WHAT COMES FIRST – SPEAKING UP OR CULTURE?
Employees should be encouraged to speak up and use their voices to support their organisation’s values and do the right thing. But we need to recognise that speaking up can often be a difficult, uncomfortable and isolating experience. There are plenty of well-known examples of people suffering terrible consequences for speaking up.
If employees experience and view an ethics and compliance programme as being unapproachable and unsupportive, we should not be surprised if they are either not reporting concerns or only doing so anonymously due to fear of how they will be treated by the organisation and their fellow employees.
Many organisations talk about having, or wanting to have, a ‘speak-up culture’ – the idea being that if we can somehow get people to speak up, then that will create a self-perpetuating speak-up culture. While the intentions behind promoting a speak-up culture are often good, the reality is that this approach puts the burden on individuals to drive culture.
We need to move past the focus on having a ‘speak-up culture’ and instead see that speaking up is the outcome of organisational culture. When organisations demonstrate genuine care for employees, they help to create trust and the psychological safety needed to help employees feel more comfortable speaking up.
Speaking up is often the right thing to do, but it is not necessarily easy or comfortable. Employees might be worried about whether they will be believed or if anything will be done. They might be worried that their concerns are inaccurate or that speaking up will cause someone else to get in trouble. They might feel that they are demonstrating a lack of loyalty to their fellow employees or that they are not being ‘a team player’ if they speak up about what others are doing.
Oct-Dec 2024 Issue
Society of Corporate Compliance and Ethics & Health Care Compliance Association