Speaking up where you work

The hardest thing on this site is not writing a placard. It is saying something at work and still having to sit in that meeting on Monday.

Most guidance skips this, or tells you to be brave and leaves you there. This guide is about the mechanics.

Choose the venue before you choose the words

The same sentence carries wildly different risk depending on where you say it. Roughly in order of exposure:

A one-to-one with someone you trust. Lowest risk, and much more useful than people expect: you find out whether you are alone before you find out publicly. Catch them afterwards rather than raising it in front of anybody.

“Can I have a word about what was said in there? It sat badly with me and I want to know whether I’m on my own with that.”

A one-to-one with your line manager. Higher stakes, but this is the conversation that can actually change something, because managers can act. Say at the start which kind of conversation it is, or they will spend it guessing.

“I’d like ten minutes about something that happened in the team meeting. I’m not making a complaint. I want you to know about it.”

A small team meeting. Manageable if you have already had one of the conversations above. Difficult cold. A short correction in the moment costs less than a speech, and it is usually all that is available to you.

“Sorry, can I stop you there? I don’t think that’s right, and I’d rather say so now than afterwards.”

An email to colleagues. Permanent, forwardable, and quotable out of context. Everything you write here should be written on the assumption a stranger will read one paragraph of it.

An all-staff channel or internal forum. Highest exposure. Real reach, real risk, and once it is up it is not coming back.

A group you convene yourself. Slowest and by far the most durable. If you are in for the long run, this is where the actual change comes from.

Pick one deliberately. Most people who regret speaking up at work regret the venue rather than the content.

Judge the room honestly

Four questions, and answer them honestly rather than optimistically. What does your workplace actually claim to value, in writing? Who has already said something sympathetic? Who is uninformed rather than hostile, that is usually the biggest group, and the one worth talking to. And what has your employer already said publicly about other forms of racism, which you can hold them to?

Open on their values, not yours

This is the single most useful technique on the page, and it is the one thing every handbook we studied that worked well had in common.

Do not open with the cause. Open with something the person you are talking to already believes about their own profession, and then ask what that commitment requires of them here. A safeguarding lead already believes children should be safe at school. A trust-and-safety engineer already believes policies should be applied consistently. You are not asking them to adopt a new value. You are asking them to apply one they already hold.

Openings for a range of professions are listed at the bottom of this page. If yours is not there, the method is: find what your workplace has already written about itself, and ask whether it is being applied evenly.

Say what you want to happen

A message with no ask is a disclosure, and it puts the burden on the reader to work out what you wanted. Decide in advance, and pick something proportionate to the venue you chose. That might be as small as asking someone to read one thing, or as large as asking your employer to say something publicly. The message templates give you a range of asks, ordered from easy to hard, so you can choose one you can actually stand behind.

One thing you are allowed to decline is becoming the person the subject belongs to. Agree to it once and it tends to be permanent, and you have to work there afterwards.

“I’ll help with the wording, and I’m not going to be the one who fronts it. This can’t become the only thing people here know about me.”

Write it down

Keep your own record: what you sent, to whom, when, and what came back. Not because you expect trouble, but because if it does become a dispute, months later, in a process, contemporaneous notes are worth more than a good memory. Keep them somewhere that is not your work laptop.

That record is also the thing a formal complaint stands on, if it comes to one. If you reach the point of putting it in writing to the institution rather than to a person, there is a separate guide for raising it with your institution.

Know what you’re exposed to

Employment protection differs enormously between countries and between contracts. Whether you can be disciplined for political speech at work, what counts as harassment, and what protection you have against retaliation are all jurisdiction-specific, and this guide deliberately makes no claim about any of them.

What it can tell you is who answers the phone. In England, Scotland and Wales, the Acas helpline is 0300 123 1100, Monday to Friday, 8am to 6pm, free, and you do not have to give any personal details to use it. Its advisers will explain what the law says and set out the options, and they will not take sides or tell you which option to pick. Acas also says on its own contact page that early conciliation is currently taking around seven weeks to start, which is worth knowing before you build a timetable around it. For equality specifically, the Equality Advisory and Support Service covers the same three nations on 0808 800 0082. In the United States it is the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission on 1-800-669-4000, and the page to read first is the one called Time limits for filing a charge, which puts the deadline at 180 calendar days from the day the discrimination took place, or 300 where a state or local agency enforces an equivalent law.

Then the two documents you already own. Your contract and your staff handbook are where a rule about political speech at work usually actually lives, and reading them takes an evening you will not get back once you have sent something.

If you are in a union, ring it early rather than late, and ask for the workplace representative by name rather than the switchboard. If you are not in one, the question worth asking a colleague you trust is which union covers this job.

The lowest rung, and the day you climb it

Two answers from memory, because you will not have this page open in the corridor. Which is the cheapest rung above that you have not tried? And what has your employer already written down about itself that you could hold them to in one sentence?

“When I feel ready” is not a cue, and neither is “next time it comes up”. Both wait on a feeling or on somebody else’s behaviour. Write these four down now, with your own names and days in them.

Forty-five minutes, this week. If it is an evening I am already at the laptop, then I will take the opener for my line of work from the list below, rewrite it in my own words with my employer’s own document named inside it, and write the ask underneath in one sentence.

Your plan, and it is the lowest rung and nothing above it. If I am walking out with the one colleague I trust and nobody else is in earshot, then I will say “can I ask you about something that was said in there?” and stop talking until they answer.

If it goes badly. If they change the subject or tell me I am reading too much into it, then I will say “fair enough, I’ve said it now”, and write four lines in the note file that evening: the date, who, what I said, what came back.

And the one that overrides the other three. If that person manages me, or my job is insecure, then I will ring the union before I say anything to anybody at work, and I will not count that as a delay.