Login Code of Conduct Found Not Binding

SurturZ writes "The Industrial Relations Commission of New South Wales, Australia, has ordered a company to reinstate an employee who downloaded porn onto a work laptop, even though it was in contravention of his workplace's code of conduct. From the article: the IRC said there was an 'air of automatically' about the annual signing off of employees on NCR's code of conduct, 'a degree of mechanical, unthinking routine in employees making a commitment to abide by the code.'" So, I think most of us can agree, porn at work == bad, but recognition that Click EULAs/other agreements are not binding is probably good. The question is — what replaces them?

what replaces them

[l3v1]

what replaces them

common sense ? reason ?
 

Not hard

[reed]

What replaces them? I dunno, when I started my job I was given the employee handbook, and time to read it. It's not long. It just says "company equipment is provided to you to do your work, and within the discression of your supervisors should only be used for such." Then it has a short paragraph about sexual harassment policy. Not a big long list of verbotens, just an understanding that (a) the primary purpose of company owned equipment is work, not personal use (though some personal use is of course OK), and (b) you must respect your fellow employees and not do stupid stuff that intimidates, harasses, offends, etc.

Creating a 5 page policy that nobody's going to read isn't really required.

They need to police it

[Todd Knarr]

It sounds like the problem wasn't just the "oh, another form to sign" nature of the code of conduct, it was the company's behavior. Remember, the IRC said outright that, despite the company claiming a "no tolerance" policy, they didn't act like one existed up until they had to terminate this guy. Likely they, like most companies, didn't actually police the code of conduct, they just let employees do anything at all until the company finally stumbled on something bad, and then and only then did the code of conduct come up. The solution the court's looking for, I suspect, is for the company to actually routinely police the code of conduct, regularly look at employees to see whether they're following it, warn those that're starting to push the borderline and generally act like the company cares about the code of conduct before it gets to a termination situation.