Take the Right Approach

Any organisation that wants to encourage its employees to come forward with suspicions of wrongdoing should put accessible misconduct reporting procedures in place. In order to be effective, the misconduct reporting procedures consist of a system which matches the organisation’s culture and approach. The SpeakUp system is designed for the European working environment - an environment where the key corporate value of an open culture conflict with the American mentality of reporting everything through a hotline.

A short history lesson...

Hotlines originated in the US along with Health & Safety regulations and came to fruition with the Sarbanes-Oxley Corporate Governance legislation. In the US, whistleblowing is perceived as an extension of the right to freedom of speech, a right that is granted under the first amendment of the Bill of Rights. An impressive whistleblowing infrastructure has developed in the US, including a broad spectrum of national and federal whistleblowing protection legislation. When the Sarbanes-Oxley Corporate Governance legislation made this practice part of the corporate environment, it was nothing new for American employees; they understood the use of hotlines.

This was hardly the case when Corporate Governance legislation introduced the integrity hotline practice to continental Europe. Europe is not the US and Europeans are not Americans. A need arose for a European approach to (internal) whistleblowing, where data protection, workers' (council) involvement, protection of the accused and above all, European culture and history are taken into account – SpeakUp provides this approach through the principles of building trust, quality by design and privacy by design.