Whistleblowing articles and news

An online suggestion box is the digital version of the physical box of the past in which company employees could drop slips of paper with suggestions for improvements. These days, organizations may choose to implement an online version which brings with it a range of additional benefits.  What are the advantages of an online suggestion box?First and foremost, implementing an online suggestion box demonstrates that you are an open and transparent employer that values feedback from your employees.  The subsequent boost to employee morale can lead to an increased workforce retention rate, saving your company money in the long term. Did you know it costs an average of 6 months’ salary to replace a member of your team? In receiving feedback through a suggestion box, you may discover ways to make your processes more efficient, a lucrative new product or service, or unearth some deep-rooted dissatisfaction amongst your workforce.  You might even unearth a case of internal theft or company fraud, something which costs the average company 5% of their annual revenue. In providing a channel for staff to voice their concerns, you are able to keep these issues inside your company and avoid unwanted and negative media attention. For employees, an online suggestion box means that they have a clear means of making their voice heard when they witness wrongdoing or suspect it. Since an online suggestion box should always be anonymous (like FaceUp), they will also be protected against any potential retaliation or damage to their future career prospects. This is also beneficial to the company itself since it increases the likelihood of their employees using the system. Finally, introducing a suggestion box ensures that your organization remains compliant with the whistleblowing legislation in your particular territory (such the EU Whistleblowing Directive) as well as any standards or certifications which you follow. Read more about standards and certifications in our recent post. What functions should online suggestion box have?User-friendliness: Setting up and navigating the system is effortless, providing an intuitive user experience.Customizability: The software should be adaptable to align with your company's identity and branding. You should have the ability to incorporate elements such as your logo and corporate colors into forms and surveys.Anonymity: Employees or customers should have the option to submit suggestions and feedback anonymously. Notifications: The tool should send reminders to employees, ensuring consistent participation and maximizing the feedback you receive.Data and analysis: It enables swift organization and analysis of suggestions and feedback, offering visual data and analytics to inform your business decisions effectively.Easy Integration: Online suggestion box should be easily integrated through API with your company intranet, website, or app.How can I ensure my team uses a suggestion box?You can read in more detail about how to successfully implement a whistleblowing system or suggestion box in another of our recent blog posts, but it comes down essentially three key pillars: A clear communication plan so that your employees know that the suggestion box exists and are encouraged to use it.Training provision so employees are comfortable using the system, know when to use it and can get the most out of all the features it offers.Assigning roles, i.e. deciding which members of your company will be responsible for receiving suggestions and taking appropriate action.Which suggestion box should I choose?Which suggestion box should I choose?There are a host of online suggestion box solutions online. Here at FaceUp, we believe that our whistleblowing platform serves perfectly as a suggestion box, thanks to features such as anonymous reporting, follow-up two-way communication, voice messaging, intuitive user design, and high level of data security.  FaceUp is GDPR compliant, ISO 27001 certified and offers E2E encryption and 2FA. FaceUp can easily be integrated with your company intranet, website, or app through API. If you would like to give FaceUp a try, you can do so with a free 14-day trial.  Are you looking for the suggestion box?For a reasonably priced, feature-rich system with the highest level of security and usability, why not give FaceUp a try? Book a consultation with our specialist today.

FaceUp whistleblowing system recently received an esteemed industry award from a leading B2B review platform, proving the brand’s top-of-the-line and superior performance as a compliance management software.  FinancesOnline, one of the most respected software review platforms today, presented FaceUp whistleblowing system with a Rising Star Award, recognizing our brand’s rising user base and fast-growing popularity. The award is given to considerably new software products that have gained market validation over a brief period.  Among other parameters, FinancesOnline examined the substantial volume of positive comments and social mentions on our platform as a mark of user satisfaction. The FinancesOnline software reviewers also authored a comprehensive FaceUp review and concluded that it exhibits robust features to help business leaders succeed. They also evaluated our support agents and found our staff knowledgeable and responsive.   The software reviewers acknowledged our product’s usability and comprehensiveness in their assessment. Among the FaceUp features they highlighted are its intuitive interface, report form, and management.  Their report mentioned how the software’s intuitive interface allows companies to set up their account structure according to their sections or departments and add members. In addition, it lets users add their members to specific reporting categories. The reviewers also noted how the platform enables organizations to generate a unique access code that employees or students can sign into. If you’re facing a more sensitive case, such as psychological or corruption issues, you can delegate those to external specialists. However, they can only access information related to the concern.  Besides these functions, the expert reviewers lauded the report form feature, which offers an anonymous option. It guarantees anonymity for students or employees who want to report a problem and lets them reveal their identity if they want to. In addition, anyone who wishes to bring up an issue can send their reports through forms or voice messages with attachments. Furthermore, they don’t have to worry since the platform conforms with the whistleblower protection laws and the General Data Protection Regulation. In addition, the report management feature enables two-way communication with the individual reporting a concern. This will let the person handling the case verify with the whistleblower any further details they need. In case they receive manual documents, they can add them to the tool and record all reports.  A recent study forecasts the global compliance management software market to reach $74.8 billion by the year 2028. That’s a compound annual growth rate of 10.9% from the year 2021. With the demand for the solution increasing, it’s no surprise that FaceUp, with its cutting-edge capabilities, is becoming one of the most reliable compliance management software.  All these features are what review platforms seek in their list of top compliance management software today. FaceUp would like to thank FinancesOnline for acknowledging our dedicated efforts. Receiving recognition from reputable organizations such as this one drives us to do even better at delivering premium compliance management solutions.  We also would like to thank the devoted teams who have trusted us with their compliance management needs. Rest assured that we will keep on delivering trustworthy services and develop more features in the future so you can enhance your total experience and fulfillment with our platform. We look forward to more decades of collaboration with you and supporting you to maximize your team management efforts.

We love hearing from our clients about how the introduction of FaceUp whistleblowing system has worked well and how it’s helping them improve their company culture. We are often asked how FaceUp works in practice, so we’ve asked some of our clients about their specific experiences. SPORTISIMOSport equipment retailer SPORTISIMO has more than 200 stores across 5 countries and employs over 4,000 people. The company’s management assumed that they wouldn't receive especially serious reports. After a year of using our platform, the reality is that their reports don’t reference fraud or serious problems, but instead contain suggestions or requests which have proven to be worth addressing: “For example, someone asked if we might be able to change the music that plays in our stores more frequently. Another employee asked why we don’t have a women’s version of a popular type of men’s size 42 shoes. At first glance, they may appear to be rather mundane issues which management don’t see due to their professional blindness, but addressing these things leads to a happier workforce,” explains Thomas Rodney. SPORTISIMO receives an average of 15 reports per month and many of them are ideas of how to improve things from employees who are too shy to speak up in person.  Brno-Centre Municipal OfficeThe introduction of FaceUp was also extremely important for the Brno-Centre Municipal Office. Their management were concerned that the option to send reports anonymously would result in slander. However, this didn’t materialise. Thanks to FaceUp, their management learnt of a case of long-term bullying in the workplace and were able to successfully resolve the issue. A slightly unexpected albeit useful dimension that FaceUp gave us was in the area of labour relations. We received several anonymous reports from employees about bullying. After an investigation, we terminated our working relationship with one of the heads of a large department of the Brno-Centre Municipal Office and in another case we placed several employees under different leadership. This then led to increased overall productivity in this office,” describes Peter Stika, secretary at the Brno-Centre Municipal Office.  ADvTechADvTECH is South Africa’s largest private education provider. All of ADvTECH’s 7 580 staff members, teachers, lecturers and students between Grades 4 and 12 at its 96 schools throughout South Africa has access to the app. "Using FaceUp, reports that have come through have been resolved far more efficiently than any other platform or method we have used in the past. Another advantage is that reporters can track what is happening with their report and the status of any investigations that are taking place. Our experience has been excellent, " says Vanessa Crawford, HR Manager at ADvTech. AKKAIndustrial company AKKA produces tools, systems and components for the automobile, railway and aviation industries. They decided to implement FaceUp to be able to communicate better with their employees and get feedback from them: “It was about connecting management with workers. We used to hold regular meetings, but no one raised anything. Now, before each event we invite employees to use FaceUp to tell us what’s on their mind. People really do send in questions which gives us a point of discussion for the meetings.” Vitkovice Steel Vitkovice Steel is a steel company which operates out of the Vitkovice ironworks in Ostrava and employs 900 people. After introducing a whistleblowing platform, their employees started sending around 5-7 reports a month. The reports were mainly generic queries or people seeking reassurance. For example, employees checked if they had correctly understood management communications. FaceUp is helping to improve their company culture - just after they introduced the platform, 70% of people wrote reports anonymously, now that’s down to just 30%. Employees have understood that they really can ask anything and are no longer scared to write under their own name. What are companies generally facing? According to our clients, these are the issues most commonly shared by their employees through FaceUp in recent years: When war broke out in Ukraine, many employees started to worry for the future of the company and their own work position. When companies go through a restructuring (for example, after an acquisition), employees asked about new processes, flagged points of confusion, and expressed their concerns for the future. The Covid-19 pandemic brought with it a wide range of measures and regulations which companies had to communicate to their employees. Employees then asked about regulations details or checked if they had understood the information correctly. Do you need advice on how to effectively introduce a whistleblowing platform? 

Whistleblowers – who are they, and why will we hear more about them this year? A whistleblower, in its literal sense, is the one who blows the whistle. Not at a football match, but in a situation where they witness real-life unfair practices. Either as an employee, a customer, or a supplier. It can often concern corruption, but it can also be in situations where someone’s health or the environment is at risk. Whether ignorance, corruption, or something else leading to bad decisions resulting in accidents, damage to health and the environment, or even misappropriation of public finances. But whistleblowers don’t wait around the corner to catch someone in the act. It can be someone who accidentally witnessed injustice, and is struggling to decide, whether to come out with the truth or keep everything to themselves. Usually, the first ones to find out about such slips are employees who notice iniquities during their work that could cause difficulties for their employer or management, or stumble across information that suggests possible harm or threat to the public interest. Therefore, by reporting the wrongdoings, the whistleblower can protect the public interest. Unfortunately, this often puts both the professional and personal life of the whistleblower at risk. This fear of retaliation also becomes the main reason why people are afraid to report unfair practices. The general approach to protecting whistleblowers varies significantly in different jurisdictions. In France, for example, there is very little specific statutory protection for whistleblowers. However, the French National Commission for Data Protection and Liberties (Commission nationale de l’informatique et des libertés) (CNIL) imposes a duty to protect those who make a complaint.  However, some jurisdictions have a unified approach to whistleblower protection. In Japan and the UK, for instance, a single law provides protection for whistleblowers in both the private and public sectors and covers complaints related to a broad range of misconduct. Protection for whistleblowers in other jurisdictions such as the US is set out in various sources, including: federal and state law and statutory and common law. European Union Directive 2019/1937 on the protection of whistleblowers came into force on 16 December 2019. EU member states now have until 2021 to incorporate the directive into their own national laws. FaceUp aims to be the tool that will help companies with adjusting to the whistleblowing protection law. It aims to ensure law compliance to the employer and offer support for employees, who can feel safe if they ever need to ‘blow the whistle’ to help uncover unfair practices at work or more.