Analysis of Uber code of conduct

I would like to share my thoughts on code of conduct of Uber. I wanted to find interesting code of ethics, ethics policy or code of conduct and, sincerely, I struggled for a bit. As these papers are usually official and are legal documents, most of them seemed a little bit boring for me. They also felt very similar to each other even among IT companies. The most interesting which I could find was Ubers' Business conduct guide from November 2019. Its online version can be found here:

https://s23.q4cdn.com/407969754/files/doc_governance/2019/Uber-COBC-2019-English.pdf

There are several points which I noticed right away in this document:

  1. Visual design - this documents clearly had quite some time spent on it by designers. I also feel that quite a lot of resources were spent on it from both legal and design departments.
  2. Separation on small parts - pages have more pictures and less text in them than in most other documents that I found. Each page is not overflowed with text, so it feels easier to read such code of conduct.
  3. Each part has a clear system Topic > Summary > Explanation. It makes it easy for worker to find a part they are interested in if later they need to review this document. Also if a worker finds a part they are interested in, they can read just a summary or dive into details. This makes usage of this document more flexible.
  4. Such structure and design led to one con. The total number of pages is quite big - 33. It might have two negative sides - to scare readers of big volume of document. Another problem is quite usual for some companies, but I think that Uber is quite a modern company and does not tend to print such documents. However I witnessed in other company when a copy, when code of conduct had to be printed and signed page by page, which did not only seem useless, but also not very friendly to environment.
As for contents of a document, it is still very similar to other companies' code of conduct or ethics policies. I can only point out two things. This document has a topic, which seemed business specific - "Rider & driver partner information", so I thought it had something which could apply only to Uber. However, the content was a typical explanation of internal privacy policy and usage of personal data, so it could be called "Data privacy" or "Internal privacy policy". Another topic, which was in a paper, but is sometimes forgotten by other companies - "Code of Ethics for Directors". It generally shows employees that code of conduct is made for everyone in the company without exceptions.

Code of conduct meme [1]


1. https://www.resonatepictures.com/friday-meme-code-conduct-4/

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