The Whistleblowing Guide

CHAPTER 5Speak‐up Procedures: A Guide for Professionals

In this chapter, we present a practical guide for professionals that is based on our analysis of relevant theories as well as our empirical research. In our empirical analysis, the key issues that emerged were ethical culture, trust building, effective communication and the importance of employee voice. In our analysis of the extant literature, we identified several key theories that can be linked together to create a framework for practical use (see Appendix for summary of key theories and how they link). The recommendations that follow are derived from this framework, and represent a novel way of understanding speak‐up arrangements.

(The following, with some minor updates, is taken with permission from Vandekerckhove et al. (2016), Designing and Implementing Effective Speak‐up Arrangements. Report to ACCA, developed from the research project Effective speak‐up Arrangements for Whistle‐blowers, which was carried out between September 2015 and June 2016 and funded by ACCA and ESRC.)

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

This chapter is meant to serve as a practical guide on how to design and implement effective speak‐up arrangements. It is based on a synthesis of best practice from our comparative research presented in Chapter 3, which included a healthcare organization (an NHS Trust in the UK), a multinational bank, and a multinational engineering company; and an extensive analysis of existing literature. In addition, supplementary empirical ...