Dive Brief:
- Fewer than 1 in 10 organizational codes of conduct explicitly address AI or technology ethics, meaning their rules may fail to account for emerging risks faced by employees, advisory firm LRN found in a recently published report.
- Nearly all of the 2,000 full-time employees in the report said their employers require them to certify or acknowledge a conduct code, but a declining share had actually used their code as a resource. LRN noted that conduct codes generally lack effective design, while nearly 1 in 5 employees said their codes lacked practical guidance.
- AI’s transformational effect on the workplace has led employees to call for greater support from their employers, a role that conduct codes could help fulfill. The report also comes out amid findings that workplace misconduct has grown in recent years.
Dive Insight:
That conduct codes are seeing low utilization may be concerning given a rise in reported workplace misconduct. According to an HR Acuity survey, 55% of employees either experienced or witnessed misconduct in 2025, a figure that jumped up from 41% in 2024 and neared a seven-year high. What’s more, 38% of respondents experienced multiple misconduct incidents.
Concerningly, LRN found that just 66% of employees felt they could report misconduct without facing retaliation, which declined from 71% last year. The firm said the findings are a sign that employees “need more than a reporting channel” when it comes to surfacing misconduct or ethics concerns and that ethics codes should describe what the organization’s investigation processes look like — a feature lacking from most of the codes evaluated by LRN.
On AI, recent HR industry analysis has found concerns that employees may not know how to best take advantage of the technology due in part to a lack of employer guidance. Employees and company leaders also perceive adoption timelines differently, according to a May Adecco Group report, with employees less likely than leaders to say that their organizations would be ready to integrate agentic AI into workflows within a year.
Most employers won’t need to add entirely new sections to their conduct codes to account for AI, LRN said, but they may need to connect the technology back to other ethical principles already espoused by the organization. This can include concepts like accountability, fairness, transparency and use of sound judgment.
“The strongest codes will not simply add more content,” LRN’s report said. “They will help employees navigate emerging risks with practical guidance that is easy to find, easy to understand, and easy to apply.”
At the same time, organizations can develop AI ethics policies centered on answering how the technology will help employees do their best work and how the organization will ensure that AI does not erode trust, sources previously told HR Dive. As with broader conduct codes, the sources noted that HR should treat AI ethics policies as living documents that evolve as circumstances do.
