Speak Up. A confidential channel for workplace concerns

Serious concerns stop living in inboxes and corridor conversations. Speak Up is two things at once: a public reporting portal where any employee can raise a concern without logging in to anything, and a case-management workspace where your HR or compliance team triages, investigates and closes what comes in - with a record of every step.

What Speak Up is

Speak Up has two surfaces that never mix. Which one you're looking at depends entirely on who you are.

That second point matters: a compliance officer who has never used CultureMonkey doesn't need an admin seat to work cases. They get a Speak Up login of their own, scoped to Speak Up and nothing else.

Reporting a concern

The reporting page needs no CultureMonkey login, so an employee can raise something without signing in - and without an account existing for them at all. The form is guided rather than a blank text box.

1. 1Open the reporting page, or scan the QR poster.
2. 2Choose to report anonymously or identified.
3. 3Pick a category - each one asks its own follow-up questions.
4. 4Describe what happened, and answer the follow-up questions for that category.
5. 5Add a location, and attach files if there's anything to evidence.
6. 6Set a password. This is what lets you come back to the case later.
7. 7Review everything, then submit - your report number is given on the confirmation screen. Save it with your password.

Every report gets a reference in the form SU-2026-00013 - the year plus a running number. Submitting offers the choice to download a PDF copy of the report, so a reporter can keep their own record of what they filed.

A reporter can attach supporting documents, screenshots, photos or recordings - up to 5 files per case, each with a size cap - if your workspace allows uploads. Files can be added, removed or skipped entirely before continuing.

Anonymous or identified

A reporter chooses their mode at submission, and it can never be changed afterwards - not by them, and not by your team. Someone who reported anonymously stays anonymous for the life of the case.

Identified reporting can be turned off, leaving anonymous as the only route. If you keep it on, you can additionally require email verification: the reporter is sent a 6-digit code and must enter and verify it before the report will submit.

Following a case as a reporter

The report number and password are the reporter's way back in. From their case page they can read replies from your team, send follow-up messages, see where the case has got to, and download the attachments they submitted.

Reporters do not see your internal stage names. They see a plain-language status instead:

The notification email your team can't see

A reporter can optionally store a personal email address to be notified when the case moves or when your team replies. That address is kept private to the reporter - it is never exposed as their identity to the case team.

The notification email doesn't change this - it only decides whether a reporter is proactively told about updates. Without one stored, a reporter sees replies the next time they sign back in with their report number and password; nothing is pushed to them in the meantime.

Once a case is closed, the reporter can no longer send new messages on it.

The case queue and workflow

Every report lands in a shared queue, filterable by stage, category and risk level. Opening a case gives your team the full intake, the message thread, and the attachments side by side.

Cases move through five stages:

1. 1New
2. 2Triage
3. 3Investigation
4. 4Concluding
5. 5Closed

A case can be closed from any stage, and a closed case can be reopened back into investigation. Anything else is blocked - you can't skip triage or run a case backwards by accident.

Replies and internal notes

Your team replies to the reporter from the case page, in a two-way thread that works even when the reporter is anonymous.

Alongside that thread, your team can write internal notes. These are visible only to the case team - the reporter never sees them, and they are never included in anything sent out.

Assignment

New cases can be distributed automatically, round-robin, among the members assigned to that category who are flagged for auto-assignment - so a report doesn't sit unowned overnight. Auto-assignment can be switched off if you'd rather triage manually. Either way, a case can be reassigned to a specific person at any time, and the new owner is emailed directly.

Who can see what

Visibility is decided by role, not by who happens to be on the team. There are three Speak Up roles, and a CultureMonkey Super Admin can also be given the same reach as an Admin - but only once they've been explicitly added to the case team.

Being a CultureMonkey Super Admin doesn't grant Speak Up access on its own - like everyone else on the case team, a Super Admin needs to be explicitly given it before they can sign in and see cases. A Viewer can read the cases in their scope and reply to reporters, but cannot assign a case, move it between stages, or close it.

Category scoping is real isolation, not a filter on a screen. A Member assigned only to Workplace Harassment cannot open, search, receive live updates for, or see analytics on any other category's cases.

Members are added from your existing employee directory and are given their own Speak Up password, shown once at the point of creation. Removing a member deactivates their access immediately while keeping their history on the cases they touched.

Categories, questions and risk

Typical starting categories include Workplace Harassment, Safety Violation, Discrimination, Fraud / Misappropriation, and Policy Violation, plus an Other option for anything that doesn't fit. Each category carries its own description, its own set of follow-up questions, and a risk level.

All of it is editable - rename categories, rewrite the descriptions, rewrite the questions, change the risk levels, reorder them, deactivate ones you don't need, or add your own. Risk runs Critical, High, Medium, Low, and the queue can be filtered by it.

The follow-up questions are what turn a vague report into an actionable one - each category asks its own, some required and some optional, so the reporter answers those instead of guessing what your team needs to know.

Who gets emailed, and when

Six notifications, each of which can be switched off on its own.

The wording of the new-case email to your team, and of all three reporter emails, can be replaced with your own.

Languages and translation

The reporter portal is multilingual - it offers whichever languages your organisation already has enabled in CultureMonkey. You choose which of those to expose on the portal, and which one is the default; English is always available. If more than one is enabled, reporters get a language switcher and the whole form - instructions, categories, guided questions, buttons - appears in the language they pick.

Enabling a language can trigger automatic translation of your categories, descriptions and follow-up questions into it. Those translations land as drafts you can edit and mark as reviewed - so a machine translation never goes out as final without someone signing off.

For the case team, translation works in the other direction - where it's configured for your account, a report or message can be translated into English, shown alongside the original rather than replacing it. Your team can also request or refresh that translation directly from the case.

Reaching frontline and deskless teams

Not everyone has a work laptop. Every workspace gets a shareable reporting link - copy it into an email, your intranet, or a chat message, and it opens straight to your reporting form. The same link also comes as a QR poster carrying your logo and organisation name, for factory floors, kitchens, depots and site offices. You can download the full poster, or just the QR code on its own to drop into materials you've already designed.

Analytics

A dashboard over any date range you choose, showing program health:

• Total cases, with the trend against the prior period of equal length.
• Cases by stage, so you can see what's sitting in triage versus investigation.
• Cases by category, with a risk badge on each, ordered by risk.
• Export to spreadsheet for board or compliance packs.

Analytics respects the same category scoping as the queue: a Member sees the numbers for their categories only, never the whole organisation. Viewers typically don't have analytics access at all.

What you configure

• The portal - on or off, its background (presets or your own image), and the trust and anonymity wording employees read before they file.
• Whether the landing page shows a "Track report" button - alongside the primary "Start new report" action.
• Identified reporting - whether it's offered at all, and whether it requires email verification.
• Attachments - whether files can be uploaded at all.
• Languages - which of your organisation's enabled languages the portal offers, and which is the default.
• Categories - names, descriptions, follow-up questions, risk levels, translations, which are active on the intake form, and the order reporters see them in.
• Your team - members, their roles, and which categories each can see.
• Notifications - which of the six are sent, and the wording of the emails.
• Assignment - whether new cases distribute automatically.
• Your QR poster - generate, download and regenerate.