The news from the Ethics & Compliance Initiative (ECI) 2021 Global Business Ethics Survey (GBES) regarding whistleblower retaliation was disturbing at best. The GBES practically screamed out, “retaliation rates have skyrocketed”. The GBES has been tracking this key metric for almost 15 years and retaliation has been steadily increasing, with a jump from 22% in 2013 to 44% in 2017. In 2020, the rate of retaliation against employees for reporting wrongdoing in the US was 79% in 2020, an increase of 35 percentage points. As the GBES dryly notes, “If left unaddressed, high rates of retaliation can erode ethical culture and undermine efforts to encourage employees to speak up and raise concerns.” Retaliation was felt at all levels of an organization, with “top managers and middle managers driving much of this increase in recent years. Between 2013 and 2020, rates of retaliation among top managers and middle managers increased by 62 and 67 percentage points respectively. In contrast, retaliation rates among non-management employees increased by 24 percentage points.” Today we continue our blog post series on issues impacting the return to work in the post-Covid era.
These findings point towards a lack of psychological safety for employees to report issues for fear of retaliation, ostracization and abuse. Professor Amy Edmondson is one of the leading experts on this issue, having written the book The Fearless Organization: Creating Psychological Safety in the Workplace for Learning, Innovation, and Growth. She recently co-authored an article in HBR.org, entitled What Psychological Safety Looks Like in a Hybrid Workplace, with Mark Mortensen where they discussed this concept in the context of the post Covid-19 working environment. Their article had significant implications for the compliance professional on topics as focused as return to work and the larger issue of whistleblowers.
Laura Tulchin said that 2020 “is the year everything changed”. That is certainly correct about working, working environments and the working relationship. The authors noted, “sorting out future work arrangements, and attending to employees’ inevitable anxieties about those arrangements, will require managers to rethink and expand one of strongest proven predictors of team effectiveness: Psychological safety.” This is because many workers are not yet comfortable about returning to office locations while Coivd-19 is still ongoing. Yet others are enjoying the benefits of working from home or are required to so due to school aged children or infirm partners or parents. Still others may be suffering ancillary medical effects or even long term medical impact from Covid-19.
All of this ties into psychological safety in that “managers have traditionally focused on enabling candor and dissent with respect to work content. The problem is, as the boundary between work and life becomes increasingly blurry, managers must make staffing, scheduling, and coordination decisions that take into account employees’ personal circumstances — a categorically different domain.” In the pandemic, this boundary has been obliterated, as “having psychologically safe discussions around work-life balance issues is challenging because these topics are more likely to touch on deep-seated aspects of employees’ identity, values, and choices. This makes them both more personal and riskier from legal and ethical standpoints with respect to bias.”
The authors believe the situation is not simply “to demand greater disclosure of personal details” but rather to “create an environment that encourages employees to share aspects of their personal situations as relevant to their work scheduling or location and/or to trust employees to make the right choices for themselves and their families, balanced against the needs of their teams. Management’s responsibility is to expand the domain of which work-life issues are safe to raise. Psychological safety is needed today to enable productive conversations in new, challenging (and potentially fraught) territory.” Here the authors insight is to provide a roadmap for doing so. It also gives the compliance professional a way to think through enhancing a speak up culture at an organization.
Step 1: Set the scene. The initial step is to have a “discussion with your team to help them recognize not only their challenges, but yours as well. The objective of this discussion is to share ownership of the problem.” The authors suggest presenting the issue as a problem to develop “new ways to work effectively…As a group, you and your employees must come to recognize that everyone must be clear and transparent about the needs of the work and of the team and jointly own responsibility for succeeding, despite the many hurdles that lie ahead.”
Step 2: Lead the way. You have to not simply walk the walk but talk the talk. As a manager or leader “the best way to show you’re serious is to expose your own vulnerability by sharing your own WFH/hybrid work personal challenges and constraints. Remember, managers have to go first in taking these kinds of risks. Be vulnerable and humble about not having a clear plan and be open about how you’re thinking about managing your own challenges. If you’re not willing to be candid with your employees, why should you expect them to be candid with you?”
Step 3: Take baby steps. It will be a time consuming process but well worth it “to build trust, and even if you have a healthy culture of psychological safety established around work, remember that this is a new domain, and speaking up about buggy code is different than sharing struggles at home. Start by making small disclosures yourself, and then make sure to welcome others’ disclosures to help your employees build confidence that sharing is not penalized.”
Step 4: Share positive examples. It is always important to share some successes to help to move the process along. The authors suggest that you “Put your marketing hat on and market psychological safety by sharing your conviction that increased transparency is happening and is helping the team design new arrangements that serve both individual needs and organizational goals. The goal here isn’t to share information that was disclosed to you privately but rather to explain that disclosure has allowed you to collaboratively come up with solutions that were better not just for the team but also for the employees.”
Step 5: Be a watchdog. This is where the ECI findings on whistleblower retaliation are the most troubling, yet the most important. Building any trust in this area “takes time to build, but moments to destroy. The default is for people to hold back, to fail to share even their most relevant thoughts at work if they’re not sure they’ll be well received. When they do take the risk of speaking up, but get shot down or worse retaliated against, they — and everyone else — will be less likely to do it the next time.”
Building psychological safety and trust is an ongoing exercise. Every Compliance Officer needs to be a part of this to ensure both institutional justice and institutional fairness.
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