What is a Whistleblowing Policy?
A whistleblowing policy helps to provide an avenue where employees or suppliers can report potentially fraudulent, unethical or illegal acts committed by their colleagues or associates. It usually also provides a commitment by the Company to protect and prevent any reprisals against the person submitting the complaints from any unfair reprisals from the person they are complaining against.
An important feature of the programme is that complaints can be submitted anonymously. This helps to encourage employees to step forward to submit complaints in case they are afraid that that they might still face a backlash from the persons they are complaining against especially if the subject is their superior.
Is a whistleblowing policy necessary?
If employees observe any potential malpractices, can't they just report the matter to Human Resources or their bosses? They can and most do but challenges arise when the person they wish to complain about is the HR manager. Or perhaps they see the HR manager and the Finance manager having lunch every other day and they are afraid that if they submit a complaint on the finance manager to the HR manager, they might be sacked the next moment after the HR manager whispers the complaint to the Finance manager.
Whistleblowing programme will designate independent personnel to receive complaints. These personnel should not have executive functions in the Company so the likelihood that complaints are made against them is very low. They also need to be of a suitable seniority in the organisation so that they are in a position to take necessary actions even if the complaint is about the CEO.
Whistleblowing complaints can be made even if there is no concrete evidence of wrongdoing. For example, if the CCTV captures footage of an employee shifting inventory out of the warehouse without any authorisation, a police report can be made immediately to call out the culprit. But if an employee notices something always missing after the same supervisor does night shifts, he can lodge a whistleblowing complaint with his observations and the whistleblowing panel will then decide what actions to take if any.
Benefits of having a robust whistleblowing programme
In the above example, if the Company has a proper whistleblowing programme, the employee might submit a complaint through the reporting channels and he can be quite confident that proper actions will be taken.
Without a whistleblowing programme, the employee might not choose to do anything at all since he has no evidence of wrongdoing or if the matter irks him badly enough, he might go direct to relevant authorities, for example, the stock exchange if the company is listed or the Charity Commission if the organisation is registered as a charity.
From the organisation perspective, both options outside of the whistleblowing programme would not be beneficial to them. Facilitating an easy and accessible way of submitting a complaint will help to channel all potential complaints to the company directly instead of through regulators or external parties. The programme need to convince complainants that they are submitting to an appropriately independent and senior person who will address the matter responsibly, that their complaint will be kept confidential and that they do not have to worry about their jobs even if subsequent investigations proves their complaint unfounded as long as their complaint is made in good faith.
Your easiest route to implementing a whistleblowing programme!
whistleblowingcomplaints.com.com provides you with a whistleblowing platform that is easy to set up and you can link it to your company website. The full system is plug and play after you have submitted your corporate details and contact parties. As the system is hosted by us, you never have to worry about scalability or hardware costs.
We have different delivery options including through an encrypted database so that even if some manage to gain unauthorised access to the database, they will not be able to read what is stored in the database.
Turnkey project
We can also help you to deploy the application in your corporate network. This helps to keep the system restricted to your employees and for you to control the security of the system and data. Just email us and we can send the instructions and process to install the application.
We can also help to customise the application based on your specific needs and whistleblowing process. Just email us your requirements and we can revert on the time we will need to complete the customed processes.
