Your people are still speaking up, they have just stopped putting their names to it. That is the uncomfortable headline buried in the latest UK reporting data, and it should worry any leader who believes a working hotline equals a healthy culture.
Safecall's 2026 Whistleblowing Benchmark Report, published in late May, found that anonymous reports now make up 56% of all cases, an increase of 9 percentage points since 2019. Reporting volumes are up, the digital channels are busy, and on paper that looks like progress. Look again. A majority of the people raising a concern no longer trust the organisation enough to attach their identity to it.
Why anonymity is a symptom, not a solution
Anonymous channels matter. They are a vital backstop, and no serious programme would remove them. But a workforce that overwhelmingly prefers anonymity is telling you something specific: people have done the maths and decided that being named carries more personal risk than staying silent is worth. They will report the wrongdoing, they will not stand behind it.
That has real operational cost. Anonymous reports are harder to investigate, harder to follow up, and far harder to resolve early. You lose the conversation, the context, the chance to ask one more question. By the time a concern arrives stripped of a name, the cheap, same-week intervention has usually already passed. You are left with the expensive end of the problem.
The Safecall data sits alongside a wider pattern in UK research: people experience far more misconduct than they ever formally report, and the gap between the two is where culture is won or lost. Anonymity is the visible edge of that gap. It is the behaviour you can measure. The question is what produced it.
Policies do not change behaviour. Rehearsal does
Most organisations respond to a speak-up problem by reaching for documents. A refreshed whistleblowing policy, a new poster by the lift, a fresh line in the induction deck, an e-learning module everyone clicks through at 4pm on a Friday. None of it touches the moment that actually decides whether someone speaks: the half-second of risk assessment a person runs before they open their mouth in a real room, in front of real colleagues, with a real manager who might react badly.
That moment cannot be taught from a slide. It has to be felt. A manager learns whether they can stay calm when challenged by being challenged, not by reading that they should. An employee learns whether speaking up is survivable by surviving it, in a setting safe enough to try and consequential enough to count. Because real behaviour change happens through lived experience, not through passive learning that everyone forgets by Monday.
This is where Sidestream works. We build immersive, award-winning experiences that put managers and teams inside the exact situations they avoid: the dismissed concern, the raised voice, the colleague who finally says the difficult thing out loud. People rehearse the behaviour, get it wrong somewhere it is safe to get it wrong, and walk out having actually practised the thing the policy only described. Our Death of Jane Doe immersive experience, recognised at the CorpComms Awards, was built to do exactly this kind of under-the-skin work. If you want the underlying method, our guide on how to build a speak-up culture at work sets out the steps, and our psychological safety training in London grounds it in Amy Edmondson's framework rather than slogans.
How you know it worked: measure behaviour, not applause
Here is the discipline most speak-up initiatives skip. They measure the wrong things. Attendance, a satisfaction score, a quiz result at the end of the module, all of it sits at Kirkpatrick Level 1, did people enjoy it, and Level 2, did they retain the content. Useful, but it tells you nothing about whether anyone behaves differently on the Tuesday afterwards.
The level that counts for speak-up culture is Kirkpatrick Level 3: observed behaviour back in the workplace. Are managers responding differently when a concern is raised in the open? Are named reports rising as a share of the total because people trust the response more? Are difficult conversations happening early, in person, rather than arriving months later through an anonymous form? That is the change worth paying for, and it is the only change that moves the 56%.
We design every engagement to produce that evidence. Behavioural rehearsal gives people the reps. Structured observation, before and after, tells you whether the reps held outside the room. No vanity metrics, no assumption that a well-received session equals a changed culture. If the behaviour does not move, the programme has not worked, and we would rather you knew that than congratulated yourself on a high feedback score.
What to do with the 56%
Treat the anonymity figure as a diagnostic, not a verdict. It tells you the distance between what your people see and what they feel able to say to your faces. Closing that distance is behavioural work, and behavioural work needs practice, not paperwork.
Start by defining the standard in observable terms. Train the behaviours that replace silence: the manager who invites challenge, the colleague who names the issue early, the leader who responds to a concern without making the person who raised it regret it. Then measure whether those behaviours actually show up at Level 3. That sequence, define, rehearse, observe, is what shifts a culture from "report it to a box" to "say it to a person".
If your reporting data looks healthy but most of it is anonymous, you do not have a reporting problem. You have a trust problem wearing a reporting problem's clothes. We can help you find out what is really happening in your organisation, and rehearse the behaviours that change it. Get in touch today. We are Sidestream.
Read on: how to build a speak-up culture at work and psychological safety training in London. Or book a free 30-minute diagnostic call and bring us the gap in your own numbers.