Are employees who work from home more ethical?

If you feel surrounded at work by dishonest sneaks and letches who’ve got their paws all over you, it may be because the more ethical people are working from home.

Then again, if you’re a telecommuter who feels morally superior about that, bear in mind that you do work alone. We don’t wish to presume, but you probably aren’t harassing your cat with those smutty jokes you used to tell in the office.

A new study cited by MarketWatch holds that employees who work from home commit less misconduct on the job than peers who head into the office every day.

In a survey of 200 firms by the Ethisphere Institute and Jones Lang LaSalle, only 11 percent said work-from-home employees had committed ethics violations in the past two years.

But 36 percent reported “visible ethics violations” by employees who don’t work from home regularly, and 43 percent reported non-visible violations for this group, such as expense account fraud or bribery, MarketWatch reports.

Those of us who usually work from home would like to think this is because of our high ethical standards, and our cat, who doesn’t understand our jokes anyway, would agree.