Knowing the whistleblowing channel exists isn’t the same as trusting it

A large Brazilian company had everything you’d expect from an integrity program: a code of conduct, internal policies, training, a whistleblowing channel and a dedicated team.

But having these mechanisms doesn’t guarantee that employees know about them, understand them or see them as effective. The company was already measuring employees’ views on integrity and misconduct prevention on a regular basis. The underlying question was: is the culture the company wants the same one its employees experience?

Integrity culture can seem hard to measure. The study heard from thousands of employees and broke the topic down into dimensions that can be tracked and compared: leadership conduct, training, knowledge of policies, investigations and disciplinary action, misconduct prevention and channels for reporting wrongdoing.

The question was whether employees saw the rules actually working.

Some questions called for a closer look. For the whistleblowing channel, for example, the study separated the views of people who only knew about it from the experience of people who had actually had to use it.

That distinction matters, because the two can be very different. People who have never used the channel are judging a promise. People who have used it are judging an experience. The same care was applied to training and to the work of the professionals dedicated to integrity.

So the survey measured three separate things: whether people know about the mechanisms, whether they’ve used them and whether they trust them.

In a company this size, the overall result hides differences between areas. So the analysis compared internal segments and tracked how each metric moved relative to previous waves.

The question shifted from “How are we doing?” to “Where are we making progress, where are the gaps, and what needs attention?”

A study this size produces an enormous amount of data, and the risk is that what matters gets lost in the noise. Results were organized into consolidated indexes, trend lines and a prioritization matrix showing which topics most needed management’s attention.

The survey became a governance tool. It gave the company the evidence to set priorities, track its integrity initiatives and focus on the aspects of the employee experience that matter most.