About Vanguard Voices
It started with something most people recognize but no system measures: how companies treat the people inside them. Books are audited to four decimal places. Carbon is reported. Security is checked every year. How leaders and employees treat each other is the one thing taken on faith.
Vanguard Voices is a Swiss not-for-profit and an independent body convening the working group writing the first public, revocable certification standard for psychological safety at work. Built on ISO 45003, the international standard for psychological health and safety at work. Drafted in public through 2026. The first three companies measured against it in 2026 to 2027. Open to any company from 2027 onwards.
Our Mission
To make how companies treat the people inside them publicly checkable. Measured the same way across companies, sectors, and countries. Renewed every year. Withdrawn when broken.
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That means writing the first version of the standard with a working group of HR practitioners, organizational development consultants, agile coaches, and researchers. Measuring the first three companies against it. Then opening it to any company that wants to be checked.
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The long-term vision is a network of certified companies that hold themselves and each other to a visible standard. Companies measuring it, monitoring it, willing to be held publicly accountable for it.
That is the infrastructure we are building.
Our Vision
A world where psychological safety is measured, monitored, and held accountable at every level of every organisation.
Where leadership teams go first. Where what's unsaid gets surfaced and acted on.
Where companies hold themselves - and each other - to a visible standard.Not a pledge. Not a badge.
Ongoing, measurable accountability for how people are treated and whether they can speak up without career risk.
Where no one has to choose between raising the hard stuff and their career. Where the cost of silence is no longer invisible.
Where organizations are judged not just on what they deliver, but on how they treat the people who deliver it.
What We Stand For
At Vanguard Voices, we believe that:
It starts at the top. If the leadership team won't surface what's unspoken between them, no programme, policy, or training will change anything below.
Silence is a cost problem - It´s not only about courage. When speaking up carries career risk, staying quiet is the rational choice. The system has to change, not the people.
Offsites fade. Infrastructure stays. Alignment without written agreements, recurring check-ins, and publicly tracked follow-through disappears within weeks. A standard is what lasts.
Pledges and badges are not the same as certification. A certificate that cannot be withdrawn becomes branding. The standard is what gets reassessed every year and revoked when broken.
The Founder’s Story
I have spent 25 years in corporate - across multinationals, across continents, in industries from pharmaceuticals to tech. I saw the same pattern everywhere and in every team I joined: leadership teams that couldn't talk to each other about what was actually going on. And everyone below them paying the price.
In 2018, while working at a global pharmaceutical company with over 100,000 employees, I built a grassroots psychological safety initiative from the inside. It reached 25,000+ engagements. I was publicly celebrated for that work - and privately punished for it. That contradiction taught me something I haven't forgotten.
The problem was never that people lack courage. The problem is that courage is required at all. Fear doesn't flow upward in organizations. It flows downward. When a leadership team can't surface what's unsaid between them, everyone below learns that silence is safer.
That's why I started Vanguard Voices. I hold ICF-PCC, ORSC, and ICP-Agile certifications. I've led change programmes, coached leadership teams, and worked inside the systems I'm now trying to fix. I know what it looks like from the inside - the politics, the silence, the cost.
Vanguard Voices is funded by my salary, not by investors or paying clients. That is on purpose: no one outside the work has financial leverage over what the standard says. Most certification bodies that started this way were founder-funded for the same reason. Independence is what makes the standard credible.
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It starts at the top. It always does.
Jessica Bensch
Founder of Vanguard Voices
