Grievance and investigations

Our SpeakUp! grievance mechanism offers employees, business partners and members of the general public a confidential environment in which they can raise concerns relating to compliance with our Code of Conduct. We offer anonymous reporting and apply strict principles of confidentiality and non-retaliation. Reports are investigated on their merits, in accordance with investigation procedures that are available to everyone on our corporate internal and external websites. The investigations are conducted or managed by dedicated resources supervised by the Head of Investigations. Findings and recommendations are reported to the relevant Compliance Committee for decision-making. In 2017, we introduced sanction guidelines to further improve the consistency of decision-making.

In 2017, 129 SpeakUp! reports were received, 14 of which were of materiality level Category 1 and 115 of Category 2. In total, 17 of these 129 SpeakUp! reports were substantiated, leading to four dismissals.

Our privacy data breach reporting procedure has been amended to meet the requirements of the new EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

In 2017, Transparency International Netherlands studied the whistleblowing frameworks of 18 large Dutch listed companies. AkzoNobel’s whistleblowing framework ranked second.