September 2021
In the eighth episode of our ‘In Conversation with…' podcast series, Lucy speaks to Neta Meidav, CEO and Co-Founder of Vault Platform, a trust tech company creating technology for reporting workplace misconduct. Neta explains how being able to ‘speak up’ and report goes hand in hand with creating or breaking trust in organisations and how companies should be striving for high reporting rates. Neta explores how trust tech has the ability to create bonds between a company and its people as well as recognising the growing importance of employees having an active voice within their organisation.
In Conversation With…Neta Meidav
Series 1: Podcast 8
Lucy Lewis: Hello and welcome to the Future of work Hub’s ‘In Conversation with…’ Podcast. I am Lucy Lewis, a Partner in Lewis Silkin’s Employment Team and in this Podcast series I’ll be hosting exclusive discussions with innovators, business leaders and thought leaders to explore their perspective on what the future of work holds.
The pandemic has accelerated longer term societal, economic and technological trends giving us a unique opportunity, a once in a generation challenge, to rethink who, how, what and where we work, and one of the undercurrents causing waves in the future of work discussion is the changing nature of the relationship between employers and employees.
We’ve seen a rise of employee and brand activism, social movements like #Metoo and Black Lives Matters, and of course the pandemic has been throwing the spotlight on employee wellbeing, on culture, and particularly on trust; and I’m delighted to have with us our guest speaker today, Neta Meidav. Neta is the CEO and co-founder of the Vault Platform, and is an ideal person to talk through what all those changes mean for the future of work. So welcome Neta.
Neta Meidav: Thank you very much. I’m really glad to be here.
Lucy Lewis: Now, not everybody will have heard of the Vault Platform so I just wanted to start by asking you if you could introduce yourself, tell us a bit about you but also tell us about the Vault Platform and what prompted you to create it.
Neta Meidav: Of course, with pleasure. So I’m Neta. I’m the co-founder and CEO of Vault Platform. Prior to establishing Vault I spent about 10 years working for the British Government. I was a Climate Change Negotiator and I really felt privileged to work on something that is so important and meaningful to society. And got the chance to work on the Paris Climate Agreement and represent the UK and back in the day it was also part of the EU negotiation team to the United Nations.
My role within the talks was to look into the measurement, reporting and verification regime of emissions, so the way Governments report on how much they emit and the way it’s been verified by an independent panel supported by the United Nations; and I was pretty shocked by how systemic, was the fraud that appeared to happen. Almost systemic in the way that it was almost legal. My role was to find loopholes in the text, in the legal text we were negotiating and to try and close those loopholes through negotiations to get companies to truly report on what they truly emit and not to double count, or to have any fraudulent activity there, and that was kind of one dimension that really brought me to think about Vault and the role of trust and how reporting can either make or break trust in organisations.
I also had a personal experience from many years ago that became very evident at the time that the Me Too Movement has just started, and that experience of what stopped me from reporting harassment when it happened to me at work, brought me to look in depth, in detail, in to how reporting systems work internally within companies. Till that day I specialised in how they work in Governments, but I started to look at how they work within private organisations and businesses, and I realised that the processes are truly backwards and trust is really lacking and as the Me Too Movement started to unfold we realised how many people are impacted by all sorts of unethical behaviour, by ethical breaches, by misconduct and thought that it’s time to put best, best technology in place to truly create psychological safety, and help people to come forward in safety and report misconduct when it happens to them.
Lucy Lewis:
So can you tell us a bit about how the Vault Platform works and how it’s evolved since you started it?
Workplace misconduct reporting tool
Neta Meidav: So we started thinking about the employee perspective and that the processes that exist in place right now, mainly speaking about the hotlines and the webforms and the email addresses that are there to encourage employees to speak up, they are not encouraging people to truly come forward.
We were looking at the data and we know that only between 6% and 11% of all misconduct that is reported is actually captured by this process. So it’s not really helpful and we started thinking about the employee perspective and creating an employee centric approach because what we realised is that we cannot really build an ethical company on the shoulders of a single, you know, Chief Compliance Officer or Ethics Officer in the company. We really do need to bring people with you on this journey and create a new contract between employer and employees and create trust in the workplace.
So with that in mind we created an ‘Employee Facing App’ which is today the world’s most advanced and innovative reporting App that exists out there, and the idea of the App is that it’s a safe space where employees can log any concerns that they’ve experienced or witnessed. They can consume the company’s own policies on a variety of behavioural conduct and ethical issues, and they can create a safe record, time-stamped record of events and then report internally within the organisation because, Lucy, what we’re really trying to encourage is internal reporting. We know that unreported misconduct might bubble up and escalate and become soon enough, get out of control and become a very painful ordeal both for the employee and for the company; and what we want to encourage is more trust internally and help companies to identify these trends before they become exceptionally harmful.
So the App enables people to create these safe records and then they have three ways of coming forward. One is with their name attached. The second one is anonymous and the legal requirements for public companies and soon enough for most companies in the European Union with the EU Whistleblowing Directive require an anonymous reporting route within companies. So true anonymity can be guaranteed through the App; and finally a third option of a way of coming forward, which we take a lot of pride in, is called ‘Go Together’. ‘Go Together’ enables people to speak up knowing that they’re not the first or only ones to be reporting a specific person, and now this capability has even evolved further to enable matching on any type of event.
So the idea is that I can come forward knowing that if I name someone for let’s say racism or discrimination or sexual harassment, I will only disclose this record if I’m not the first and only one and our technology can identify if there has been a pattern giving people confidence of coming forward. We know that specifically women and minorities are up to eight times more likely to report with ‘Go Together’ than any other way and giving companies the opportunity of identifying a bad apple or a repeated pattern before it becomes a lawsuit or a story in the New York Times; or even you know just a very bad experience for its people which is extremely important these days.
So that’s what the App does and you have asked, Lucy, how it evolved over time. There were two main learnings for us. First and foremost we started Vault as a means to report behavioural misconduct, so things like sexual harassment and bullying and discrimination, and we soon enough realised that it’s a tool for all ethical issues. So it can be a health and safety breach which we’re seeing very, you know, prominently used these days during COVID. It can be financial or corporate fraud, money laundering. Some companies using the App and the anonymous chat routes in order to enable any type of informal question to management, and we see people are coming forward anonymously asking management questions and providing informal feedback.
So this is very much one way which it evolved into becoming these all encompassing integrity reporting mechanism; and then a second thing that we’ve discovered along the way is that there is a huge operational pain on the company’s side in how to manage these reports. So many of them are still using Excel sheets or they’re using very clunky software and we created the Resolution Hub which is one central place that enables them to manage everything that is reported, automates many of the things that they’re doing manually today. It enables collaboration between different parties in the organisation so maybe you need to bring in your, you know, your legal Counsel, and perhaps you need to bring in the Line Manager for their input.
So it enables people to collaborate while segregating important data. Not disclosing it where it doesn’t need to be disclosed and it also allows you to have data analytics that is very important in this case. So it shows, essentially it’s a map into the company’s ethical health and cultures, so you can see where a problem’s stemming from, what type of problems do you have. You can see what’s the most common type of reporting you had in a year; and it shows, it gives a very good overview of where things stand and enables a company to take a very specific remedial action that is very specific to, let’s say, a team on a specific subject instead of throwing another blanket training on the company.
So that’s what the system does and how it evolved over time.
Lucy Lewis: That’s really, really interesting and actually it takes me to something that I wanted to talk to you about. You talked about creating a speak up culture being critical to trust and you’ve created the App and that raises this question of trust tech. We hear quite a lot about trust tech. You touched on this in your explanation of, if you like, taking a health check of the business and of the company, but I’m really interested in the idea that we can use trust tech to measure trust, the role that data has in measuring trust,
Trust Tech
do you think this kind of trust technology can help us build trust by measuring it?
Neta Meidav: Absolutely. A very simple thing we can do to measure trust is to ask in the employee survey, the yearly employee survey is to ask have you experienced any ethical breaches, or any misconduct in the last let’s say 12 months of your work here, and this is already a question that I know many of the people surveys are addressing; but then there is a second question that is very, very important to follow up with in that survey and that is ‘and have you reported it’? If the answer is yes, then have you reported it? So getting a sense of what is a reporting rate within companies is crucial to be able to measure the levels of trust within companies. Companies seem to sometimes confuse high reporting levels with bad culture or low trust but actually all research shows that it’s to the contrary.
So a culture of openness, a culture of speak up, is a culture where employees feel like they can alert the company, they can come forward and let their employer know that there is a problem, means that there are high levels of trust and employees trust their employer to take action and they trust their employer that they truly want to listen. So that is already a simple thing that everyone can do to measure trust in the workplace. We know by the way if you’re interested in the benchmarks, we know that in the best performing cultures out there, usually in you know in the big tech companies, we’re seeing the reporting level of 25% of misconduct. So it means that at best 25% of misconduct that is observed in the company gets reported internally. Usually the number is actually much lower than that. So that’s just to give a bit of a benchmark of what good or, in this case, what bad looks like; and what we should all strive to do is increase the reporting levels because increased reporting levels means first and foremost that we have built a culture where our employees, our teams, trust us to listen and to take action, and secondly as I’m sure you know Lucy, it means that you can truly mitigate risk. It means that you can truly protect the company from legal proceedings and from liability further down the line, and you can prevent big scandals from happening before they actually go beyond a certain tipping point.
So that’s why ‘speak up’ is so important, such a crucial indicator of the ethical health and the culture in a company, and of course of trust itself. Beyond that, trust tech means tools that are there, technology that is there to increase, let’s say, intensify the bond between a company and its people, which I think is especially important in times of COVID where we’re all working remotely and most of us still do. So we have technology that truly breaks trust right. We have surveillance technology. You know people today don’t trust technology that much because they think their employers are using it in harmful ways or in ways that are not beneficial towards the employee like different productivity tools for example that measure employee’s productivity whilst working remotely would be one example of those; but there is actually technology today that brings employees and employers closer together and helps to overcome that gap of trust, that deficit of trust that exists today. There are a range of opportunities like that and I’m very proud that we’ve built a product within that category.
Lucy Lewis: There’s such a lot to come back to there, thank you. If I take one of the things I just wanted to pick up on, and I’m interested in your experience really of this, that I talked at the beginning about the future of work, seeing an increased importance on employees having a voice, that feeling that people are listening to them, that their employers are expected to respond with social purpose; and I’m wondering whether you know in the work that you’re doing with the Vault Platform, you’re seeing this changing expectations, a greater importance for employees as part of a sort of war on talent. They want to feel that they’ve got an active voice within the organisation.
Employee Voice
Is that something that you’re seeing evolving?
Neta Meidav: Absolutely, absolutely and we’re seeing that on, I would say, on two main fronts. First and foremost our App and Platform enables people to know by name who is taking care of their case. So what we found is that one of the barriers to speak up is that people feel that they’re very much in the dark, right. They submit their report, their complaint and they don’t know who is taking care of that and especially again in this very weird time that we’re living through right now, putting a personal face to a company is exceptionally important to create a more trusted culture. So within Vault for example if I had an issue I know who’s taking care of me, I know I submitted it to say Lucy and I know that Lucy is my contact person within the organisation, and that is incredibly important.
The other, I would say, even more important trend is the intention that the company sets with launching a tool such as Vault. So the bigger impact that we’re seeing is with the actual launch of the product. The very launch of a product like Vault means that a company is setting an intention. It’s sending a very clear message internally that we’re an ethical organisation. We’re an organisation that takes your voice as employees very seriously; and we want you to speak up because we want to listen.
So to give you a great example one of our clients experienced an uptick in reporting shortly after launching. This is by the way very common. About 70% of our clients have an uptick, a healthy uptick in reporting within the first month after launch, and this was a big bullying and racism case that was exposed and actually led to, in that case, a termination of a Manager from the company. The VPHR asked this person who came forward, ‘what made you speak up now?’ and he said look the App is great and it’s very intuitive and of course you know it helped me to overcome my fear and to come forward. This specific employee did not come forward anonymously so she had a person to kind of ask for feedback, but then he said, but what really triggered me deciding to come forward is the actual, the fact that you’ve invested in something like this. It means that you would listen and that you truly care and that was the biggest factor for me in deciding to come forward.
So when you launch a mechanism such as this, when you launch a software such as this, it usually comes with a very strong message from the top which you send through to your employees as well as, by the way, many times externally to the public as well, to your Board, where you’re saying we want to listen, and we want people to come to us and alert us if there is anything that requires our immediate attention as employers; and today Lucy you know that what we’re seeing and we absolutely love is that companies refer to us in their annual reports, our clients are referring to Vault Platform as part of their ESG strategy, because it really is about how you govern the company, and really is about the social impact that you’re driving internally within your organisation because you want marginalised voices to be heard, because you want to empower people who would otherwise remain silent and many times it also comes very much, you know, works hand in hand with diversity and inclusion as well.
So we’re very pleased to see how our clients are boosting up their ESG through investment into their speak up mechanisms.
Lucy Lewis: Thank you Neta and actually that’s really helpful because that covers some of the questions I wanted to ask you about. An increase in pressure on businesses around things like ESG, greater sustainability, more pressure on ethical business practices and how all that plays into this, and I think you’ve answered that really well.
One thing that I did want to touch on, you talked about the strange times we’re living in, and we couldn’t be doing a Podcast like this without mentioning the pandemic.
Workplace bullying
One of the things that we’ve seen is that actually in some cases there’s been increasing reports of discrimination and harassment, and that might surprise some people you know, people or lots of people are no longer in the offices but actually that’s created an opportunity for things to happen behind screens, on keyboards in a way that’s unchecked and unseen; and I’m interested in your perspective on what all of that means for the sort of changing workplace etiquette. What can businesses be doing to ensure that discrimination, harassment, it doesn’t just shift in parallel to being a digital problem.
Neta Meidav: Absolutely and you’ve really nailed it there Lucy. It has shifted to become; you know, workplace cyber bullying or digital form of harassment and discrimination and other ethical breaches and malpractices. I think the fact that we moved to a working situation where, as you said, you hide behind your keyboard, it also means you don’t have that peer to peer, sometimes very helpful pressure that stops people from behaving in a certain way, right? It’s all a contributing factor.
A recent report from a Project Include found that going remote actually made workplaces more hostile environments for already marginalised groups, and over a quarter of people that were surveyed say that they experienced an increase in hostile behaviour. Not surprisingly 98% of that population that saw an increase in that behaviour are women, and 99% are non-white. So you really see how the shift to work from home, what an enormous impact it has on populations who otherwise, workplaces are so, are working so hard to promote right? It almost wipes out all that amazing progress that we’ve seen in the world of diversity and inclusion in recent years; and that’s truly unfortunate.
So yes, today these types of behaviours are done online. It’s a trend that started before COVID but COVID only accelerated this, and I think we’re still going to see what is the aftermath so there’s still a lot that is happening right now on all the fronts of misconduct that we are still just not aware of, right? That we’re going to see, that will kind of come to the surface at a later stage.
In terms of what companies can do. Again I would say the biggest thing they can do is to not only set the right message but to also enforce it with action. So invest in trust-making mechanisms. Create a more personal dimension to the company. It’s harder today to relate to a company’s brand and identity when you’re working from home.
So, the more personal a company can show up, the more channels it can create for employees to come forward and make connections and speak up internally, the better it is for the organisation. The open door policy doesn’t apply anymore because there is no door to be opened; and you don’t even know your HR department, you know, these are complete strangers to you so kind of seeing that experience from the viewpoint of an employee in that position, that literally never met anyone outside of their immediate team that they’re seeing on Zoom or very, very infrequently seeing the whole company on all hands, is just to kind of provide that opportunity, and send a very strong message about ethics and about speak up that is coupled with the right type of tools. People don’t use the hotlines anymore. They don’t… they would not use that alienating webform you have there. They need to know anonymity is super important, and it’s incredibly important in a time where people are also fearful for their jobs, right? So we should invest in any channel we can to make people feel more comfortable.
Lucy Lewis: Yeah it’s interesting. The response to this will be ensuring that we find a place for trust tech like the Vault Platform, to have a digital response to some of the changing ways that people are interacting with each other. It is really interesting.
Future of Work
I’m going to stick with the pandemic. We’re running short of time and I’ve asked everybody on this Podcast the same question. What do you personally think will be the biggest and most radical change for the future of work that we’ll take forward with us from the pandemic?
Neta Meidav: Yes it’s an excellent question because I think we’re going through this incredible revolution right now that has so many dimensions and we’re in the midst of it, right? We’re in the eye of the storm. It’s almost difficult to kind of assess what it would do but I think that the biggest take away from my standpoint is that there is a very strong dilution of companies… of the sense of connection with companies these days.
So there is something about coming to a physical workplace when you immerse yourself in company’s brand and messaging and you meet people in the lift who you didn’t plan on meeting today, and they’re, you know, working for the same organisation as you do. There is something about those kind of corridor chats and the watercooler chats. There is something about coming to a physical place that creates a sense of connection. It creates a sense of identification with a company’s brand; and it’s much harder to create that experience when people are working remotely.
So for employees, and definitely for those who were onboarded during the pandemic, it’s almost starting to feel like ‘okay I’m working for this firm, but I could have been working for another firm’. The differences are starting to really blur and within that I think the most important trend that will emerge is that the sense of purpose and working for purposeful companies, understanding truly and believing from an employee perspective, understanding and truly believing what the company does beyond its performance and revenue line would become even more important than it used to be.
So the sense that I’m working for an ethical organisation and I understand its purpose and I know its role in society and its role for the environment, would become even more important than it used to be, which is why the rise of ESG is real, and it’s great.
Lucy Lewis: Yeah it is great and it’s a really useful and hopeful insight and it’s a really good place to finish giving people an idea of where to focus and how trust tech fits into that. So thank you very much Neta. It’s been you know really fascinating to explore this with you.
Neta Meidav: Thank you.
Lucy Lewis: If anyone listening would like to find out more about the Vault Platform please do have a look at www.vaultplatform.com and you can find Neta Meidav on LinkedIn. Thank you again Neta