The Benefits of Whistleblowing

Whistleblowing has moved from being a taboo to a potentially important part of the organisational ethics toolkit. Now, it is central to a company's system of checks and balances and shields companies from numerous risks.

In this blog post, we will go through some of the reasons why every organisation, large or small, should have a whistleblowing system in place. We will also dive deeper into each one of them in later blog posts.

How Whistleblowing Increases Transparency and Accountability

A transparent and accountable work environment helps the company be more efficient by preventing illicit activities and undesirable behaviour. Whistleblowing helps in this by enabling the company to know of any misconduct or fraud well in time, and hence a proper action could resolve the issue before the damage becomes unfixable or gets publicly known in another way.

Foster a Speak-Up Culture

The company's whistleblowing mechanism encourages employees to speak up, resulting in a favourable workplace culture that promotes dedication, engagement, and performance. Employee happiness leads to a more pleasant working environment, higher performance as well as better customer service.

Provides Anonymity

A whistleblowing channel provides a confidential and optionally anonymous reporting channel that allows employees to draw attention to any issues that they feel are inappropriate for the workplace.  With a whistleblowing system enabling anonymity, the whistleblower does not need to be worried about reprisals for sharing the information and more reports can be made. According to a survey conducted by 2Secure, 1/3 would only sound the alarm if they were guaranteed anonymity.

Compliance Made Easy

With a whistleblowing system like Visslan’s, compliance is easy and the company can easily follow guidelines and whistleblowing legislation, not to mention GDPR. Through the system, it is also easy to stay in touch with the whistleblower, even if they choose to remain completely anonymous. All in all, the system makes handling each case more efficient and is dealt with sensitively, consistently, and correctly, not to mention advanced end-to-end encryption.

Whistleblowing Prevents Big Scandals

Whistleblowing is a very effective tool to combat fraud. According to ACFE (Association of Certified Fraud Examiners), fraud losses were 50% smaller at organisations with whistleblowing hotlines than those without, where the typical organisation loses 5% of its revenue to occupational fraud. It increases the trust of the employees and all organisations directly or indirectly linked to the company and is unique in that it allows anyone who has been in contact with the organisation, even external stakeholders, to raise a concern if they see something that they believe violates any laws or the company’s ethical values.

Increased Commitment Towards a Better Work Culture

Incorporating a whistleblowing system demonstrates the company's commitment to implementing its Code of Conduct and fostering a culture of compliance and the highest corporate ethics, which also plays a crucial role in attracting new talent and retaining existing employees.

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Whistleblowing is just not about being compliant with the new EU whistleblowing directive. It is much more than that. Application in large companies will surely lead to exciting outputs like supplementary contribution to quality control, but the mindset toward the implementation will determine the impact, something that Visslan is currently pioneering.

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