James Ritchie | With the treatment of Richard Boyle, Julian Assange, it's any wonder anyone speaks out

Whistleblowers play a crucial role in organisations and the wider community, and we must create safe environments for people to speak up on matters of public interest and unethical or unlawful behaviour or conduct in both government agencies and businesses.

What's needed is more effective frameworks to encourage positive and constructive cultures for whistleblowing or "speaking out" as I prefer to call it, in organisations. Additionally, there must be real protections for those who come forward.

Asking someone to speak up in the workplace strikes fear into the heart of most people, and when you consider the experience of Richard Boyle, or high-profile whistleblowers like Edward Snowden and Julian Assange, it's a surprise that anyone ever comes forward.

More commonly, people will resign and get another job elsewhere leaving a festering seed ready to blossom into a scandal.

Making the situation even worse is that most organisations have complex and time-consuming processes whistleblowers are required to follow to even raise an issue, involving outsourced reporting lines or phone numbers that go unanswered.

So, we create fear and combine it with a complex process with little clarity of outcome or confidence in protection and we also wrap complex legislative jargon around the whole situation and over-emphasise the downside risk to the whistleblower. Needless to say, the few who do usually have something pretty significant to report.

In this new era, where the principles of Environment, Social, and Governance (ESG) are no longer just words, and diversity means more than numbers and quotas, whistleblowing can and should be used as a proactive risk management tool to maintain trust in the organisation and create a competitive advantage.

But how could whistleblowing act as a competitive advantage?

Speaking out allows an organisation to identify potential issues before they become scandals which is the essence of proactive risk management and creating a culture in an organisation that values transparency and ethical decision-making is the reputation protection superpower many organisations don't realise they have.

In the current environment of low public trust, reputation is a very valuable commodity, for organisations of any size.

Having transparent whistleblowing protocols and an actionable framework for staff, can help an organisation demonstrate real ESG credentials to stakeholders.

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One way for an organisation to start the journey is to create a speaking out framework based on a real understanding of the way humans make decisions. So, how might this broadly look?

It's easy to understand - Which means the process shouldn't require a PhD to interpret and should be accessible to the most junior person in the organisation, including specifying the types of things they should speak out about.

It's communicated by leaders - which means the people in leadership roles in the organisation need to be seen to be communicating the process, including its intent, reporting lines and process for responding to disclosures.

It's both contemporary and compliant - A framework should be directly linked to the organisation's vision and values. This shows an organisation has a commitment to speaking out, not only because it's required by legislation but because the organisation is committed to a contemporary and ethical culture.

There's a Dutch proverb that says: "trust arrives on a tortoise and leaves on horseback" and for anyone that's witnessed the fallout from the PwC scandal or the Qantas brand's dramatic fall from grace, it's clear as society's expectations evolve in relation to large institutions and government, preventing the next scandal from ever occurring, should be a very high priority.

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