Quiet Quitting vs External Whistleblowing: The impact on employment of a lack of ethics

In the face of the quiet-quitting revolution, tech industry leaders must not be taken by surprise by their louder, more impactful, colleagues quitting with spectacularly public results. Both represent challenges to be managed.

ESG compliance is becoming an increasingly salient business pressure. In tech, that looks like self-regulating internal ethics boards that are considered by those around them as powerless. Evidence of the calling out of these failings is common, most notably arising from high profile whistleblowers including Facebook Whistleblower Frances Haugen.

Speaking to a Parliamentary Joint Committee on the draft Online Safety Bill, Frances Haugen outlined how tech firms continue to get away with this, in part, by leveraging the severe skills shortage within the tech sector.

Tech regulators are not able to compete with the offerings of tech firms, nor do they have access to the hands-on training opportunities with the latest in machine learning and automation that these companies have available. Firms create these sizable compensation packages to out compete one another for these people that have these sought after skills in automation, cybersecurity, and tech.

Tech companies are also vulnerable in this scenario. Any harm caused to a company by external whistleblowing is the result of internal failure, not just the subject of the whistleblowing itself but the failure of the internal systems which should have listened to the concerned individual.

When you have empowered workers, who are keenly aware their skills are in demand, not listening to them can be as fatal to your business as not listening to your customers. The cost of lost talent, severance packages, loss of public and professional image, productivity loss, and fines from regulators makes the choice clear, listening to whistleblowers is crucial.

In the UK, an Office of the Whistleblower would offer safe harbour to those looking to highlight unethical and criminal behaviour within any business or institution. The Government is in the process of reviewing their draft Online Safety Bill which will go part of the way to making the internet safer for some, but more must be done. We join the calls of the APPG for Whistleblowing to the Government to adopt the Whistleblowing Bill at the earliest possible opportunity.