By Adam Turteltaub

Sometimes you make a few technical changes to a compliance program  because a law or regulation has changed. Autoliv didn’t want to do that and just meet technical requirement of the EU Whistleblower Directive. They wanted to use it as an opportunity to assess what they were doing to encourage employee reporting, whether it was working, and to improve support for people speaking up.

Erica Wikman, Vice President, Corporate Compliance, Autoliv and David Barr (LinkedIn), co-founder of Campbell Barr, tells us in this podcast that they shared a vision of moving away from just whistleblowing. Research showed it can have negative connotations.  In addition, whistleblowing tended to be interpreted narrowly, with tremendous variations by region. They also found a fear of either retaliation or that nothing would be done.

So, the Autoliv compliance team began to think more broadly and encourage people not just to speak up when they saw a potential compliance issue but also when they saw something positive in the organization or just wanted to express gratitude.

Along with that change of scope, they decided to open the lines of communication and encourage employees to bring their concerns and praise wherever they were most comfortable.

To make it work they reached out to HR, manufacturing, quality and the health and safety team. Together these groups identified similar needs and dialogue and a willingness of leadership in those areas to come up with a common, welcoming approach to speaking up.

By making speaking up more natural and a part of the business dialogue, they were able to lower the barrier to raising issues and turn perceptions around. A potential negative had become a positive.

Listen in to learn more about what they did and how you could change the entire atmosphere around speaking up.

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