what employees should try to achieve, a list of core values specifies how employees should go about promoting these goals. When choosing your core values, you should be guided by your understanding of what the organization's actual culture looks like and of the aspirational culture employees want to belong to. This will help ensure that the values you select are relevant to your employees and the challenges they face. You should also choose values that help employees navigate common ethical challenges arising in your industry and your organization. When selecting the organization's core values, you should follow these guidelines. .0 To ensure that your organization's core values cover enough ground to provide significant guidance, you should choose at least three core values. To ensure that employees can remember both the list of values and how the organization defines those values, you should not pick more than seven core values. To ensure that employees understand how the core values are supposed to guide their behavior, you should use clear and relevant language to elaborate on how the organization understands each value. Finally to ensure the organization can gain buy-in from employees, you should select values that reflect an aspirational culture employees want to belong to. .9 As you work to create a mission, vision and value statement that achieves these goals, you will need to use the information you gathered during your ethics assessment. This will ensure your mission, vision, value statement reflects the aspirational culture employees want to belong to and the relevant workplace challenges that employees face. It will also help you use language employees understand when drafting the statement. The sixth step in developing an effective code of ethics is to determine which standards and behaviors the code should emphasize through the code provisions. Code provisions are specific guidelines that clarify how the organization's mission, vision and values are supposed to guide employee behavior. Because it is not possible to come up with a comprehensive list of provisions that cover all challenges employees face, you should determine which challenges to focus on. You may, for example, want to include provisions that address common challenges and that address areas where the organization has commonly seen misconduct in the past. Regardless, you should try to choose provisions that will make your code relevant and useful to employees. The seventh step in code development is to outline how the code provisions relate to the organization's policies and procedures. For example, if you have a provision linked with the core value of respect that forbids harassment, you should also specify the policies and procedures that clarify the organization's expectations in this area. You can do this by including footnotes that refer to a source offering more detailed information about the organization's rules in each area. This strategy helps make the code concise while still providing detailed guidance to employees who need it. .0 The eighth step in developing a code of ethics is to draft the code provisions and the other elements of the code. There are several elements of an ethics code including a meaningful title, a statement of the organization's mission and vision, an introductory letter from the organization's most senior executive, a table of contents, a list and description of the organization's core values, a prologue to the provisions, the code provisions, a description of the systems and structures that support the code in promoting an ethical culture in the order the organization, a model ethical decision-making process and a statement of responsibility for employees to sign. We will discuss the goals for each of these elements and what they should include in the final section of this course. The ninth step in code development is to solicit feedback from a group of stakeholders beyond those you selected to draft the code. This group should represent a wide variety of stakeholders including employees representing all business units and all levels of seniority. If your organization is very small, you should allow all employees to provide feedback. You should also consider soliciting feedback from those presenting key groups of beneficiaries and other stakeholders in the community. After soliciting feedback from stakeholders, you should review the feedback and revise the code as appropriate. While you do not have to follow every suggestion, you should acknowledge that you took all suggestions into account and explain how each comment factored into your decisions about how to revise the code. You should also keep in mind that this feedback can be used not only for code revisions but also for the development of ethics training programs and other aspects of your organization's overall ethics program. .5 The final step in the preparation of your ethics code is to gain executive approval of the final product. When you reach this stage, you should explain the process you employed to produce the code and the reasons guiding your choice of how to articulate the organization's mission, vision, and values and the reasons you selected the code provisions covered in the code. Now that you've got an idea about the benefits a code of ethics can provide and the process you should employee to produce your code, let's review a description of what should be included in each section. .1 Let's begin with a discussion about the sections that should be included early in the code's contents. The first thing employees will see when they receive your organization's ethics code is its title. To generate interest and enthusiasm about the code, you should try to come up with a title that is meaningful to your employees and introduces the organization's aspirations in a way that generates motivation to foster the culture the code aims to promote. You should try to come up with something unique to your organization rather than just finding a title you like from another organization's code and using it. After the title, the first section of the code should list the organization's mission and values. Recall that a mission specifies the purpose and goals of the organization, and a vision clarifies what success looks like in achieving this goal. These statements form the foundation of your code. Everything else, including the core values and code provisions, specify strategies for reaching the goals specified in this section. An introductory letter written by your organization's senior most executive should also be found near the beginning of the code. This letter should indicate the significance of the code and emphasize the importance of its standards. In order to do this, the letter should define the purpose of the code; introduce the nature of the code provisions by indicating whether they are enforceable or just aspirational; clarify that these code provisions represent standards the organization hopes employees will meet; explain the benefits the code can bring to the organization, the community and the reader; acknowledge those who participated in the development of the code; affirm that the code is a living document that will be revised as needed in the future according to the organization's changing needs and challenges; and indicate that all employees at all levels are expected to abide by this standards presented in the code. The senior most officer who cracks this letter should also promise that he or she will abide by the same standards. .7 There is one more element that should be found near the beginning of your code: a table of contents. This will increase the utility of your code as a reference employees can use to seek guidance as they face particular workplace challenges. When they face such challenges, they should be able to look at the table of contents to determine which section provides guidance on the current dilemma. You should also make sure to number the pages of your code to help ensure that employees can find the relevant sections quickly and easily. Let's continue with a discussion about the sections that should be found in the middle of the code. After providing the preliminary sections, you should include a section that outlines your organization's core values. This section should specify your organization's core values and define them in concise, simple language that all employees can understand. Your codes next section should include a prologue to the provisions. This prologue should explain why the organization chose to include the standards covered in the provisions as particularly important to highlight. Because ethics codes cannot include every possible standard an organization wants is employees to meet, the team creating the code must choose which standards to highlight. In choosing these standards, the team should be guided by an understanding of the organization's overall goals, an understanding of the actual culture of the organization and ethical misconduct that has arisen in the past and an understanding of the aspirational culture employees want to belong to. .8 If the code contains a prologue that summarizes the reasons the code development team chose to highlight the standards covered in the provisions, it gives employees the context to make educated assumptions about how the organization wants them to behave when they face challenges the code does not cover. Immediately following the prologue to the provisions should be the codes list of provisions. This section should do four things. First, it should specify each highlighted standard of behavior in clear and concise language that all employees can understand. Second, it should show how each provision relates to the organization's core values. Ideally, the core values you selected are relevant to your employees, the challenges they face, and the personal values they hold. The standards highlighted in your provisions should have the same relevance and should expand on how those core values should guide behavior in specific cases. .5 Suppose, for example, that your organization selected fairness as one of its core values and defined fairness as treating everyone with equal respect and concern. To expand on what that core value means and how it should be applied, you may come up with several code provisions that illuminate how that value relates to employees, beneficiaries, and the broader community. After considering what issues your organization needs to highlight, you may select the following provisions. .7 Managers should follow the organization's hiring and evaluation procedures consistently and avoid showing favoritism to specific employees or candidates. Employees should distribute an equal portion of resources to each beneficiary, unless they can demonstrate an unequal distribution as warranted due to different levels of need. Employees should avoid bribery, corruption, or any other activities that promote unfair come petition. One way to show the relationship of such provisions to the core value of fairness is to provide a separate subheading under each provision that lists the core value relating to the provision. This strategy makes extra sense if some of your provisions relate to more than one core value. You can also organize the provisions according to the value they most generally support. The third thing your code provision section should do is provide examples that illustrate both how an employee can meet the standards expressed in each example and how an employee can fail to meet those standards. To do this, you should consider writing case studies that clarify what complies with the standard and failure to comply with the standard look like. You can also do this by including answers to sample questions that employees might ask about how to apply the provision standards in their jobs. .2 Fourth, under each provision, the code should also list policies and procedures that relate to the code provisions and that clarify the organization's standards. You can do this by including footnotes that provide clear references to the relevant policies and procedures so it is easy for employees to find more detailed information when necessary. Now that you have an overview of the contents that should be included in the beginning and middle of the code, let's continue with a discussion about the sections that should be included at the end of the code. After explaining each code provision, your code should include a description of the systems and structures that support the code in promoting an ethical culture. This section should offer information about a communication strategy, which would explain where detailed information about the organization's standards can be found and how the information in the code will be communicated to employees and the general public; a training strategy, which should explain what ethics topics the organization's training program will cover, how the training will be delivered, when employees must complete the training, and who must complete the training; instructions for where to seek guidance, which should list the people employees can turn to for council when they are unsure about how to respond to a challenge they confronts in the workplace; and an outline of the organization's policies for reporting suspected or observed misconduct. This section should explain the process employees should use to report misconduct, the process the organization uses to investigate misconduct, and whistleblower policies that indicate how the employee reporting misconduct will be protected from retaliation. .3 The end of your code should also include a section that provides employees with a model ethical decision-making process. A typical approach is to provide employees with a list of questions they should ask themselves. You should try to make the procedure long enough to prevent misconduct but short enough that employees can remember it when they have to make a spur of the moment decision. The code should conclude with a statement of personal responsibility. This statement may resemble an oath that employees take representing their commitment to uphold the standards articulated in the code to the best of their ability. .1 I want to conclude the course by reiterating a few key points. First, you can only prepare an effective code if you have an understanding of your organization's actual culture and the aspirational culture your employees want to belong to. To gain this knowledge, you must conduct an ethics of assessment before drafting your code. Second, a code will have little to no impact without the appropriate systems in place to support it including effective modeling of ethical behavior among leadership, effective training programs, consistent enforcement of the code's and standards, and the presence of reporting mechanisms that are easy for employees to use and that protect them from retaliation. Finally, a code of ethics is a living document that should be updated as the needs and challenges of your organization change. .0 Preparing a code of ethics that promotes an ethical culture is a lengthy and difficult process. But once you begin the process, you will find that each step adds value and gives you additional tools to foster a culture in which the members of your organization consistently and willingly meet the highest standards of ethical behavior.