Integrity@WERQ. Our major survey of your staff, managers and systems.
Nothing is more rewarding than leading an organisation or workplace to successfully deliver on its mission – providing high quality services and outcomes for its clients, customers, stakeholders and shareholders, including wider society.
But ensuring this success is socially responsible and achieved with high standards of integrity does not happen by accident. All organisations face the challenge of ensuring governance and management processes meet expectations of clients, society, and staff by ensuring the company or agency lives out a positive and healthy ethical culture.
Griffith University’s Workplace Experiences & Relationships Questionnaire (WERQ) measures the state of ethical culture, climate and leadership in any organisation. It does so with a special focus on whistleblowing processes and systems – measuring in detail, the experience of staff and management with how real-life wrongdoing concerns are dealt with, or would be if they arise.
WERQ involves a confidential survey for everyone in the organisation. Its matching versions gather all the key perspectives from senior and frontline managers, employees and other workers including volunteers, people working in governance roles, and where relevant, non-executive directors and other members of oversight boards, commissions or councils.
The online WERQ survey takes 20 – 30 minutes to complete. It is a substantial survey requiring appropriate planning and time allowances.
Key indicators include:
- Aspects of your organisation’s ethical culture and climate
- Standard of ethical leadership in your organisation
- Awareness and knowledge of your reporting / ‘speak up’ processes
- Staff trust and confidence in your organisation’s responsiveness to concerns
- Recent/current levels of reporting, silence or other action in response to actual wrongdoing concerns in your organisation
- Investigation rates and outcomes for internally reported concerns
- Quality of responses to internally reported wrongdoing
- Support, treatment and welfare of staff who have raised wrongdoing concerns.
In Whistling While They Work 2, the Integrity@WERQ phase of the project captured the experience of 17,778 individuals with the processes for reporting wrongdoing, across 46 organisations based in Australia and New Zealand.
This was the biggest purpose-built dataset in whistleblowing research compiled to that date, worldwide – and included 5,055 whistleblowers and 3,604 managers and governance professionals who had dealt with whistleblowing cases.
How do you compare?
Integrity@WERQ is available to any organisation seeking to understand and benchmark its whistleblowing environment and processes against the existing research.
It is crucial to know the state of your organisation’s integrity policies and procedures, but also how these work in practice, and how they interact with the ethical culture, climate and leadership of the organisation.
This survey provides the ability to monitor and compare in order to evaluate whether key processes are working to meet real-life integrity challenges – in particular, whether wrongdoing concerns perceived by staff and managers in your organisation are being raised and appropriately dealt with.
Integrity@WERQ collects the perceptions and experience of managers and staff throughout the organisation to understand what really happens and help identify where effort is needed to achieve improved outcomes.
For more information, please contact us.
