How data is making whistleblowing more effective

The spec­tac­u­lar fall from grace of US healthtech firm Ther­a­nos and its CEO, Eliz­a­beth Holmes, which began when three employ­ees con­tact­ed state reg­u­la­tors about the company’s mis­lead­ing claims, high­lights the vital role that whistle­blow­ers con­tin­ue to play in busi­ness.

But what if firms could bet­ter man­age the report­ing of mis­con­duct inter­nal­ly and con­vert employ­ees’ com­plaints into data that would enable them to detect pat­terns of harm, there­by enabling them to resolve a prob­lem before it enters the pub­lic domain.

That’s what sev­er­al grow­ing tech com­pa­nies, includ­ing Vault, Navex, SpeakUp and Tel­li are offer­ing their cus­tomers, through plat­forms that allow employ­ees to report wrong­do­ing anony­mous­ly. In Vault’s case, for instance, com­plaints are direct­ed to a named man­ag­er, who can mes­sage the employ­ee, still anony­mous­ly, to request more infor­ma­tion if need­ed, before a res­o­lu­tion is reached and the com­plainant is noti­fied of the result. The sys­tem also gives users the option to dis­close their con­cerns only once sim­i­lar com­plaints have been reg­is­tered.

Accord­ing to Vault’s co-founder and CEO, Neta Mei­dav, adopters of her firm’s tech are report­ing a 70% aver­age increase in the num­ber of inter­nal com­plaints received, while the time tak­en to resolve them has fall­en by half. This, she says, points to a new era in employ­ee-gen­er­at­ed data that, when act­ed on cor­rect­ly, can not only save com­pa­nies the costs of lit­i­ga­tion and all the asso­ci­at­ed rep­u­ta­tion­al dam­age; it can also prompt them to engi­neer turn­arounds in prob­lem­at­ic areas.

“There’s a lot of data flow­ing through our appli­ca­tion, but we’re not sit­ting in between employ­ees and employ­ers, col­lect­ing data on the former’s behalf and pass­ing it for­ward. We don’t believe that trust can be out­sourced – it needs to be built or rebuilt,” Mei­dav stress­es. “We pro­vide com­pa­nies with the tech­nol­o­gy, which then they can run autonomous­ly to cre­ate that trust.”

Vault and its coun­ter­parts can process evi­dence sub­mit­ted in var­i­ous for­mats, includ­ing emails, texts, chat mes­sages, voice­mails and screen­shots, gen­er­at­ing reports for inves­ti­ga­tions that can be cir­cu­lat­ed to the rel­e­vant stake­hold­ers. Their tech can also con­nect the dots on reports of a sim­i­lar nature, to alert com­pa­nies to recur­rent pat­terns of bul­ly­ing, say. This gives them the hard data required to address sys­temic prob­lems that are spread­ing beyond one indi­vid­ual or team. 

With the abil­i­ty to cre­ate reg­u­lar high-lev­el reports about mis­con­duct across the organ­i­sa­tion, com­pa­nies can take a more strate­gic, data-dri­ven approach to improv­ing their cul­tures. Mei­dav cites the case of a US tech firm at which com­plaints sub­mit­ted through Vault exposed racist bul­ly­ing, tying it to a sin­gle per­son. The com­pa­ny swift­ly dis­missed the per­pe­tra­tor and imple­ment­ed an anti-bul­ly­ing pro­gramme in the depart­ment affect­ed.

Intro­duced late last year, the EU’s whistle­blow­er direc­tive (which cov­ers UK-based firms with oper­a­tions in the EU) oblig­es com­pa­nies with more than 250 employ­ees to intro­duce inter­nal mis­con­duct report­ing sys­tems. But Mei­dav believes that the tide has turned already: CEOs have been con­vinced by their com­pli­ance offi­cers that they do “need to know” about prob­lems in their organ­i­sa­tions – and they accept that it’s impor­tant to invest in tech­nol­o­gy that makes data about such mat­ters man­age­able.

She is also expect­ing an increase in the report­ing of envi­ron­men­tal issues, par­tic­u­lar­ly giv­en that ESG dis­clo­sures will become manda­to­ry from next year for UK com­pa­nies with more than 500 employ­ees.

A sys­tem­at­ic, data-dri­ven approach could have cre­at­ed a com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent expe­ri­ence for Gio­van­ni (not his real name), a for­mer sales direc­tor. He and a col­league blew the whis­tle on what they believed were unlaw­ful data-scrap­ing prac­tices by their firm, which led to an employ­ment tri­bunal hear­ing last year after he left the com­pa­ny in 2020, dis­il­lu­sioned by its han­dling of their com­plaint.

Gio­van­ni believes that an inter­nal report­ing plat­form would have giv­en the company’s com­plaints process more struc­ture and, poten­tial­ly, pro­vid­ed more sup­port for him and his fel­low whistle­blow­er.

“Hav­ing a tech­nol­o­gy and a prop­er pro­ce­dure would def­i­nite­ly have helped,” he says. “Many of the chal­lenges I faced were because there was no process to fol­low in the right way. Noth­ing was writ­ten down that could guide us on how to make a pro­tect­ed dis­clo­sure. So hav­ing such guid­ance through the imple­men­ta­tion of a sys­tem, com­bined with a gov­ern­ment func­tion that’s tru­ly invest­ed in the fair treat­ment of whistle­blow­ers and the inves­ti­ga­tion of wrong­do­ing, would help com­plainants and also make com­pa­nies more account­able.”

Georgina Hal­ford-Hall is the CEO of Whistle­blow­er­sUK, a not-for-prof­it organ­i­sa­tion that pro­vides sup­port both for peo­ple who have blown the whis­tle and for those think­ing about act­ing on their con­science. She sees the new mis­con­duct report­ing plat­forms as “the bedrock of the infra­struc­ture that rev­o­lu­tionis­es whistle­blow­ing and dri­ves cul­tur­al change”.

Nonethe­less, she’s con­cerned that, while these sys­tems claim to pro­tect people’s anonymi­ty, it’s pos­si­ble for data-scrap­ing tools to iden­ti­fy com­plainants and so put them at risk of reprisals. 

“We reg­u­lar­ly hear from peo­ple whose con­fi­dence in an employer’s inter­nal report­ing sys­tem has been demol­ished because they have become tar­gets after that system’s fail­ure. Too many organ­i­sa­tions see a whistle­blow­er as a prob­lem to be rid of, rather than a val­ued asset,” Hal­ford-Hall says. “Report­ing plat­forms aren’t a sil­ver bul­let. They can­not solve the lega­cy issues [affect­ing how com­plainants are treat­ed] on their own.” 

But she adds that they do “have an impor­tant role in the future of whistle­blow­ing” in com­bi­na­tion with oth­er mea­sures, not­ing that her organ­i­sa­tion has called on the gov­ern­ment to cre­ate an inde­pen­dent body to ensure the fair treat­ment of com­plainants. The House of Lords is set to debate this rec­om­men­da­tion after a pri­vate member’s bill spon­sored by Baroness Susan Kramer in Jan­u­ary 2020 pro­posed the for­ma­tion of an Office of the Whistle­blow­er.  

Andrew Pep­per-Par­sons, head of pol­i­cy at whistle­blow­er sup­port organ­i­sa­tion Pro­tect Data, agrees with Hal­ford-Hall that inter­nal report­ing sys­tems will only be as effec­tive as the cul­ture of sup­port for com­plainants that the employ­er fos­ters.

“These report­ing apps do have a place,” he says. “But, if imple­ment­ing them is mere­ly ful­fill­ing a require­ment, that’s not going to work. This is not only about whether your com­pa­ny enables its employ­ees to raise con­cerns. It’s also about how you train man­agers to deal with those con­cerns, espe­cial­ly any that aren’t raised through closed sys­tems.”

While Mei­dav acknowl­edges that tech­nol­o­gy and cul­ture must work togeth­er for report­ing plat­forms to have the most ben­e­fi­cial effect, she adds that the abil­i­ty to receive com­plaint data in black and white gives com­pa­nies a sol­id foun­da­tion.

She points to the case of for­mer Face­book employ­ee Frances Hau­gen, who felt she had no option but to take her com­plaints about the company’s prac­tices to the US Secu­ri­ties and Exchange Com­mis­sion and The Wall Street Jour­nal last year. 

“If Face­book could have said: ‘We have giv­en our peo­ple the best tool out there to report any con­cerns to us,’ it would have put the com­pa­ny on a dif­fer­ent stand­ing,” Mei­dav argues. “We’ve dealt with so many exam­ples where that would have been the case. So com­pa­nies are almost tak­ing out a plat­form like Vault as an insur­ance pol­i­cy for them­selves.”