Hello, this is Bradley Bailyn and this is podcast number four of the You Can’t Be Serious (YCBS!) Legal Podcast.
We have a nice intimate setting today because I wanted to get this out, but I am not in my office. As you can see, I am in the car. So here we are anyway.
So today we’re gonna talk about codes of ethics.
More and more of my clients are asking for them and I’m suggesting it to people.
Why? Because New York City and New York State are very progressive.
If you don’t know that we have more laws being passed every year on all kinds of topics that you may or may not be aware of, but they come with heavy penalties and fines and you could have a lot of problems. So really the best way to stay in compliance with laws known and unknown is to be on the right side of progressive culture, which means having a code of ethics.
How do you use a code of ethics?
Let’s start with this.
What is a code of ethics? A code of ethics is basically you sit down and you think of your vision and you think of your mission. It doesn’t have to be anything too fancy, just something positive – the way that you want to make the world a better place. And then your code of ethics helps you to translate that into guidelines for how to make decisions when you don’t specifically have anything in your company handbook or your company rules regarding how to make that kind of a decision.
When does something like this happen come up? Something like this is going to come up whenever your employees need to make decisions without you or when they make decisions with you. So how does the decision work? You are going to think of several things.
The first thing is you’re going to think about what’s most profitable for your business naturally.
Then the second thing you’re going to ask yourself is, is this ethical? Is this something that improves our company culture? Is this something that we will be proud to have on the front page of YouTube or The New York Times or wherever it is that it comes out?
And it will because you’ll get hacked, your employees will publish it. It’ll be disclosed in a lawsuit. Nowadays, there is no privacy. So everything’s transparent, for better or worse. There is no privacy anymore.
So you really just have to make sure that everything happening behind your back is something that you would like to be happening in front of your back.
Which means that when you’re making these decisions, you’re going to say, is it profitable and is it ethical? This generally means does it comply with our code of ethics?
Now, depending on your industry and depending on the size of your company and depending on who you are and the kind of things that you sell, the code of ethics is not necessarily always going to be the same.
You don’t want to grab IBM’s code of ethics. It’s not going to make sense for you and it’s not even going to protect you necessarily in a court of law or fix your culture because you’re not going to be able to apply it in any kind of a meaningful way.
But if you have something that can help everybody make decisions and leaves everybody feeling like you’re the kind of person who does the right thing and this is the kind of company that does the right thing and tries to treat everyone the right way, and if you ever get investigated, I should say when you get investigated, because if you’re successful, you will get investigated either by the press, the government, by litigants, or maybe all three of those things you want to come out smelling sweet, whoever, whatever former employees they call to testify, whatever documents may leak, whatever it is that happens, you want everyone being like they’re pretty honest, they’re pretty ethical, they’re pretty upstanding.
I don’t necessarily agree with every decision that they make, but there are good people there. They’re generally good people.
That’s what you need folks saying about you. All right.
So if you have any questions about how to apply ethics to your company or you need a code of ethics drafted or your current code needs to be revised, please feel free to give me a call at 646-326-9971. Or you can text me.
Or email Brad@BailynLaw.com.
Also, if you have any questions that you would like to submit for this podcast for future episodes, please send it off to me.
If there’s a subscribe button on whatever platform you’re currently watching this on, please use that subscribe button because I give you tips and tricks that you will not hear anywhere else, and that’s pretty much it.
Thank you and have a wonderful evening.
