How To Improve Your Company’s Whistleblowing Policy

Honesty, integrity, accountability are all crucial values to hold, not just as an individual with professional responsibilities but also as a company with employees, clients, contractors and other such dependents. Unfortunately, professional reality is far from this ideal ethical basis, as evidenced by the considerable volume of white-collar offences recorded each year.

While there are many ways a business might seek to eradicate the possibility of corruption, one crucial way is a clear frontrunner – whistleblowing. Put simply, your employees must feel empowered to call out professional misdeeds where they see them. Again, the reality is far from the ideal in this regard, as whistleblowers are often punished or pushed out for their reportage; how, then, do you enshrine your employees’ safety and security with respect to whistleblowing?

Keep records of all cases

It is nothing short of vital that you treat each whistleblowing account as important as the last. This means keeping a record of all reports made, whether they are found to be true or false. These reports should be kept transparent, too, so that employees can access and read the transcripts of their disclosure if they request to do so – provided, of course, that each record complies with UK GDPR regulation.

Opt for an independent hotline

Any company can be subject to fraudulent or corrupt behaviour from one of its executive employees. It follows, then, that any in-house whistleblowing system could also be compromised by the fraudulent or corrupt behaviour of executive employees. The one surefire way to remove the risk of internal tampering is to retain the services of an independent whistleblowing hotline, ensuring any procedures for reporting are outsourced, and effectively firewalled from improper professional behaviour.

This also follows for settling any disputes that arise as a result of whistleblowing that takes place. A retained team of corporate litigation lawyers enable a full investigation and dispute resolution process to take place with complete professionalism, and without the risk of further reputational damage.

Train all employees

Your responsibility is not just to ensure clear avenues to whistleblowing, but also to ensure all employees are aware of said avenues – and their rights, responsibilities and protections, too. The idea is to make clear the company’s values with respect to honesty, integrity and transparency, while providing active tools that enable employees to work within those values too. On a practical basis, this means training in how to raise a report, education in how reports will be handled and processed, and encouragement to speak up through the channels provided.

Prevent retaliation

The final piece of the whistleblowing puzzle is to prevent retaliation. This is the principal risk faced by whistleblowing employees, and the risk you are investing in whistleblowing training and channels to reduce. Fundamentally, if people have previously seen colleagues treated poorly after an incident, they are more likely to keep quiet with their own intelligence. Retaliation against employees is illegal in the UK, but this does not stop it from happening; training of higher-level employees, safeguarding of lower-level employees and stringent documentation about the consequences of retaliation are all foundational elements to a rock-solid whistleblowing stance.