An employee knows something is wrong. They’ve seen the signs. Maybe they’ve quietly weighed the risks for weeks. The question isn’t whether your organization has a hotline. It’s whether employees trust it enough to use it.
That question is at the heart of World Whistleblower Day. For compliance leaders, the challenge isn’t simply encouraging employees to report concerns. It’s building the kind of trust that makes reporting feel worth the risk.
(Editor’s Note: World Whistleblower Day is Tuesday, June 23.)
Reporting is rising, and that’s largely good news
The latest NAVEX Hotline and Incident Management Benchmark Report offers a meaningful signal about where employee confidence is heading. Across more than 4,000 organizations covering 77 million employees, 2.37 million reports were analyzed. The findings show reporting volumes reached record levels again in 2025.
Since 2020, overall report volumes have increased 27 percent. That’s not noise. That’s a structural shift in how employees relate to their organizations. Among organizations that track reports from all channels, not just hotlines and web submissions, reports requiring review, resources, and management attention have risen 40 percent in the same period. This is especially notable because during times of economic uncertainty, we typically see reporting levels decline.
At first glance, higher volumes might suggest growing misconduct. More often, they reflect something more positive: employees believe their concerns are worth raising. A healthy speak-up culture encourages people to flag issues before they become regulatory investigations, litigation, financial losses, or reputational crises. Volume, in this sense, is a sign of health.
The real question is not how many reports came in. It’s what happened after employees spoke up.
When response times slip, so does confidence
Not surprisingly, many organizations are struggling to keep pace with increased reporting. Median case closure times increased by seven days in 2025, reaching 28 days. When surveyed about this trend, compliance leaders identified increasing case complexity, not simply higher volume, as the primary driver.
Employees rarely experience “case complexity.” They experience waiting. For an employee who just filed a sensitive report about their own manager, four weeks of silence can feel like an answer in itself. Delays can leave reporters wondering whether their concerns were taken seriously, or at all. That uncertainty quietly erodes the trust that took years to build.
Civility complaints are early warning signals, not soft issues
Workplace civility is a category that deserves particular attention.
Civility complaints are the most common type of workplace report and, in an unfortunate twist, have moved to be among the most time-consuming matters to investigate. The median closure time for civility cases climbed from 19 days in 2024 to 31 days in 2025. These cases are often dismissed as interpersonal conflicts or “soft” HR matters. That dismissal is a mistake.
Civility concerns frequently serve as early indicators of deeper organizational problems. They can signal leadership breakdowns, team dysfunction, cultural deterioration, or emerging risks of harassment and discrimination. A complaint about a manager’s tone in team meetings may be the first visible symptom of a toxic dynamic that can take years and potentially significant legal exposure to unwind. Yet compliance leaders surveyed suggested these cases receive lower priority than other compliance matters. That may be a costly mistake.
Today’s civility complaint may be the first draft of tomorrow’s litigation matter.
Compliance professionals who treat civility reports as a priority, not an afterthought, can catch more problems while they’re still manageable. This delay is not an indication of complexity; it is the early warning signal that compliance leaders need to address the resource constraints facing their programs.
Retaliation is one of the harder workplace behaviors to prove, but it shouldn’t be the excuse
Retaliation reporting increased in 2025. Yet only 16 percent of retaliation allegations were substantiated, compared with an overall substantiation rate of 44 percent across all case types. That gap should concern compliance leaders because other workplace behaviors are substantiated at 39 percent, and they can be just as difficult to substantiate.
Retaliation rarely arrives as an obvious act. Instead, it surfaces in subtle shifts like exclusion from meetings, reduced responsibilities, a change in a supervisor’s tone, or an assignment quietly pulled. Some of the most damaging retaliation comes not from managers but from peers who distance themselves from a reporter, exclude them from informal networks, or treat them differently after a complaint is made.
Regardless of who participates in retaliation, it is not acceptable. Each of those changes, on its own, may be explained away – or taken as a notable datapoint in the investigation. Investigators need training to recognize subtle forms of retaliation and avoid allowing evidentiary challenges to obscure legitimate concerns. The gap between 16 percent and 39 percent is too high for similar workplace conduct matters.
Employees do not need to witness retaliation firsthand to become reluctant reporters. They only need to believe it could happen to them. Fear of retaliation remains one of the most powerful deterrents to speaking up. That makes robust anti-retaliation monitoring, investigator and manager training, documentation practices, and post-investigation follow-up essential, not optional, components of an effective ethics and compliance program.
Accountability is what employees actually watch for
Trust is reinforced not only through investigations but through visible accountability. The NAVEX data shows meaningful shifts in how organizations respond to substantiated misconduct: “no action” outcomes have reached a five-year low, while training and disciplinary actions are becoming more common.
Employees rarely see case outcomes directly. But they see whether a colleague’s behavior has changed. They notice whether a manager was moved out, whether team dynamics shifted, and whether the culture felt different after a report was made. These observations, accumulated over time, shape their belief in the system far more than any policy document or training module.
If employees believe reports disappear into a black box, confidence erodes, regardless of what is actually happening behind closed doors. Closing the loop, even in general terms, matters.
The real test
World Whistleblower Day is not just a moment to recognize those who came forward. It is a reminder that trust is the foundation of every strong speak-up culture and must be earned, and continually reinforced, through action.
Employees will only speak up when they believe they will be heard, protected, and treated fairly. Every investigation, every response, and every act of accountability either strengthens or weakens that belief. When that trust exists, organizations gain their most valuable source of risk insight and their strongest early-warning system against future misconduct.
The question worth asking today is not whether your organization has a reporting system.
It’s whether your people actually trust it.
Carrie Penman is the Chief Risk and Compliance Officer at NAVEX, where she leads the company’s formal risk management processes. She also oversees its internal ethics and compliance activities, employing many of the best practices that NAVEX recommends to its customers.
