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In this blog post, we take a look at some of the wider costs misconduct can inflict on an organization that lacks the proper processes and culture around misconduct reporting and handling.

People Leaving the Business

Misconduct and the lack or perceived lack of action following a report can lead to employees leaving a business and finding a role elsewhere. Some companies may not see this as a major issue, as they can just rehire. However, a study conducted by Glassdoor found that the average cost of hiring in the US was $4,000 and it took 24 days on average to fill an open position. 

In our Trust Gap survey, we revealed that 45% of those who personally experienced or witnessed workplace misconduct ended up leaving their role. We also discovered that US office-based businesses spent approximately $20.2 billion on hiring costs over a 12-month period, highlighting how costly it can be to lose employees.

Workforce Productivity

Unchecked employee misconduct also impacts those who chose to remain with an organization, with 49% of those who personally experienced or witnessed workplace misconduct taking time away from work. The average number of sick days for employees who have personally experienced or witnessed workplace misconduct is 12 days in the UK and six days in the US, which equates to one sick day per office-based worker related to workplace misconduct.

And it’s not just the victims of misconduct who suffer. Increased workplace absence can often lead to a loss of employee morale and disruptions in productivity for both the victims of misconduct and their colleagues. Employees may experience increased stress and the potential for burnout as a result of increased workload, which greatly impacts their productivity and that of the wider business.

Legal Proceedings and Financial Settlements

Workers that experienced or witnessed workplace misconduct estimate that 22% of these instances resulted in legal proceedings and 24% in financial settlements. In 2020, workplace-related litigation reached a record high, with the top 10 cases totaling $1.58 billion, an 18 percent increase over 2019’s $1.34 billion. 

In 2021, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) received more than 12,000 whistleblower tips from individuals in 99 countries and paid out approximately $564 million to whistleblowers in the fiscal year. During the same period, the Department of Justice (DOJ) recovered over $1.6 billion from False Claims Act actions filed by whistleblowers. 

Through litigation and settlement, many companies have been forced to not only completely revamp their policies, procedures, and oversight functions but also to change the composition of their Boards and leadership teams.

Reputational Damage

In the age of social media, it’s not hard for employees that have witnessed or experienced misconduct to share their experiences with the public and the media. One of the major fallouts of unchecked misconduct and these reports being made public is how significantly it can affect an organization’s brand and reputation.

Being seen as an employer that values its employees means it is easier to attract and recruit new talent and can make the organization more appealing to customers as well. Conversely, an organization with rampant misconduct issues will make headlines for the wrong reasons, leading to a change in the way the brand is perceived. Reputational damage can also be felt through share price drops, as many investors may choose to disassociate themselves from toxic organizations.

It’s clear that the consequences of employee misconduct are far-reaching. Any organization that wishes to maintain a strong brand reputation, reduce employee attrition rates, and be productive must act on misconduct reports and ensure that reporters feel safe, recognized, and rewarded for their efforts. By doing so, the organization can avoid the potentially devastating costs of failing its employees.

Discover more about the costs of misconduct and the importance of rebuilding trust with employees in our game-changing Trust gap survey.

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Frequently Asked Questions

What are the costs of misconduct?

Misconduct and the lack or perceived lack of action following a report can lead to employees leaving a business and finding a role elsewhere. The number of sick days for employees who have personally experienced or witnessed workplace misconduct equates to one sick day per worker related to misconduct.

Can misconduct affect productivity?

Employees may experience increased stress and the potential for burnout as a result of witnessing or experiencing misconduct, which greatly impacts their productivity and that of the wider business.

Can misconduct affect a business’s reputation?

An employer that values its employees can attract and recruit new talent and can be more appealing to customers. Conversely, an organization with rampant misconduct issues will make headlines and experience reputational damage.

How can businesses avoid reputational damage?

Any organization that wishes to maintain a strong brand reputation, reduce employee attrition rates, and be productive must act on misconduct reports and ensure that reporters feel safe, recognized, and rewarded for their efforts. By doing so, the organization can avoid the potentially devastating costs of failing its employees.

The post The High Costs of Misconduct: A Closer Look appeared first on Vault.

Furthermore, a significant percentage of employees globally are not working in organizations with effective Ethics & Compliance programs. Without these structures in place, organizations as a whole will find it very difficult, if not impossible, to improve their workplace cultures with a view to mitigating the very damaging effects of misconduct.

This week the Ethics & Compliance Initiative (ECI) released the 2021 Global Business Ethics Survey on the State of Ethics & Compliance in the Workplace, A Look at Global Trends.

In 2020, the global median showed 29% of employees felt pressure to compromise on business ethics to maintain or improve performance. This is up from 20% in 2019 and 22% in 2015 and is believed to be largely due to the economic impact of Covid. 

In the US this increase is more pronounced, almost doubling to 30% of employees feeling pressure to compromise when compared to 16% in 2017. 

Employees are aware of the problem

Yet both globally and in the US, the levels of observed misconduct have been high but steady for some years now. 

In 2020, 49% of US employees reported observing misconduct, a number little changed from 47% in 2017. For context, the US had a historic high of 54% in 2007 – a predictor of things to come. 

Globally, however, the median is lower at 33% and has remained largely unchanged since 2015. In both the US and global surveys though the most frequently observed category of misconduct appears to be conscious and unconscious bias or discrimination, which manifests as favoritism towards individuals or specific groups of people. 

When it comes to the reporting of incidents of misconduct, both globally and in the US specifically, more employees than ever are speaking up. There has been much debate over this in the Ethics & Compliance community, with speculation ranging from employees feeling more comfortable about speaking up from the perceived safety of their own home, due to the shift to remote working, through to more employees having an ax to grind over pay cuts, furlough, and restructuring. 

In the US, while 86% reported at least one behavior that they “thought violated their organization’s workplace ethics standards,” the rates of reporting for the most common types of misconduct were much lower – discrimination was only reported by 40% despite it being the most commonly observed issue.

 Furthermore, 35% of non-management employees indicated that they did not report an incident of misconduct because they did not believe corrective action would be taken.

The global median for reporting misconduct was similar at 81% in 2020, compared with 63% in 2019. But the report does not dive into the specific mechanisms used so it’s difficult to see if cases were escalated properly. However, the findings below suggest ineffective escalation is part of the problem.

It’s also worth mentioning that lawmakers in both Europe and the US are making moves to incentivize and protect external whistleblowers but to also pressure organizations to make their internal reporting and whistleblowing systems more effective. 

It’s still difficult to Speak Up 

This is pertinent to the next point which is that retaliation rates against misconduct reporters and whistleblowers have skyrocketed. The ECI notes that “Retaliation against reporters is one of the most intractable issues that organizations must address.”

In 2020, the rate of retaliation against employees for reporting wrongdoing in the US was 79%, an increase of 35 percentage points from 2017. “If left unaddressed, high rates of retaliation can erode ethical culture and undermine efforts to encourage employees to Speak Up and raise Concerns,” the ECI said. 

Globally, the median for retaliation was 61%, a large increase from 2015 (40%) and almost double 2019 (33%).

With fewer than one in seven employees globally (one in five in the US) working in strong ethical cultures, the ECI expressed concern that as the impact of the pandemic continues to be felt, companies will find themselves on rocky ground when it comes to Ethics & Compliance. 

Bear in mind that the findings of this survey are set against the backdrop of an expanding risk profile for E&C professionals as the focus shifts to less tangible and financial misconduct through the lens of ESG. But also a regulatory shift toward greater financial penalties and compliance programs that don’t just tick the boxes on paper but are actually effective in practice. 

Getting tougher on ethical failings 

A great example of this came from SEC Commissioner Caroline Crenshaw this week when she spoke at the Council of Institutional Investors and said the SEC needed to change its approach on the issuance of corporate penalties based on whether shareholders would be harmed by the penalty. Indeed, in a field where penalties are often ‘priced in’ Crenshaw’s aim is to make them “sufficiently high to motivate the company to remediate problems”.

She also said the SEC should be looking at more factors relating to the effectiveness of corporate compliance programs, whether the company self-reported the misconduct, and whatever conditions allowed the misconduct to happen in the first place. 

Crenshaw also said organizations would need to get their house in order when it comes to “cooperation credit”, which is not afforded to companies that merely respond to Enforcement Division requests, or conduct a not-so-independent investigation led by corporate counsel. 

“Meaningful cooperation requires a commitment to proactively identifying and remediating wrongdoing, as well as holding accountable those individuals responsible for misconduct. It’s about substantially shortening the staff’s investigation and working with the staff toward an efficient resolution,” she said. 

From the number of Ethics & Compliance professionals we speak to about streamlining and efficiently resolving investigations, there’s a lot of work to do here.

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At the same time, there is a growing trend for employees to publicly call out misconduct as seen through harassment claims with MeToo and discrimination highlighted by Black Lives Matter.

The lawmakers’ focus and rise of social movements are both a direct result of ineffective legacy incident reporting and whistleblowing mechanisms.

In this discussion, we get legal insight from Søren Pedersen, Partner, Bird & Bird, and Kate Ash, Global Ethics and Compliance Officer, Neptune Energy, looks at how such environmental changes bring about a remarkable opportunity to take meaningful action on matters of culture, ethics, and integrity.

By putting in place key processes and making internal reporting channels more accessible, employers can mitigate the risk of ethical breaches or incidents of misconduct hitting the headlines or the courts.

The post Best practice for reducing workplace misconduct through enhanced reporting appeared first on Vault.

Even with strong company policies in place emphasizing zero tolerance for workplace misconduct, employees are still reluctant in many instances to report incidents of harassment, racism at work, or bullying by a colleague or superior. Of the many reasons for this is that employees are often embarrassed about discussing the incidents, are unclear of the reporting process, or don’t have faith in the official procedure. Many also fear retaliation if they come forward, particularly if the incident involves an individual who is in a position of power and leadership. 

Clarify in writing your incident-reporting procedures

A company’s employee handbook should clearly define its code of ethics and conduct and reporting procedures (how and where to file a complaint) for employees to follow in the event of workplace misconduct. These complaint-reporting procedures should be reviewed with new hires and regularly communicated to staff, reinforcing the organization’s commitment to take appropriate disciplinary action against perpetrators who violate company policy and create a hostile work environment. Policies should be easily available so that employees don’t have to go looking for them. Any increase in effort to file a report raises the barrier for an employee to do so, and in some cases incentivizes them to find another, easier, route to voice their concerns. Social media is a common choice.   

The reporting procedures should also convey than an investigation will follow once a complaint is filed to determine if there has been any wrongdoing, misconduct or ethical lapse. The investigation should be fair, objective and balanced, discreet to the extent possible, and everyone should be treated with respect and dignity. Each investigation should also be done promptly for a number of reasons: innocent people should be cleared as soon as possible, corrective action is generally more effective when taken sooner, and the misconduct must be stopped with swift disciplinary action.

Reporting bad behavior

In many companies, the procedures for filing a complaint involving harassment, discrimination and other wrongful actions involve going to an employee’s direct supervisor, department head, or Human Resources (HR) department.  This person is then responsible for executing company policy as it relates to investigative procedures and the type of disciplinary actions to take if warranted. In some cases the disciplinary action will result in immediate termination while in other cases disciplinary measures may involve verbal counseling, written warning or suspension without pay. 

In some cases, however, the individual (such as a supervisor or department head) receiving the formal complaint report is the very person perpetrating the bad behavior – which is a clear conflict of interest. In other cases, the perpetrator may be a top executive, compromising HR’s objectivity and integrity or, even worse, forcing a cover-up. We’ve seen this time and again in high-profile cases where an organization’s culture fostered an environment that allowed leadership’s bad behavior to be swept under the rug, silencing victims even after they did complain. The #MeToo movement revealed the systemic issues that exist, leaving those who experience sexual harassment with little redress and support. 

Confidence and confidentiality

Employees need to feel confident in their organization’s workplace incident-reporting process. If employees witness a company turning a blind eye in remedying workplace misconduct, incidents will go unreported. If by reporting a complaint, employees fear retaliation in the form of termination, demotion, reassignment, or ostracism, the reporting system is ineffective. Those who report possible or actual misconduct and those who cooperate in an investigation must feel safe and secure that they will be protected from retaliation. Employees will only provide information only if they believe that they will not be penalized for doing so.

Providing confidence in a company’s policies on reporting workplace misconduct involves protecting an employee’s identity and keeping his or her complaint confidential throughout the entire process. In some cases, anonymous reporting legitimately protects victims and witnesses, and encourages and emboldens them to report situations early—before a situation worsens. In other cases, however, only having anonymous reporting mechanisms, or those that do not easily enable an anonymous reporter to identify themselves while maintaining confidentiality, can be detrimental to culture by suggesting the workplace environment is one where it is not safe to Speak Up.  

Applications such as Vault Platform eliminate the fear of reporting and retaliation. Employees and witnesses can report misconduct in the workplace without having to speak directly to anyone. This eliminates the need for face-to-face conversations and the fear of embarrassment, humiliation or intimidation. Employees can describe their concerns via the Vault app and then opt to report the incident anonymously or not. The report, if submitted, goes to the employer’s designated HR case manager, with the reporting employee receiving notice that the organization is taking action.

Vault Platform works for HR as well, because employees are more comfortable in coming forward to report any incidents of harassment or discrimination, and an effective, tangible process to hold the perpetrators accountable is clearly evident. The reporting process is documented, facilitating an optimum outcome for the organization and the employees involved. 

It’s important to not only have a reporting process in place but to also ensure that it is utilized by the organization and its staff. 

Learn more about the importance of effective reporting mechanisms by downloading Vault Magazine

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Frequently Asked Questions

What constitutes misconduct in the workplace?

Workplace misconduct is when an employee’s inappropriate behavior or actions go against the company’s policies and values. Examples include: bullying, harassment, fraud, corruption, and discrimination.

Who can report misconduct in the workplace?

Every employee should be able to report workplace misconduct to their employer without fear of retaliation.

What does misconduct mean in the workplace?

Workplace misconduct is when an employee’s inappropriate behavior or actions go against the company’s policies and values, such as bullying, harassment, fraud, corruption, and discrimination.

Why don’t workers report misconduct?

There are a number of reasons why workers don’t report workplace misconduct and workplace bullying, with the principal reason being the fear of retaliation.

The post How to report workplace misconduct appeared first on Vault.

• Can you get fired for reporting harassment?
• What are the rights of a whistleblower?
• Can you be fired for being a whistleblower?
• Can you be prosecuted for not challenging bullying and harassment in the workplace?

The clear sentiment here is that employees are scared and unsure when it comes to reporting workplace harassment. For those of us with professional insight into HR or workplace misconduct processes, the concern that someone might lose their job for reporting harassment seems absurd. But is it really?

We’ve all heard or read the media horror stories about people being ousted for reporting misconduct. Now consider that at this moment in time you might be in a vulnerable state.

Imagine someone at work has just done something terrible to you, something that makes you feel humiliated, or insulted, or angry. Then let’s say you muster the courage to say something, to Speak Up – you’re not challenging an executive decision or a company strategy, you’re challenging the behavior of a specific person, you’re making an allegation against someone that they may well refute.

That’s a big ask, so you’d hope the process supports you.

The first question is: What is the process? Do you even know about it?

A slight modification of the search terms above unearths many questions from employees about how to go about reporting misconduct. This suggests that it’s not unusual for people to be in the dark about the process.

It’s good practice for organizations to run awareness campaigns to help employees to learn about, recognize and know what to do about workplace harassment and bullying at work. But it’s not something that all organizations do.

A good awareness campaign should also emphasize the process itself – how HR or the relevant party would handle an incident. The idea here is to let employees know that workplace harassment, bullying and all forms of misconduct are serious issues and treated as such. Educate them that HR is not spying on them but the tools and processes are in place to give employees the opportunity to share their concerns.

Secondly, is the process human?

So, you have established that a reporting process does indeed exist. Next, you pick up the phone and you call a number to speak with a complete stranger. This may seem absurd in itself but this is the typical tool that’s been used by organizations for years. The problem is that it’s not effective.

Many organizations will require anyone with a grievance to send an email to a generic mailbox, which will return an automated message with a reference and a telephone number to call. This ‘hotline’ will allow you to make an anonymous report to a human in a call center somewhere – someone who works for the hotline operator, not your company, and probably doesn’t know anything about your company.

It’s a legacy approach and it feels impersonal and alienating. Degrading even. Can you trust a stranger in a call center in a moment when you’re feeling vulnerable and even afraid for your career?

Finally, what happens during and after the process?

This follows very closely the previous point. One of the key challenges with anonymous hotlines is that once the report has been filed it disappears from the employee’s radar. It’s like shouting into a black hole. You assume that once the report has been made, things start happening behind the scenes. But you don’t know that. So not maintaining communication once an employee has filed a report can make them feel like there’s no point in their efforts. The same is true for other reporting processes that are not employee-driven.

Interestingly, research was done by the National Business Ethics Survey of Fortune 500 Companies on the channels used by the small number of people that do go ahead and report misconduct.

• 60% reported to a supervisor
• 21% reported to executive management
• Only 11% reported to a hotline

This demonstrates that while the hotline is often pitched as the process of choice and the one actioned by the employee it’s also the least used method, which means organizations relying on this modality for data are woefully underestimating the size of the problem. The other clear challenge is that reporting an incident to a superior then makes it incumbent on that person to action the complaint. How many of these reports either go no further or are dealt with in an unofficial and undocumented capacity?

Best practice suggests that there are clear and ongoing communications between the reporter and the case manager about what to expect from the organization and what the organization will do with regard to process. This will help employees walk away from the incident feeling like the process was handled fairly regardless of whether they agree with the outcome and is something very difficult to achieve with the ‘fire and forget’ nature of a hotline.

Any organization that wants to nurture an environment where employees feel psychologically and physically safe, must build foundations on internal trust. If a culture doesn’t support or encourage speaking up by raising awareness of the available tools and explaining the end-to-end process, call centers and poorly documented methodologies are merely paying lip service to a solution, and your people will see right through that.

The post Does your speaking up process treat you like a human? appeared first on Vault.

The answer might be a resounding ‘yes’ – you feel like you work for an organization that values your opinion and encourages healthy debate. It sounds like the kind of organization everyone wants to work for. 

But let’s just reframe the question with a slightly different context. Imagine someone at work has just done something terrible to you, something that makes you feel humiliated, or insulted, or angry. Or you’ve witnessed an incident in your workplace which makes someone else feel like this. Is your answer still the same? 

It might be. If there’s a definitive incident, you might feel like your workplace culture would support you if you reported it. But what if there’s no ‘big bang’, no one definitive incident, what if you’ve been increasingly uncomfortable with a situation or a relationship over time? Would your answer still be the same then?

It’s often the case that there is no singular event or incident, rather something negative has built up over time and turned you into a less productive, less happy, less healthy human being. This might be repeated insulting or humiliating behavior towards you, a repeated joke that crosses the line of being reasonable. You might be witness to something unethical, even illegal, that makes you feel uncomfortable working with certain people, or even for the organization. 

Let’s say you muster the courage to say something, to Speak Up – you’re not challenging an executive decision or a company strategy, you’re challenging the behavior of a specific person. That’s a big ask, so you’d hope the process at least supports you. 

Do you have a Speak Up culture?

It’s likely that the process will require you to send an email to a generic mailbox, which will return an automated message with a reference and a telephone number to call. This ‘hotline’ will allow you to make an anonymous report to a human in a call center somewhere who works for the hotline operator. It’s a legacy approach and it feels impersonal and alienating. Degrading even. 

There are some companies that are trying to bring the hotline into the modern day, where you talk to a chatbot instead and answer generic questions about the incident. But this is still the same underlying modality and is still impersonal and alienating. 

Can you trust a stranger in a call center, or a robot, at a moment when you’re feeling vulnerable and even afraid for your career?

Any organization that wants to nurture an environment where employees feel psychologically safe, must build foundations on internal trust. If a culture doesn’t support or encourage speaking up, call centers and bots are merely paying lip service to the solution, and people will see right through that. 

In recent years, those tasked with building that environment have witnessed great changes within organizational culture. ‘HR’ is no longer the ‘hiring-and-retiring’ department and its remit has extended to employee relations, diversity, inclusion, ethics, and beyond, as companies that once shouted; “our people make the difference,” realize that they have to work to attract and keep those people because it’s people, especially the ones in the trenches, that really do care about workplace culture. 

You can buy tools to help you build a healthy culture, but you can’t buy culture itself. If you don’t support the creation of that culture organically, there aren’t any tools that will save it. 

You can’t buy culture but you can build it

So, if you work in a capacity where you are managing people or nurturing culture, here are three critical things you can do to build trust and create an environment that encourages people to Speak Up:

• Stop outsourcing 

It’s a common mistake that people would prefer to talk to a third party. They need help and intervention, and that can’t come from an external person paid to take calls on your company’s behalf. To build trust, people need to know that their case is being managed by someone who knows the company and possibly the parties involved. 

Do however use third-party, or non-employer branded reporting tools. This gives people reassurance that your organization takes reporting seriously enough to have invested in a specialist tool and removes concerns over an in-house system that could be open to abuse. 

• Make the process human 

The HR sector has worked hard over the last years to humanize a function that was once seen as very people-unfriendly. Do not expect people to talk to a call center representative or a bot in a vulnerable moment. This makes people feel the same frustrations and alienation as reporting a fault with the company laptop or submitting a request about payroll. It reduces your interaction to a ‘trouble ticket’. People want to know who inside the company is going to help them. They want to have that personal connection. And as management, this is what’s good for your company’s culture too.

Do use technology to make the process as user-friendly and effortless as possible. Humanizing doesn’t mean avoiding tech, in fact, quite the opposite. 

• Let people control the process

One of the biggest challenges when moving ahead with reporting an incident is that once you’ve picked up the phone or messaged the bot, or emailed HR, it’s ‘out there’ and the process has started. Someone might lose their nerve or might have reacted in the heat of the moment, or could be reporting something that is fairly innocuous at the time but is the straw that broke the camel’s back. 

If you let people control the flow of evidence they feel more confident in their actions. Use a system that lets people build up their cases over time, and combine all those little things before submitting, which will help them and HR see the scope of the problem in one place. Then only when they are prepared and ready do they begin the process and get HR involved. 

Do you use a system that encourages people to compile evidence about their grievances at the time and over time? This can save you hundreds of hours in investigation time and resources when it comes to looking into a claim and also puts the entire case into perspective before and after submission, making a better experience for all parties involved.

The post Three ways to humanize the speaking up process appeared first on Vault.

To maintain this trust, or help reestablish it should it be found lacking, it’s essential to implement a misconduct reporting and recording system that employees also trust. The legacy tool for this purpose is the anonymous hotline, a system that has remained unchanged for decades and is in dire need of an overhaul. Hotlines, for the most part, are outsourced to a specialist provider that will have a call center handling the inflow of calls. Your organization is just one of many customers accessing this shared resource, which brings with it sixteen inherent challenges:

1. Your employee has been calling the hotline but there is no agent available
2. Your employee has to make time in their day to make the call. This can prove inconvenient and time restrictive
3. Your employee has to find somewhere private to make the call and is afraid of being overheard
4. The conversation is difficult and frustrating as the agent doesn’t understand what the employee is trying to say, or the employee doesn’t understand the agent
5. English is not your employee’s first language and it’s difficult to articulate the incident report in real time
   
6. The agent doesn’t work for your organization and doesn’t understand its particularities. This can make it challenging to establish context for the incident
7. The agent is a call center representative employed by the hotline provider and has no investment in your organization. This can make them seem disinterested or impersonal
8. Your employee may be feeling vulnerable and traumatized and may find it embarrassing to speak on the phone
9. Your employee has no visible assurance that the communication is confidential and secure. If it is an anonymous report they may worry about their anonymity
10. The experience can feel like shouting into a well as the employee has no tracking or follow up options and may feel like no action was taken
11. If no action appears to have been taken (even though it has been in the background) then the employee may feel the case was not handled fairly
12. By calling a hotline the employee may feel like they need to report a ‘major’ incident but in reality, reports might be made up of lots of smaller incidents over a period of time. The employee might feel discouraged from reporting a ‘smaller’ incident
13. The employee cannot submit visual evidence such as screenshots of messages or photos over the phone
14. A reporting mechanism that allows written entries into a report over a period of time allows the employee greater clarity of thought and means they can revisit their entries when they are feeling less emotionally vulnerable
15. Hotlines were first introduced decades ago when telephones were the most obvious means of communication. Times have changed and the telephone is not necessarily the preferred medium especially for Millennials and younger generations
16. Hotlines are not particularly efficient for your organization either. The HR professional or similar tasked with investigating the claim will be given a report collected by a third party supplier and will then have to invest time and resources into their own investigation

Cultivating a Speak Up Culture

There is also the cultural impact to consider and various psychological phenomena that apply here and raise the barrier to create a ‘Speak Up culture’. One of these is the diffusion of responsibility, whereby each individual believes they only have limited power to make an impact resulting in them thinking it won’t make a difference. Kickstarting the entire reporting process by having employees call into a third party with no vested interest in the organization (other than being a paying customer) already sends the message that misconduct incidents are not something dealt with in-house. While only offering an anonymous hotline suggests that if you speak publicly, you’re likely to be punished. 

The design of the anonymous hotline compounds the problem by isolating people submitting reports – incident reporters do not know whether they are a lone voice or one of many, which makes the process more intimidating.

Already, employees are afraid of being targets of retaliation or reporting an incident having an impact on their job. Trust works both ways – to gain your employee’s trust, you should develop relevant policies to encourage a ‘Speak Up culture’ and in return, they will trust you have their best interests and the ethical interests of the business at heart. 

Finally, you can always buy tools to help you build a healthy culture, but you can’t buy culture itself. If you don’t support the creation of that culture organically, there aren’t any tools that will save it.

The post 16 Reasons Why Anonymous Hotlines are Broken and Outdated appeared first on Vault.