You’re a typical employee. You go to work in the morning (or whenever), do your job and go home again. You don’t particularly like the company but they pay you what they say they’ll pay you and they give you the holidays that they say you’re entitled to so that’s about it. You don’t expect more and they certainly don’t give it.
It’s hardly idyllic but it is reality.
For most people, that’s what work is. Somewhere you go when you’d rather be somewhere else but, hey, it pays.
Suddenly, you see something at work. One or more of your colleagues is doing something against the rules and it’s making you feel uncomfortable. What should you do?
Let’s be clear about things. If you turn a blind eye, there is little to no difference between you and your colleagues. Not only that, if they are cheating the company, that will, somewhere down the line, have an effect on you. If they take, then someone else has to give.
It’s the basic law of ‘continuity’: a company is like a pipe – what goes in must come out and it can only come out in one place. If your co-workers are creaming something off in the spirit of ‘free enterprise’ that means less for the rest of you. Sooner or later, their antics are going to appear on a balance sheet and that balance sheet will dictate your job security, pay rise, fringe benefits, overtime etc. Something will always suffer – it has to.
So, hopefully we’ve established that it does have something to do with you.
There’s another thing, too. If you don’t like what you are seeing, turning a blind eye won’t make it go away and the knowledge of what you have borne witness to will play on your conscience. The longer you leave it, the harder it will be to do resolve it and the more you will get eaten up in the meantime.
Obviously, the best thing to do is to gently persuade your colleagues to quit what they are doing but that will probably involve personal risk and you should never put yourself in the line of fire.
Ultimately, it’s the company’s job to protect the company’s interests. However the company may not be looking in the right direction therefore you need to be its eyes for it.
You have three choices.
- Report the individuals with full details of the ‘crime’
- Report what is going on in detail but leave out the names of the participants
- Report the individuals but leave them to confess what they are doing
The other option – of making vague allusions to theoretical crimes – only works on television. In real life, by doing this, you are just rather pointlessly sticking your neck out.
Once you’ve decided on your course of action, you can either choose to blow the whistle openly or anonymously.
If you opt for reporting the breaches anonymously then you should understand that you may later come under suspicion yourself as there will be nothing on file to protect you should someone subsequently accuse you of being a party. On the other hand, putting something in writing that cannot be fully substantiated might well be libellous.
Therefore, whichever of the three options you choose for reporting, you are going to be caught up with this dilemma.
It may be that a quiet word in the boss’ ear will resolve things but, if the breaches are more serious, you really need to protect yourself. As an alternative to becoming a full-blown whistle-blower struggling to decide about whether it is safe to put things in writing, why not jot down some proposals which will prevent the breaches from occurring? Thus, rather than naming your colleagues, you stop their game.
Make sure you get your proposals officially recorded. Ask for a file reference, receipt, acknowledgement, or something which, should you get dragged into an investigation, will effectively exonerate you. After all, it’s a pretty thick criminal who invests time and effort advising their victim how to protect themselves against the crime.
Without looking at specific cases it’s difficult to give examples of what proposals you could put before management but suggestions might include better security measures, a camera above the clocking-in machine, changing a lock etc. You will then have to be prepared to stonewall the questions about ‘Who?’ and ‘When?’.
Remember, joining in with the offenders, no matter what pressure they subject you to, only makes you as bad as them. The ‘I was simply following orders’ defence has been tried at just about every war crimes trial and it doesn’t work. Some things are deemed so bad that you are expected to go against the flow.
Have you ever been in a position where you wanted to blow the whistle? Did you? What happened?
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