Automated issue-communication method that significantly improves an organization's safety culture and corporate forthrightness by encouraging the communication of issues and concerns, circumventing middle-management filters while suppressing 'whistleblower' creation

摘要

This invention is a method for soliciting or requiring each individual in an organization (particularly organizations engaged in activities potentially impacting public safety, such as nuclear power plants, refineries, airlines, and space agencies) to report “up the organizational chain-of-command” his or her issues and concerns periodically as well as in specific instances to senior managers, to regulatory bodies, and/or to the public with minimal or no changes or filtering. Such information may be limited to concerns or issues but also might include up to the full range of routine and non-routine information falling within the knowledge or expertise of the individual, such as work completed and planned and any related obstacles to that work. This invention provides a method or approach that causes this range of data to not only bypass potential filters within middle management, it also provides peer validation and an archival record potentially important for the analysis of the root causes of accidents and incidents, for evaluations of regulatory compliance, and to motivate individuals to increase their productivity, personal integrity, and forthrightness. The work-related issues-and-concerns information may be collected, aggregated, integrated, stored, and analyzed as needed to evaluate potential safety, economic, regulatory, and political impacts associated with the issues and concerns raised. What separates this invention from previous art is primarily that it provides a credible, automated means for lower-level workers and managers to communicate effectively with senior managers without mid-level managers in the organization filtering, modifying, or delaying those communications and provides for concurrent peer-review validation of issues and concerns where those issues and concerns might (previously) have led to “whistleblower” status for the originator.