Having a speak up channel is important organisational infrastructure. It’s different from the organisational climate, which is what people feel when they consider using it. I’d posit that many organisations have a channel, but most have never measured either.
Infrastructure, like a physical structure, is easy to point to. We can retrieve a policy, point to a sticker on the wall with a phone number and email address, print a pdf, highlight a contact person, register training completion, and so on.
These things are helpful and New Zealand organisations have built plenty in recent years, partly out of good faith (props to them), and partly because the Protected Disclosures (Protection of Whistleblowers) Act 2022 helped organisations sharpen their pencils. That said, beneath the spend on these things sits some assumptions that I think are un- or under-acknowledged. The key one for me is this: if we have a mechanism, people can use it and, if they can use it, we’re safe, or have done enough.
These don’t follow, although it’s logic and positioning I’ve seen.
The channel-climate gap
I referenced Detert and Burris in a previous post, and it’s an excellent piece. Published in the Academy of Management Journal the pointed title is ‘Is the door really open?’. They surveyed 3,149 employees and 223 managers, looking for what actually predicted whether people voiced concerns and ideas.
Unsurprisingly, by which I mean given the nature of this and my other posts I don’t think you’ll be surprised, formal mechanisms barely registered. Rather, leader openness in practice was what predicted Voice. The effect ran through employees’ perceptions of psychological safety, that is, their private assessment of what speaking up would cost them.
What mattered was how the person behind it behaved when someone walked through.
The finding is consistent
We’ve got nearly two decades of research to support that position. Elizabeth Morrison’s 2023 review in the Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior takes stock of hundreds of voice and silence studies, and the through-line is consistent. Before speaking, people run two calculations. Will this make a difference, and is it safe?. Let’s call these Futility and Fear.
The existence of a channel answers neither question. People answer both questions through observation, anecdata, and by asking others. What happened to the last person who raised something? Did the concern get an answer, or disappear into a workflow? Did the person who spoke stay, get quietly sidelined, or leave?
That’s really all a speak-up climate is: the shared conclusion a workforce has reached about what using the channel actually costs. You can’t buy it, it isn’t a plug in, and you can’t train it in a single session, because it’s built entirely out of observed events. Which is also why it’s uncomfortable to measure. Channel audits count things the organisation did. Climate measurement is a different animal.
Current case studies to watch
New Zealand currently has a live illustration of the gap. In May this year, a former senior adviser at the Financial Markets Authority stated publicly that she had raised concerns about the regulator’s internal culture “through proper channels”, and called for an independent review. For close to three months there was no visible response. At the end of July the chief executive went on leave, and the acting board chair said the board had only recently become aware of cultural concerns. In the first week of August, MBIE commissioned an independent investigation led by Kristy McDonald KC.
That investigation is under way and has made no findings, so nothing here is a conclusion about any individual or about what it will report. It may find the concerns were handled better than the public record suggests. But the sequence visible from the outside is instructive on its own. A regulator had channels. A staff member says she used them. The response that finally arrived came after sustained media attention, not before it. Whatever the investigation concludes, the distance between May and August is an illustration of the difference between infrastructure and climate, at an organisation whose day job is holding others to account for the gap between what they say and what they do.
For another, both the Sydney Morning Herald and the (Australian) Financial Review (along with several others) have articles outlining that general counsel Louise Capon and HR head Dorothy Hisgrove have resigned, ahead of upcoming Senate inquiry public hearings into the handling of a whistleblower complaint and audit scandal.
In classic corporate “sorry, not sorry” prose KPMG wrote, “While the searches were undertaken in accordance with KPMG’s policies and procedures, we regret any distress this process may have caused the whistleblower. KPMG will consider its approach to these matters as part of the lessons-learned review being conducted by Andrews Group and Dennis Gentilin”.
“We regret.” Not, “We apologise”.
We can’t measure climate like channels
If we really want to get our hands dirty, and make an effort to measure climate over channel, we have to ask different questions. These could be:
- How long did the last three genuine concerns take to get a substantive response?
- Did the people who raised them ever learn the outcome?
- Does anyone use the channel twice, or more?
- Does your usage data show single attempts followed by silence?
- When bad news reaches your leadership table, what happens to the person carrying it?
On that last one, like, what actually happens? Are they immediately dissed by the executive, labelled as vexatious or a poor performer, and a narrative constructed to dismantle their character? When I say what happens after the complaint is important, I mean from the very second it was received.
I would wager that none of this shows up in a compliance audit.
There’s also a version of this for individual leaders, because climate isn’t set at the organisational level alone. Detert and Burris located the effect with the direct leader. Your team’s climate is being written in small, ordinary moments: what your face did the last time someone corrected you in front of others, whether the person who flagged the risk on the project got credit or a reputation, how you talk about people who raised problems once they’ve left the room. Nobody experiences the organisation’s hotline; they experience you.
I should highlight two issues. First, channels aren’t pointless. Absolutely not. Serious wrongdoing needs formal, protected routes, and the Protected Disclosures Act exists for good reasons. This argument is narrower: the channel is necessary and nowhere near sufficient, and the part that does the predictive work is, I think, largely unmeasured.
Second, climate really is harder to measure than compliance. It moves slowly, it varies by team, ait changes when team composition changes, and no single metric captures it. Harder is not the same as optional. It just means the work looks less like an audit and more like paying attention to what happens, repeatedly, over time.
Detert and Burris asked in 2007 whether the door is really open. In 2026 your answer shouldn’t be to point to the door.
Photo by Kristina Flour on Unsplash
References
Detert, J. R., & Burris, E. R. (2007). Leadership behavior and employee voice: Is the door really open? Academy of Management Journal, 50(4), 869-884. https://doi.org/10.5465/amj.2007.26279183
Morrison, E. W. (2023). Employee voice and silence: Taking stock a decade later. Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior, 10, 79-107. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-orgpsych-120920-054654
Case sources: MBIE, Investigation into conduct and culture at the Financial Markets Authority (4 August 2026), https://www.mbie.govt.nz/about/news/investigation-into-conduct-and-culture-at-the-financial-markets-authority, plus contemporaneous reporting by RNZ, NZ Herald and others, May to August 2026.