Public sector organisations almost universally react to difficult workplace issues by developing and implementing sets of procedures. Every public sector organisation has many volumes of these procedures. It is not surprising that these will usually include procedures for the sensitive and difficult area of the reporting of wrongdoing. It is also not surprising that the difficulty of the area will lead to widespread uncertainty regarding the appropriate content for procedures and doubts regarding their effectiveness.

This analysis has, however, demonstrated empirically that the effort put into developing and implementing more comprehensive whistleblowing procedures is worthwhile. There are strong indications that comprehensive procedures help raise confidence that the organisation will deal with reports effectively and sensitively and will encourage reporting. Comprehensive procedures are also associated with better outcomes for those staff who do report. In particular, comprehensive procedures for the reporting of wrongdoing and the protection of whistleblowers are associated with good outcomes, as indicated by the measures of how internal witnesses are treated by management and their co-workers. Besides engendering good outcomes, comprehensive procedures are strongly associated with the encouragement of staff to come forward. Legislation itself also appears to have clear positive effects, although these could also relate to elevated expectations of good treatment by management, which might or might not necessarily pan out in practice.

This chapter has nevertheless also shown some serious weaknesses in procedures and conflicting assessments of the adequacy of procedures at different levels in agencies. A surprising and troubling result was a negative relationship between the comprehensiveness of the procedures and the confidence of more senior staff in the likely response of management to whistleblowing. More-senior staff (such as managers) often appeared to have either overly optimistic or pessimistic views of their own procedures, depending on the case. In either case, their views appeared to be somewhat disconnected from the reality, particularly since the views of less-senior staff tended to correlate more directly with the real quality of the procedures.

The analysis of which procedural items were most commonly present when the outcomes were positive, and when the attitude to reporting wrongdoing was positive, enables a tentative conclusion about which elements of the procedures were most important to staff. Some of those elements relate to the way in which organisations handle reprisals. The analysis of procedures indicated that, overall, this was the weakest area in reporting procedures and one in which organisations could make significant improvements. While more comprehensive procedures correlated with better outcomes, these were not necessarily explained by the contents of the procedures themselves on the relevant issues.

This evaluation of the whistleblowing procedures of individual organisations has essentially been a measure of the completeness of written documents. While the evaluation in this chapter has attempted to include all relevant procedural elements relating to whistleblowing, there are many other issues involved in the effective handling of wrongdoing besides the completeness of written procedures. Clearly, procedures alone do not guarantee a good outcome; this is likely to hinge on management commitment, promulgation of the procedures and effective resources devoted to investigation and to supporting staff. Nevertheless, the evidence suggests that these factors are also more likely to be present in those organisations that take the trouble to develop more comprehensive whistleblowing procedures, which appear to reflect at least some aspects of organisational practices.

The second report from the present research will describe, in greater qualitative detail, the direct relationships between agencies’ procedures, operational systems and outcomes from whistleblowing. Using the framework already developed and provided in Appendix 3, this further research will support a clearer picture of current and potential best practice in systems for managing the reporting of wrongdoing. As it stands, while most agencies in most jurisdictions are yet to move beyond a mere compliance approach to whistleblowing procedures, there is clear evidence that such movement is necessary and potentially rewarding. As more senior managers move to recognise the utility of good whistleblowing systems, as well as their legal and ethical responsibilities to ensure the welfare of their own employees, the value of a more comprehensive approach to whistleblowing is likely to be immense.