How to Use Hotlines and Case Management Software for an Ethical Culture

With The Great Resignation and more and more organizations being held to account, an ethical workplace culture is more important than ever. One way to promote a culture of ethics is by implementing both a whistleblower hotline and case management software. These two systems work together to help you identify, investigate, manage and prevent workplace issues.

Why is having both a whistleblower hotline and case management software so important? Here are three benefits of using the two systems in tandem during each stage of the process.

Efficient Intake and Triage

If you want to promote a speak up culture, you need to create a safe space for reporters to raise concerns. A healthy way of exposing issues that need to be addressed is to implement robust reporting mechanisms (like a hotline) and use that information to identify the problems in your organization that need attention.

After receiving reports through your whistleblower hotline, the next crucial step is to evaluate and prioritize them. Case management software automates the intake and triage processes so your team can get right into investigative work. Platforms like Case IQ can categorize and assign cases to the appropriate team member, ensuring that nothing falls through the cracks, and that you address certain incidents within the timeline of reporting requirements.

Efficient intake and triage are essential, especially if your team has to sift through a large number of hotline reports. With case management software, you can expedite the initial assessment, enabling quicker responses to urgent matters and the allocation of resources where they are needed most.

Effective Case Management and Investigation

During the next stage of the process, managing and investigating the issue, you want to resolve it as quickly as possible. To capture those issues and conduct proper investigations efficiently and in a safe way, you need both a whistleblower hotline and a robust case management system.

For the case management stage, a hotline provides all of the information you need to hit the ground running. You know who’s involved, what happened, when and where it happened and maybe even the level of severity of the incident. When you integrate your hotline with a case management system, all this report information is automatically pulled into a new case file, so you won’t waste time on administrative work.

When you use a secure, centralized case management platform like Case IQ, you can keep track of every action taken on each case in one place. All supporting documents and evidence are stored there, and you can communicate and collaborate within the platform to protect sensitive data. You can even generate final investigation reports with just a few clicks. Combined with the automated case creation from your hotline, these features ensure that you resolve every incident efficiently to protect employees and your organization.

Data Analysis and Reporting

Finally, the aim of every investigation should be to prevent similar issues from happening again.  Learning from the data you’ve collected and taking action to reduce repeat issues improves the workplace for employees while also protecting your organization. To do so, you need both a hotline to collect data and case management software to analyze it.

A whistleblower hotline collects important incident data, but it’s not very valuable when used alone. Case management software like Case IQ complements your whistleblower hotline by allowing your team to identify trends, patterns and recurring issues through world-class data analysis.

With case management analytics, you can make sense of your hotline data. For instance, you can see who is reporting (unless it was anonymous), where it came from, the type of incident, whether the reports ended up being substantiated and more.

Without a case management system’s data analysis, your hotline data is just a messy list of information. Without a hotline, you are less likely to catch issues before they escalate. Both together give you insight into your organization’s issues and how to resolve them.

When you analyze your case data, you can take preventive action against organization-wide problems and make data-driven decisions about where to focus your resources. For instance, if you receive a lot of harassment reports from one office in particular, you might implement a harassment training refresher for employees working there.

How Case IQ Can Help

When used together, whistleblower hotlines and case management software like Case IQ help you foster an ethical culture while protecting your organization from fines, lawsuits and other negative consequences. To learn more about Case IQ’s modern case management platform and how it can integrate with your reporting mechanisms, click here.