WHY VANGUARD VOICES EXISTS
Vanguard Voices is a Swiss not-for-profit association working to make psychological safety at work something organizations can be held accountable for.
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The idea grew from a contradiction.
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Organizations routinely ask people to speak honestly, challenge decisions and raise concerns. But the personal consequences of doing so — and the quality of the organizational response — can remain almost entirely hidden.
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Vanguard Voices exists to help change that.
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We are bringing practitioners, researchers and people with experience inside organizations together to build something that can withstand scrutiny, not simply attract agreement.
Our Mission
To make psychological safety at work publicly accountable.
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That means moving the conversation beyond whether organizations encourage people to speak up, toward what happens when someone actually does.
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Did anyone respond?
Was the person protected?
Did anything change?
Did the organization learn?
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Our work is about making those questions harder to avoid - and eventually easier to answer.
Our Vision
A world where people do not have to calculate the career cost of saying what needs to be said.
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Where leaders are expected to hear difficult information, not merely invite it.
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Where silence is treated as information.
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Where patterns that are obvious to employees cannot remain invisible to organizations.
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And where psychological safety is judged by what happens in difficult moments - not only by what an organization says about itself.
What We Stand For
At Vanguard Voices, we believe that:
Leadership goes first. What leaders make discussable - and what they avoid - shapes what becomes possible everywhere else.
Silence contains information. When people repeatedly withhold concerns, the question is not simply why they lack courage. It is what they have learned about the consequences of speaking.
Response matters as much as voice. Encouraging people to speak up means little if nothing is required of the organization after they do.
Good intentions are not evidence. Policies, values and training matter. But they cannot, on their own, tell us what happens when the system is tested.
Why this Work, now
For decades, organizations have invested in culture programmes, engagement surveys, leadership development and speak-up initiatives.
Much of that work matters.
But an important gap remains.
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We have become increasingly sophisticated at measuring what employees report feeling while remaining far less able to see what organizations actually do when difficult information reaches them.
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Vanguard Voices exists to work on that gap.
Not because one standard can solve psychological safety.
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Because some things become harder to ignore once someone starts asking for evidence.
The Founder’s Story
I have spent more than 25 years working inside large organizations, across countries, functions and industries.
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Over those years, I kept seeing versions of the same pattern.
People often knew what was wrong.
They talked about it privately. They warned each other. They adapted around it. Sometimes they left.
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What was missing was not always voice.
It was a reliable organizational response.
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In 2018, while working inside a global pharmaceutical company, I started a grassroots initiative focused on psychological safety and accountability to company values. It eventually generated more than 25,000 engagements.
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The work was publicly celebrated.
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My experience behind the scenes was considerably more complicated.
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That contradiction stayed with me.
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It made me question an idea that sits underneath much of the speaking-up conversation: that the solution is to make people more courageous.
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I no longer believe that.
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If telling the truth requires unusual courage, the system is already telling us something.
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That is why I founded Vanguard Voices.
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My background includes organizational change, leadership coaching and work inside complex multinational systems. I hold ICF-PCC, ORSC and ICP-Agile certifications.
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But Vanguard Voices should not depend on my experience or convictions being correct.
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The work has to be challenged by others, tested in organizations and changed when the evidence demands it.
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Vanguard Voices is currently founder-funded. That gives the work something I consider essential at this stage: the freedom to develop the standard without a paying organization determining what it should say.
The aim is not to build a standard around my story.
It is to build something strong enough to stand without it.
Jessica Bensch
Founder of Vanguard Voices