4 key challenges to a psychologically safe 'speak up' culture

Safety, Health, & Wellbeing Live 2023

In late September, Peter Jenkins (Lead Facilitator at Simple Foundry) was invited to speak at the Safety, Health, & Wellbeing Live 2023 conference.

In this conference, Peter was invited to the panel of the session: IOSH - Breaking Down Barriers to Encourage a Speak Up Culture. This session focused on the key elements of whistleblowing, and creating a psychologically safe working environment.

Psychological safety is crucial for teams, as it fosters a shared belief that interpersonal risk-taking is safe and mistakes won’t be punished. It also plays a vital role in encouraging individuals to speak up, while its absence can create fear of reporting incidents due to potential consequences. This panel discussion gives insight into how to reduce fear and stigma around speaking up and protecting individuals from retaliation.

For the session, Peter joined:

• Lawrence Webb - IOSH President & Conference Chair
• Andrew Pepper-Parsons - Director of Policy at Protect Charity
• Tina Russell - Professional Conduct & Ethics Lead at CIPD

Creating a psychologically safe environment can be extremely challenging across the globe.

• An estimated 7,500 people (globally) still die from unsafe and unhealthy working conditions every day
• According to the World Economic Forum, 85 million jobs are at risk of being displaced by technology (but 97 million new roles could be created by 2025 thanks to technological advances)
• Only 31% of workers knew how to raise a whistleblowing concern at work (YouGov, 2021)
• From April 2022 to March 2023, the HSE received 2916 concerns (that presented a significant risk) raised by potential whistleblowers, and followed up on 2514 of them.

In light of a lack of information, significant safety & health challenges, fears over automation, and a broadly helpful regulator. The panel sought to answer some key questions on whistleblowing:

What are the challenges and risks involved when working in a culture that actually doesn’t encourage open communication and nurture a speak-up culture?

When we say 'culture' it's easy to think of safety culture, but we should be considering 'business culture', not making whistleblowing a part of safety culture that sits outside of this.

Not reconciling business & safety culture can lead to 'us vs them', or potentially a perceived culture of 'finger wagging' and 'do as I say, not as I do', which can hit our 'value on investment' (productivity, resilience, retention & success) at best or compliance ('someone else will raise or sort this') at worst.

Consider business risk management and risk assessments; in the former, we might find our business teams, individuals, or actions/outcomes are illegal, unprofitable, or out-of-step with our values. In risk assessments, we may be unsafe, be that through connivance, consent, or neglect.

Without a robust speak-up culture, with proper communication, our risks can be much higher across and throughout our business.

The effects on staff can be critical. Who wants to work somewhere that they aren't appreciated? In workplaces that don't promote or encourage open communication:

• turnover can be higher,
• productivity can be lower,
• resilience of teams can be shot

What would you say are best practices for creating policies that encourage whistleblowing while also protecting the rights of all parties involved?

‍Go back to basics: Have you established business culture values, vision, and objectives that take into account human capital and the outcomes you want to achieve? Or have you integrated a Safety 'mission' into your business?

When I joined an 18-site business in accelerated growth (primarily through acquisition), who needed an inhouse safety function establishing. I championed a simple mission:

“Inspire people to ask good questions, empower people to make good decisions”

This manifested itself through:

• Completing very forward-facing, regular, in-person set of face-to-face visits,
• Establishing world-class automated (and anonymous, where required) digital report submissions

What preventative measures, over time, would you advise that can stop the build-up of toxic working environments?

‍Before preventative measures, consider your approach to solutions and change management; think in frameworks rather than focusing on the 'nitty gritty'. Two spring to mind:

• Organisational architecture - the mapping of: Culture, Strategic Direction, Core Processes, Skills Bases, and Structure.
• OST(T) - Objective, Strategy, Tactics, (Tasks). Create a framework to deliver and track your actions before you jump into the detail, and see how everything builds up.

Breaking down OST(T) through an example:

• Objective - Reduce number of employees stating (I find the workplace toxic) by 10% YoY from 2023-2024
• Strategy - Senior Leader Development; Visible leadership (Transparent 'You Said, We Did')
• Tactics (Senior leader development) - Core & behavioural skills multiskilling, Internal & External mentoring, Embedded 360-feedback
• Tasks - Established a standardised training needs analysis, complete 'Insights' personality mapping, undertake a facilitated mentoring plan, establish a 360 feedback framework

Consider your biases - Critically self-reflect to ensure 'emotionally-intelligent objectivity' is baked into your processes. This might mean focusing on developing positive traits in your teams, such as:

• Empathy,
• Active listening,
• Conflict resolution,
• Emotional intelligence

What about measuring or even validating the outcomes of whistleblowing? Does this exist? Is there a way to measure this?

Whistleblowing is sometimes seen as a 'failure' - the other systems in place for reporting and escalation have 'failed', and Whistleblowing is the 'last resort'.

Set the expectations of your Executive team and Senior leadership team on what Whistleblowing represents in your organisation, before working out measuring or validation.

Measuring outcomes - requires robust outcomes underpinned by a supportive investigation process to be defined first. I.e. are your outcomes the reports, or are they the actions? How does your investigation process support this?

• If they are the latter, how do you want to thematically segment them? Do you want them to link them to your business values?
• Is your whistleblowing service designed to engage in a feedback cycle? I.e. do you openly share the whistleblowing report findings with your staff and elicit feedback on the actions, completing semi-quantitive analysis on the perceptions of the decisions?

How can Simple Foundry help?

Through our solutions, we can support you and your business in creating simple but effective surveys and quizzes, which will seek to identify the sentiment of staff in your business. These survey responses can be automatically added to an Excel tracker, and flag any critical issues that might arise. We can also help you in creating custom email responses that are on-brand, and also link to any other internal or external campaigns (or support/employee assistance programmes) you are undertaking.

We can also support you with a fully automated (anonymous - if required, and GDPR friendly) whistleblowing process, starting from a Microsoft Form, with automatic escalation and approval gateways between one or more managers, including full investigation team approval prior to the next gate of the process being unlocked. This can be supported by a dedicated and 'protected' Teams 'team', which can be used to automatically document and save associated correspondence, based on a subject line entry.

Reach out to us through our contact form for further information, we'd be more than happy to help where we can.