Understanding the Severity of Your Hotline Calls
No two hotline calls are the same. The key to measuring the effectiveness of your hotline is your ability to assess call severity.
There are generally three levels of severity when it pertains to hotline calls:
- S1: Severe actions that present immediate dangers to individuals and the organization.
- S2: Severe actions that aren’t quite as imminent as S1s, usually these allow a bit more time to follow up.
- S3: All other violations that might be less severe and don’t pose immediate threats.
Many organizations struggle when it comes to labeling their violations. They might be improperly defining severity across the board, which can result in a profound misunderstanding of their overall culture.
Let’s determine the most effective ways to diagnose the severity and get the best overall compliance outcomes. For more info, get the 2020 benchmark report below:
Too Many Severity Calls?
The average severity percentage breakdown for ComplianceLine is as follows: S1 is 4.8%, S2 is 5.7%, and S3 is 89.5%.
If your organization is getting an exceedingly high number of S1 or S2 calls, to the point where these make up a significant portion of your overall hotline calls, you need to assess your definitions and determine whether or not it’s a definitional or cultural problem.
Severity or Definitional Problem?
Some organizations provide non-specific definitions of compliance severities, which can lead to misreporting across the board.
A broken faucet in the office kitchenette is significantly lower on the totem pole than an ethical issue that puts employees at serious risk.
If this categorization is incorrect, it will lead your compliance team to waste precious time and resources.
The other potential issue is awareness. When your employees aren’t aware of the hotline or they have an incorrect understanding of how it should be used, they are far less likely to report violations.
Since the goal is always to maximize the number of incidents being reported while ensuring that your team feels safe, you need to clear up these definitions right away.
Assessing Severity and It’s Still Too High?
Maybe you’ve already made the definitions clear but you’re still getting way too many severe reports. It might be time to assess the healthiness of your organization and identify ways to make the environment less toxic.
How to Magnify Impact
As compliance and HR professionals, we want to continually magnify our impact within the organization. To do this most readily, we must become experts at crowdsourcing risk.
Crowdsourcing Risk
Our goal is to continually encourage a speak-up culture where all individuals feel comfortable reporting on issues no matter the level of severity.
It’s important to cultivate a sense of openness with your team that helps them understand the importance of reporting compliance violations, as well as knowing the protocol for how to go about that reporting.
Educate Your Team
The process begins and ends with education. The better you can instill knowledge about your reporting systems, protocols, and compliance procedures, the more positive outcomes you will generate.
With ComplianceLine, you can get access to the top training practices in the industry, aimed at accurate severity assessments that are proven to deliver better results.
