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| | | IN BUSINESS
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Go to the Listen Again page | ![]() | | | | |  | | Thursday 8.30-9.00pm,
Sunday 9.30-10.00pm (rpt) | | | | Programme details | 16 October 2008 |
| | |  | | |  | | | | | |  | About this programme by Peter Day
It is ten years since Britain passed a law giving protection to whistleblowers... employees who felt something was wrong in their workplace and told the bosses about it.
The new law shielded them from victimisation, and (as we hear in this In Business) it followed several highly publicised cases where fear apparently blocked the revelation of eventually fatal shortcomings in public or private organisations.
All this set me thinking about corporate culture ...the unspoken rules and references that dominate most workplaces, inherited and refined over the years.
Most organisations make curious assumptions about the shared goals of their workforce. Then new faces at the top are far away, the corporate change of strategy is a lurching change of direction, messages about new priorities are “cascaded” through the email system so that eventually they percolate through to the people at the bottom ...otherwise known as the people who spend their daily life in contact with the customers, where things really matter.
Whistleblowing is one of the checks and balances organisations put in place to try to keep themselves honest. Whistleblowing hotlines are mandatory under the Sarbanes-Oxley accounting rules rushed in by the US authorities after the corporate scandals (such as Enron) at the beginning for the 2000s.
Whistleblowing can of course be effective; publicising a hotline is a constant reminder of the decency at the heart of a company which can be appealed to when things go wrong.
But the need for a hotline sheds some light on the nature of organisations ...the way that being “organised” detaches ordinary people from the normal responsibilities and decencies and turns them into corporate persons with loyalties mainly to their immediate superiors...the straight line relationships on the organisation chart. Organisations replace human good behaviour with corporate good behaviour, and it is not quite the same thing.
How can the world’s main banks have got engaged in such an orgy of destruction as we have seen in the past several years ?
It must have been more than just stupidity.
The trend in organisations is to chip up the tasks into bits that prevent sensible questions being asked about their purpose : the banks and building societies used to find the money, arrange the mortgage and live with the loan until it was repaid, with oversight of the whole process.
Then they thought they could streamline the process into component (and outsourced) parts : retailing loans, parcelling them up, selling them to investors, buying them in bulk.
In this way they held the real world at bay, created a machine, and chopped up loan arranging into such tiny pieces that overall oversight was removed from the process, along with any grounding in the real world.
Banks created a machine that disabled the oversight and the responsibility mechanism that used to be at the heart of what they did.
And nobody blew the whistle on it.
Whistleblowing is a necessary part of running a modern organisation. But organisations have to be built so that when someone blows the whistle, they know how to respond.
| | | | | | About In Business
We try to make ear-grabbing programmes about the whole world of work, public and private, from vast corporations to modest volunteers.
In Business is all about change. New ways of work and new technologies are challenging most of the assumptions by which organisations have been run for the last 100 years. We try to report on ideas coming over the horizon, just before they start being talked about. We hope it is an exhilarating ride.
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