Business ethics cannot be understood only as a set of certain rules collected in the form of formal documents. Designing codes and programmes, managers should involve employees in the process so that they co-create and identify with the emerging document; they should feel that they are its co-authors. Creating an ethics programme requires the development of employees’ need for developing that programme,disclosure and systematization of the most important values for each stakeholder group. A well-designed programme / code of ethics helps to reduce costs and increase profits because it reduces instances of lies, corruption, fraud and other bad practices. It also reduces the number of situations in which there is a conflict of interests, increases the trust of customers, contractors and partners, increases the credibility of staff , loyalty of emplyees, significantly improving the company's reputation (Żemigała, 2007). According to Gasparski (Gasparski et al. 2004), a good ethics programme facilitates moral leadership and patterns of the ethical impact, the formal definition of core values. It also makes it easier to inform about the unethical behaviour, develop a code of conduct and procedures for resolving conflicts. It also enablessystematic benchmarking assessment in order to further improve and ensure a long-term strategy aimed at continuous development of staff, formal and informal controls of the ethics system and its adjustment. Managers can institutionalize the process of ethical decision-making, consciously leading to the situation that every moral decision is based on previous decisions taken. Codes of ethics provide a basis for creating social policy, and as a result, a company assumes social responsibility.