Scott Bridgen, Hotline Sales Manager at Expolink, will be presenting a seminar on Whistleblowing as an External Service at the Smaller Government Bodies HIA Forum on 15th July IN Southampton.
The forum is hosted by Ordnance Survey Risk & Assurance and provides a comprehensive symposium on corporate governance in modern business. Scott will be talking about common misconceptions and myths surrounding whistleblowing in the workplace, how to position whistleblowing and the importance of effective communication within an organisation – making whistleblowing work.
Other speakers include Geoff Jennings of the National Anti-Fraud Network, Mike Doughty, Head of Internal Audit at Natural England and Alan Kenah and Ian Grant of Dstl.
We invited Tony Kelly, Group Head of Health and Safety at IPF, to air his views on international safety operations and its associated challenges faced and ethical business practice.
With regard to safety, since the company was established what major changes have you noticed in the home credit loan market and the business culture surrounding it?
Like any business where the majority of its workforce is operating in the street and customers’ homes, the challenges faced by our people change according to societal shifts. The business has only been operating for four years as an independent entity so in terms of witnessing social change I think differences are slight.
From the start, IPF made a commitment to providing a safe workplace for all of its people and that has never changed. What we have done is spend time looking at safety management models from world-class organisations and determining how we can modify existing best practice to match our needs as well as building on our own best practices. IPF prides itself on Corporate Social Responsibilty and ethical business practices and safety is an integral part of that.
As Europe becomes more integrated, working practices change fast and often affect more than one country at a time. How to you keep abreast of what affects you and your company?
There is a head of safety in every market in which we operate and I am in the head office. We work as a global team sharing developments and practices. Each of us monitors the local law along with our company lawyers and corporate insurance companies.
That’s quite a network, so changes such as Romania’s adoption of EU standards earlier this year, become known to us all very quickly. I have tried hard to foster a team ethos of constant communication using any and every method from SMS messages to video conferencing and quarterly workshops. In fact we are exploring opportunities to use our own accident incident management database, built on technology supplied by Expolink, as a type of sharepoint for safety. Not least we are a team of global travellers (I am on first name terms with KLM cabin crew!!!) so word spreads very quickly.
What health and safety challenges do you find the most prevalent when the organisation is looking to open offices in a new country?
In every walk of life there is a tendency to fall into two traps; the first being that whatever happens in our own lives is unique to us and second is the assumption that because we don’t know about something then we presume it doesn’t exist. In terms of safety, those false assumptions could lead someone to believe that a new market won’t have safety laws equivalent to UK standards simply because in other respects the country seems less developed than our own.
In fact most, countries have very similar safety laws by virtue of being members (or aspiring to be members) of international quasi-states such as the EU or by establishing government targets to render economies sustainable as in Abu Dhabi or China. And of course providing safety to people is only humanitarian ethics in the final analysis and that is a worldwide trait; no decent person would ever wish harm on another, immaterial of where they live.
The challenge therefore is to make sure you get a copy of the local safety law in a language you can read and then do a thorough comparison to international standards such as OHSAS 18001 to establish some ground-truth.
With such a large and diverse workforce what impact, if any, do you think the UK Bribery Act will have on your organisation?
Wow that’s a question not normally asked of a safety practitioner! What I can tell you is that we already have a Code of Ethics and policies and procedures aimed at preventing bribery and corruption. With no complacency at all, we are confident that we do not have a problem with corruption in our business.
The Bribery Act will, perhaps, make people think a little harder about their conduct and will also provide us with an opportunity to revisit our current policies and procedures. We will also carry out further risk assessments and take the opportunity to ensure that our workforce’s knowledge and awareness of bribery and corruption is as good as we would want it to be.
With countries that have different HR and operational practices to the UK, what are the biggest risks to the workforce and how do you best assess and manage these?
As previously mentioned, the differences are generally pretty subtle in corporate practice. We are a global company with global standards so working conditions for our own people are pretty uniform across the group. We are rolling out global training and education schemes so wherever you are you will have had the same core skills delivered to you. The market heads of safety and their teams work to localise elements to face particular risks. Often these reflect nothing more complicated than the environment or climate.
Poland is pretty chilly in winter but in Mexico snow is something largely seen only in films, so we tailor our safety skills and communications to the target audience. We assess environmental risks at a micro-scale right down to the patch of ground covered by an individual sales agent and then these are used to form risk maps at every successive layer right through the whole group. To understand this concept, consider your own neighbourhood. Where I live is an inner city pedestrianised area with high-rise apartment blocks, lots of bars, a canal and fancy marble flooring. Where I used to live was rural with a major road of fast-moving traffic nearby. The risks associated with living and working in those two areas are clearly massively different. We then map those and build layers of what I call risk pixels into a picture for a country showing the hotspots and safer areas. We monitor and review these risk maps regularly and that’s a useful tool for educating new workers and for looking at the risks for any business expansions. I believe vehemently that risks are best assessed by those that face them and, with intelligent guidance, it is local workers who generate the best mitigation plans.
So I don’t see a single biggest risk across the group; I see single biggest risks for each neighbourhood and worker. In terms of operational practices, nobody in their right mind ever looks to get hurt and one of the things I’ve learned from thirty years of working around the world is that people are the same everywhere; they just need to be shown a better way and they will quickly adopt it. We work as a global team sharing good practice which we introduce wherever we find a gap, so homogenising operational practices is not as hard as you imagine.
How do you encourage best ethical business practice internationally?
Achieving this is like pushing on an open door. I’ve worked in all sorts of places from Afghanistan to Norway and superficially you couldn’t imagine two different places. What I have learned is that the fundamentals of ethical and social mores are the same the whole world over. We capitalise on that by showing people the positive benefits of striving for the highest ethical standards that can be achieved.
Engagement, morale, operational effectiveness and well-being all grow when a business unit is run ethically and well and that’s quickly spotted by anyone who sees a standard higher than their own. That’s our business ethic, so therefore it’s our business case for insisting our ethical standards are global, internally. Of course, as I have described, the law ain’t so very different anywhere and that provides our legal argument for insisting on compliance.
Externally, we run Corporate Social Responsibility programmes in every market in which we operate and our in-house safety mentors (like a Six-Sigma Green belt but for safety) and full time practitioners are often at the forefront of them. They can vary from helping children’s homes to education programmes at colleges and schools, all to spread the concept of ethical practice and safe working wherever we are operating.
By deciding to use a whistleblowing service at your organisation you have already identified yourselves as responsible employers who want to protect your colleagues and your business. You have made the decision to promote a culture of free speech, compliance and intolerance of corrupt and immoral activity amongst your co-workers and business subsidiaries, which is to be commended and should be promoted.
Since you joined partnership with Expolink can you be unequivocally certain that your whistleblowing service is being thoroughly and holistically communicated throughout your organisation? If the information and service procedures are buried under laborious and text-heavy HR and policy documentation, chances are your employees aren’t going to find it when they really need to access the service.
We know that you are busy people, so we have compiled a check list to help you ensure you are optimising your whistleblowing hotline service and that information is percolated throughout your organisation.
If you are unsure of awareness amongst your staff a simple survey can assure you. Are they aware that the service is confidential, 24 hour and there to protect them and not just your business? Expolink’s Whistleblowing Hotline must be communicated as a truly positive service for your colleagues. The information you provide should be concise and succinct in its first instance with plenty of opportunity for colleagues to find out more about the service.
They should understand that the hotline is there to protect them and that they can use the service to help maintain a culture of ethics and accountability in their workplace.
As your trusted partner we are more than happy to help if you have any further questions or would like to discuss re-marketing the service for the benefit of your employees and your business – so please feel free to contact us. After all if they don’t know about the service they won’t make contact and you could lose vital information.
Whistleblowing does not enjoy the high profile in Hungary that it has in the US, the UK or elsewhere in Europe. There is no concise translation in the vernacular and the practice rarely receives attention in the media. There is a historical context to this reticence. Hungary, like many of its neighbors, was governed for much of the 20th century by authoritarian regimes and dictatorships – thus the concern that reporting corrupt activity could end very badly for the citizen(s) concerned. However, recent proposed developments in the country’s legislation have brought Hungary and its constitution, to the public’s attention.
On April 1st 2010 a new whistleblowing regulation, the Act on the Protection of Fair Procedures, was ratified enabling whistleblowers to safely report on issues that may provoke public concern. This was supported by the initiation of the Public Interest Protection Office, whose remit was to handle incidents arising from the Act. This met with contention from opposition parties and the Office doors were never opened. The Protection of Fair Procedures Act is now solitary in its stance against the protection of whistleblowers and indubitably weakened by the lack of an office to facilitate the law. The initiatives were part of a wider anti-corruption strategy which faltered after a change in government to the centre-right Fidesz Party in May 2010, intended to strengthen the existing constitution rather than introduce new legislation.
As it stands, the Hungarian Labour Code does not offer employees recommended avenues for whistleblowing but more general information regarding how to behave when exposed to corruption or wrong-doing in the work place. Disregarding externally imposed legislation (such as the United Nations Convention against Corruption) there are only intermittent mentions of whistleblower protective policy throughout Hungarian Law. Regulations are outlined in the Act on the Protection of Fair Procedures aiming to ensure that the whistleblower is protected across economic, legal and personal spheres. Provided the information has been submitted to a regulating body named by the employer, the whistleblower enjoys full confidentiality of personal data and is kept informed throughout the lifecycle of the investigation.
Despite this lack of coherency, a study carried out in 2007 by Price Waterhouse Coopers suggested that whistleblowing has been highly beneficial to Hungary in reporting economic crime and in fraud detection. Another study by Gallup showed that while most citizens surveyed were happy to report corruption, most did not know how this would be best achieved. For those not willing to do so, the main reasons were fear of reprisal or fear of the police (who were listed as the only option for referral). A further justification was that the interviewee felt the incident did not merit reporting.
The value of this data is diminished by the police-only option for referral and that the survey did not make the distinction between reporting in and out of the workplace, and whether the interviewee was using a private or public sector context. However, the survey does highlight the discrepancies and lack of understanding of the whistleblowing and corporate governance culture in Hungary. Holistically, the Act and overall approach to whistleblowing rests on shaky ground.
When it comes to global business, the Hungarian data protection authority has adopted the stance that it is illegal for domestic whistleblowers to make reports directly to the international parent company (considered to be a third party) rather than for the matter to be reported to the Hungarian employer. The control of data therefore rests with the Hungarian employer; the option to retain the assistance of the parent company in processing the report remains.
Currently the Hungarian Government is facing a humiliating review by the European Commission regarding changes in its media laws. This embarrassment is felt even more keenly by president, Viktor Orbán who is coming to the end of a six month presidency of the EU. Neighbour states are challenging proposed changes to media laws that activists fear could subjugate free press and create a public information culture that panders to the Government. Under new laws if national security is considered ‘at risk’, a journalist protecting a source (or associated data) can be fined up to €661,000, and a press provider fined €180,000. If media agenda marches to Orban’s drum then what truly defines national security is surely subject to Government bias.
Orbán recently stated that his government is willing to review these laws at the request of his neighbours. Perhaps his stated original intention of strengthening and integrating Hungary’s existing constitutions holistically could herald a greater institutional sea-change to whistleblowing and corporate governance for his country.
Sources
http://www.whistleblowing-cee.org/countries/hungary/research/#14
http://www.edri.org/edrigram/number9.2/hungary-media-legislation-2010
