The State of Misconduct at Work in 2023

Wherever your industry is today, wherever your organization is today, taking the steps to protect workers, brands, and profits is always a winning business strategy.

Workplace Misconduct is behavior that violates company policy or the law, and harms an organization. While most people don’t and will never engage in misconduct, it only takes 1 in 20 workers engaging in misconduct to reduce productivity by 40% and make team members 54% more likely to leave. This is known as the 5% threshold – and is the industry standard for safe levels of misconduct within a team, organization or industry.

Fama’s 2023 research found 1 in 10 candidates were engaging in misconduct last year – double the 5% threshold.

As the workplace misconduct experts, Fama has spent nearly a decade helping companies reduce workplace misconduct and improve quality of hire through our award-winning online screening solution. After screening hundreds of thousands of candidates and uncovering tens of thousands of instances of misconduct, check out these trends in misconduct at work from 2023:

• 1 in 10 candidates had misconduct issues
• Out of 9 industries benchmarked, 8 failed to keep misconduct to safe levels
• The most common types of misconduct were: harassment, sexual misconduct, and intolerance (i.e. racism, sexism, antisemitism, bigotry)
• Content with misconduct increased by 40% from 2022 to 2023

Read the research to learn about misconduct levels in YOUR industry, gain insight on societal and organizational factors impacting these trends, and steps you can take to combat it.

Complete the form to download the research.