Speak Up, Listen Up
We help organisations build cultures where colleagues feel empowered to speak up, and where leaders are skilled in listening up and taking appropriate action when they do. Our programmes go beyond policies and whistleblowing channels, to address and challenge deep-rooted cultural norms. We help you build cultures where providing challenge, sharing perspectives, asking questions, raising concerns, bringing fresh thinking and taking risks is psychologically safe – for everyone – throughout your organisation.
Why Does It Matter?
Expectations around culture and conduct – and what is socially, ethically and legally acceptable – are rightly changing. There have been stark examples – from business, media, politics and beyond – of the human, reputational and financial damage inflicted by toxic cultures or poor conduct.
A culture where colleagues feel empowered to ‘speak up’ is critical for organisations wanting to navigate risk, fuel growth and innovation, and fundamentally protect the diversity, health and performance of their teams.
The Business Challenges Speak Up & Listen Up Can Solve
Empowering colleague voice is a business imperative, boosting diversity, innovation, and risk management. Open cultures foster resilient workforces, attract and retain talent, and reduce toxic behaviours. Safe environments encourage diverse thinking, driving innovation and continuous improvement. Proactive risk cultures enable early issue identification, mitigating reputational, financial, and human capital risks.
What We Offer
We help leaders cultivate a “speak up” culture by building their listening skills and fostering an environment where speaking up is welcomed, encouraged, and acted upon. We break down barriers to open communication, establishing it as crucial for success, safety, and growth. Through co-created behaviours, dialogue to address limiting beliefs, and mechanisms that enable honest communication without fear, we drive both “hard” and “soft” change. Leveraging triple-loop learning and Schein’s cultural model, we create a culture where employee voice drives the organisation’s heart.
When focussing on Speak Up & Listen Up, there are three areas for consideration:
Speaking Up Is Influenced At Many Levels
At its core, speaking up is something that happens within a relationship. However, that relationship always exists within a multi-layered system, which means that a ‘speak up culture’ needs to be addressed at many levels. One of these levels cannot succeed without the other.
Listening Up Is As Important As Speaking Up
To truly hear your employees’ voice, there needs to be an equal focus on building the capabilities, skills, attitudes and actions of receivers – and particularly leaders – to listen up. For speaking up to flourish, it needs to be absolutely clear it is welcomed, encouraged, celebrated and acted on.
There Are Different Types Of Speaking Up
Speaking up is more than just formal processes such as whistleblowing, it also happens in the semi-formal town halls through to informal day-to-day interactions between colleagues. These interactions can be both ‘prohibitive’ (where people share concerns or challenges), and ‘promotive’ (where people bring new ideas and celebration).
The Science Of What We Do
Our approach leverages the principles of ‘triple-loop learning’ and Schein’s ‘Three Levels of Organisational Culture’ to help organisations, leaders and individuals identify, acknowledge and reflect on the long-standing beliefs that might be contributing to silence or an ineffective culture of speaking up. We use these root causes to implement interventions that tackle the mindsets, behaviours and practical mechanisms needed to drive ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ change.
Establish a foundational principle
Establish a foundational principle or value across your organisation and your people that speaking up and listening up are important for the success, satety and growth of all.
Make space to explore existing limiting mindsets
Facilitate dialogue amongst leaders and colleagues to identify and reset the underlying limiting beliefs that sit across all levels of your organisation, so that everyone is paying attention to the employee voice.
Co-create speak up and listen up behaviours
Designing, with your people and leaders, the behaviours everyone will commit to demonstrate what we’re actually doing to empower speaking up across your organisation.
Prioritise enabling and reinforcing actions
Implementing the practical mechanisms and artefacts in your organisation that enable individuals and leaders to truly listen to one another and speak openly and honestly without fear of consequences. Recognising and rewarding the right mindsets and behaviours to reinforce transformation towards your established principle.
The Impact
Organisations with a strong speak up culture
Companies with a strong speak up culture are 50% less likely to experience misconduct
Organisations with strong employee voice mechanisms reported an average of 15% higher levels of innovation and idea implementation
When employees speak up and feel involved in decision-making, they report 4.6 times higher levels of empowerment and commitment.
Client Success Stories
Our methodology has been tried and tested with 100+ organisations, defining cultures that have created measurable results like the ones below:
Speak Up & Listen Up FAQs
Other questions you may have
A culture where colleagues feel empowered to speak up is not just one simple idea, mandate or set of policies. Instead, it is a deep cultural orientation that allows the voice of employees to drive the heart of your organisation. A culture where providing challenge, sharing different perspectives, asking questions, raising concerns, speaking truth to power, bringing fresh thinking and taking risks is psychologically safe – for everyone – throughout the organisation. These lived behaviours and experiences, coupled with genuinely listening to and appropriately acting on the voices of your people is how we define a ‘speak up culture’.