The problem with whistleblowing, even within a company, is safety. After all, if you talk, your bosses may retaliate against you. Brno-based FaceUp has developed a platform to keep internal whistleblowers safe; I sat down with its CEO, Jan Slama, to talk about it.
Ethics and compliance
Slama is clear about his company’s mission: “helping organizations build an ethical culture while staying compliant with regulations.” The solution for this is FaceUp, which serves as an ethics and compliance platform where employees can submit anonymous reports on issues that they face, and organizations can manage compliance issues.
Slama is quick to make clear that there’s a massive difference between internal and external whistleblowing. This isn’t about outing corporate missteps, but rather about making sure people within a company know what’s going on.
School project
Though actual criminality is one thing FaceUp targets, the most common use cases are reports on sexual harassment and bullying, which are still far too common. In fact, bullying is how FaceUp got started.
While the founders (besides Slama, there are David Spunar and Pavel Ihm) were still teens, they developed it as a way for Czech primary and secondary school students to report bullying anonymously. Called Nenech to Být (“don’t leave it like that”), it has been running since 2017 as a nonprofit app. Currently, it’s used in as many as 2,000 schools.
The three met in school, but much of their work was done with the help of the JIC innovation agency, based in Brno. It started with practical advice, like when FaceUp entered the US market, to JIC Ventures, the organization’s VC arm, helping raise FaceUp’s series A this year. Slama emphasizes JIC has been a “crucial partner” from the very start.
“JIC has been a key partner for us from the very beginning of our journey,” says Slama, “just having the option to have offices there was a huge benefit. It meant we started out working in an incredibly driven and innovative environment.”
“The mentoring was also vital,” Slama continues, “ever since FaceUp was founded, whenever we don’t know how to handle something, we check whether JIC has an expert on it. They helped us with the transformation from a school non-profit project into a commercial platform for companies.”
Market needs
Slama also emphasizes the benefit of going to JIC events, where the team met representatives from other industries, who really liked their concept. Around that time, Czech parliament passed a law that made it mandatory for companies with more than 50 employees to have some kind of whistleblowing program in place.
However, the team was told, just providing an email address to whistleblowers wasn’t enough, as people feared retaliation. Much better to have a platform that has anonymity built in, like FaceUp does.
However, says Slama, though communication on the platform is encrypted end-to-end, if the whistleblower is not careful, they can be tracked by other means. “ We explain that they shouldn’t report from company WiFi or a company device.”
Pivot upon pivot
With this kind of feedback, the decision to pivot toward company use was easily made, especially with JIC’s help. However, this wasn’t without issue, says Slama. “We expanded the product into a survey platform and we were developing solutions to improve engagement between HR and the employee.”
This is when real-world developments intruded. “When Donald Trump became US president we saw that all these “soft” topics stopped being important,” says Slama, “for example, we were doing a case study with one US customer where the head of HR told us that she can’t use some words like diversity or inclusion.”
FaceUp’s founders realized this meant they’d have to do a small pivot within a pivot: “In this environment building tools for an open company culture really isn’t the focus,” says Slama, “so besides further improving our confidential reporting, we’re also building features that let customers manage ethics and compliance issues.”
Going modular
Not that customers need to choose between these. FaceUp is a modular platform, so companies can pick and choose what they want to use. There’s a module for online reporting of workplace harassment, a module for handling cases that have come in, and a module that sends out surveys to employees, among others.
Because of its modular nature, FaceUp is extremely versatile, while also being as comprehensive as possible. In Slama’s words, “ we’re trying to solve all the pain points around ethics and compliance.”
Finding the fit
This seems to be successful. Slama claims FaceUp has helped uncover as many as 45.000 real problems. While communication is encrypted and thus inaccessible to FaceUp, Slama can share some stories about how the platform is used, like how it has uncovered crime rings in Latin American factories.
A less exciting, but maybe more recognizable, use case is how retail chain Sportissimo uses FaceUp as an HR tool where employees can share ideas or ask questions. According to Slama, it shows how companies can use FaceUp, and gives him confidence for the future.
That confidence seems well earned: currently, 1.700 companies use FaceUp, and the number is growing, thanks to the team always working on new modules. Currently in the pipeline are new modules that focus on things like disclosure management and policy management.
On top of that, the company also wants to scale. Right now, they’re focused on companies that have 500 to 5,000 employees, but the founding team is determined to expand this. After all, there are plenty of things to blow the whistle on.
