In a survey carried out by VinciWorks, a staggering 50% of respondents said they weren’t confident their organisation would deal with a report of sexual harassment very seriously. And worse, 10% of respondents said that they had been shown sexually explicit or inappropriate content at work. The results of this survey and others evidence that in an environment where harassment is tolerated and complaints ignored, abuse will thrive. Sadly, a study by the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission critically shows that 75% of victims don’t report abuse because they fear retaliation, whilst 75% of victims who did report abuse experienced retaliation.

Whistleblowing regulations in the UK

The current legislative framework governing whistleblowing in the UK was introduced by the Public Interest Disclosure Act (PIDA), which has been in force for some 20 years. PIDA amended the Employment Rights Act and its aim was to protect workers who blow the whistle not only for personal gain, but also for public interest.

PIDA clearly states that the dismissal of an employee for whistleblowing is automatically considered to be unfair if the reason, or the main reason, for their dismissal was that they made a “protected disclosure”.

VinciWorks’ whistleblowing portal

The Omnitrack whistleblowing portal is VinciWorks’ solution to allowing staff to easily and anonymously raise concerns of any inappropriate behaviour. This includes reporting harassment, discriminatory behaviour, suspiscious financial activity and more. The portal then instantly notifies appropriate managers that a report has been made, enabling them to record the report and immediately take the right course of action, widening a responsive culture and mitigating the risk and damage.

How does the whistleblowing portal work?

Simple to setup and deploy, the whistleblowing portal allows anyone in your organisation to immediately, easily and securely report inappropriate,  unethical or illegal behaviour such as bullying, sexual harassment or financial misconduct.

Whistleblowing portal features

Create and customise forms

A form is made public to all employees and contains the appropriate fields for whistleblowing. If there are any additional fields that should be added, this can be done directly by the admin. The form can also be embedded into sexual harassment training as well as on the company intranet or website.

Inbox

Form submissions are then passed to the inbox where the system administrators can review the forms, add them to a central register and decide on appropriate courses of action and any necessary prevantative measures that need to be implemented.

Flag reports that require further action

Flag concerning reports until they have been dealt with to a satisfactory standard.

Get a full view of the Omnitrack dashboard

Get a full view of all of your organisation’s reporting portals via the Omnitrack dashboard.

What should a whistleblowing portal include?

The portal serves to ensure all staff feel comfortable raising any concerns relating to their workplace. The portal can allow for submissions to either be anonymous or not. While VinciWorks provides a template for the portal, administrators can easily create new fields according to their organisation’s needs. The form is completely customisable. Here is what the VinciWorks template includes:

• Name of whistleblower
• Name the individual/s involved (alternatively, reporters can choose for this to remain anonymous but this means they cannot be contacted for any followup)
• An account of the inappropriate behaviours witnessed or experienced. This should include:
  • Time and date
  • Any other witnesses who may have seen what happened

What is Omnitrack?

Omnitrack is a reporting and tracking tool that helps businesses shape their culture to encourage all employees to engage in the risk management process. It allows anyone to identify a risk, with high priority issues escalated to the risk management team.

Omnitrack can either be implemented to manage a primary compliance discipline or can be scaled up to cover all your business’ compliance and reporting needs.

Omnitrack whistleblowing portal – product features

• Build forms
• Collect data
• Manage approvals and flag submissions
• Analyse data
• Report instantly
• Review changes with a full audit trail
• Customisable for anyone
• Track anything
• Secure your data