Psychological safety should not depend on courage
Companies ask people to speak up.
Few create a measurable obligation to respond.
Vanguard Voices is developing a public organizational standard for whether people can speak up - and what the organization is required to do when they do.
Grounded in ISO 45003. Written in public. Built for recurring assessment.
The standard is currently in development.
No company has yet been certified.
25+ years
The founder’s experience working inside large organizations
ISO 45003
The international guidance underpinning the psychosocial-risk frameworks
5 draft domains
Covered by the first version of the proposed standard
3
Organizations planned for the initial cohort: one founding organization & 2 pilots
The first public standard for psychological safety at work
Can people speak up, raise concerns, disagree with someone senior, or admit a mistake at your company without paying for it?
Vanguard Voices is convening the group writing the standard.
Built on ISO 45003. Independently checked. Revoked when broken.
GET THE VANGUARD VOICE
A weekly letter from inside the building of the standard.
Draft criteria. Methodology decisions. Disagreements changing the work. The questions that remain unresolved - and what we are learning as the first version takes shape.
Subscribers get first access to working group invitations and founding cohort applications.
THE ACCOUNTABILITY GAP:
COMPANIES AUDIT THEIR FINANCES. THEY send SURVEYs to THEIR PEOPLE.
Financial statements are audited. Carbon emissions are reported. Information security is tested.
But what happens to the person who raises a difficult concern is usually known only inside the organization.
An employee survey can reveal how people experience the workplace. It cannot, by itself, show what leaders did when someone spoke up, whether the person was protected or whether the organisation learned anything afterward.
Psychological safety remains largely a private claim.
Vanguard Voices is developing a way to test it.
AN OPEN LETTER
TO ANYONE WHO HAS WATCHED THE SAME PATTERN REPEAT
Jessica Bensch, Founder
You have watched this happen.
A concern is raised quietly.
Side conversations multiply.
Someone resigns.
An investigation follows.
The organization publishes a statement, holds a leadership retreat or restructures a team.
Six months later, the same pattern appears somewhere else.
It is not your imagination.
For decades, organizations have asked employees to be courageous, challenge the status quo and speak up.
Far less attention has been given to what the organization must do next.
The problem is not always that nobody
spoke.
Often, someone did.
The problem is that hearing the concern created no clear obligation to respond.
Psychological safety cannot rest on people becoming braver.
It requires structures that make listening, responding, protecting and learning part of how the organization operates.
Vanguard Voices is developing a standard for that missing obligation.
The obligation begins with leadership. The evidence must extend across the organization.
This is your moment.
Not to ask people to speak louder.
Not to tell them to be more courageous.
To build organizations in which raising the difficult thing creates an obligation to listen, respond and learn.
Psychological safety should not depend on whether one person is willing to risk everything.
Jessica Bensch, Founder
WHAT silence COSTS PEOPLE WHEN NOBODY IS required to respond
Every organization has things people hesitate to say aloud.
The tension between two teams that everyone works around.
The concern about the strategy that never reaches the formal meeting.
The behaviour of a senior colleague that has been an open secret for years.
Each incident may look small when viewed alone.
Together, they reveal what the organization has made safe - and what it has not.
Scene 1
THE RISK EVERYONE SAW AFTER THE MEETING
A team member sees a serious problem in the plan.
In the meeting, the senior sponsor asks whether everyone agrees.
Nobody objects.
Afterward, three people privately admit that they had the same concern.
The organization records consensus.
It may never record the risk people were afraid to name.
Scene 2
THE RESIGNATION EVERYBODY PREDICTED
The team had seen it coming for six months.
Nobody raised the underlying problem formally. The exit interview produces no clear finding.
The next person hired into the role discovers the same conditions.
The organization records turnover.
The pattern remains invisible.
Scene 3
THE LEADERSHIP RETREAT THAT UNRAVELS BY WEDNESDAY
Everyone agrees in the room.
The real disagreement emerges afterward in private messages and corridor conversations.
By Wednesday, the decision has been quietly reversed.
The organization records a decision.
It may never examine why nobody challenged it when the decision was being made.
WITHOUT A STANDARD, EACH SCENE CAN BE EXPLAINED AWAY AS AN ISOLATED INCIDENT.
Together, they show how an organization handles interpersonal risk.
WHAT MAKES THIS STANDARD credible: PUBLIC, COMPARABLE, REVOcABLE
The standard is intended to turn a private claim into a public test.
Leaders shape the conditions in which people decide whether it is safe to speak.
The proposed standard examines whether those conditions are supported by evidence, experienced across the organization and strong enough to survive a difficult moment.
Public
The criteria, evidence requirements, assessment method and certification rules are intended to be publicly available.
The first version is being developed with practitioners, researchers and organisational operators, using ISO 45003 as an important foundation.
Significant methodology decisions, disagreements and revisions will be visible while the standard is being built.
An organization should not be able to define psychological safety entirely on its own terms and then declare that it has achieved it.
Comparable
Participating organizations would be assessed against the same core criteria, evidence requirements and renewal expectations.
Published guidance would account for differences in organizational size, industry, workforce structure and legal context without allowing every company to invent its own definition of success.
The goal is meaningful comparability - not context-blind scoring.
Revokable
A leadership retreat can produce agreement.
A standard asks what changed after everyone went home.
Under the proposed model, certification would need to be renewed regularly. Serious or repeated breaches could lead to corrective action, suspension or withdrawal under published rules.
Without a credible way to remove certification, a certificate risks becoming decoration.
2026: Write & Challenge the First Version
A working group of approximately 15 to 25 practitioners, researchers and organizational operators will examine the first draft.
Their task is not to endorse it.
It is to test its assumptions, challenge the methodology and identify where the standard could fail, mislead or create unintended consequences.
One of the hardest questions is already clear:
What should happen when a senior person breaches the standard?
The work is based in Switzerland. Members may participate from anywhere.
Phase 1
2027: Test it in 3 Organizations
The current plan is to work with one founding organization and two separate pilot organizations.
The founding organization will help test the practicality of the criteria while the first version is being developed.
The pilot organizations will then test the revised methodology in different organisational contexts.
Their results and implementation experience will provide the initial evidence and learning base for strengthening the standard before wider use.
Participation in the pilot will not guarantee certification.
Phase 2
2027 onwards: Revise, Publish & Expand
Following the pilot, the standard will be revised before being made available more widely.
This phase is expected to establish:
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Who is qualified to assess organizations
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How conflicts of interest are prevented
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Who makes certification decisions
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How decisions can be challenged
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When certification is renewed, suspended or withdrawn
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How the criteria, methodology and results are published
The timing of wider certification will depend on what the pilot evidence shows.
Over time, Vanguard Voices intends to explore alignment with recognised good-practice frameworks for standards, assurance and public accountability.
Phase 3
FROM WORKING GROUP TO PUBLIC STANDARD
Three phases, on the record.
The standard must be challenged, tested and revised before it can be opened more widely.
Here's what that looks like:
participation: TWO WAYS TO HELP SHAPE THE FIRST VERSION
For founders of 25-to-250 person companies
The first three organizations - one founding organization and two pilots - will help test the standard before a wider public launch.
This is for leaders willing to let the process reveal uncomfortable things - and prepared to treat certification as a test, not a badge.
Selection will consider:
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The organization’s readiness for meaningful scrutiny
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The size and accessibility of the leadership team
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The ability to include employee experience and organisational evidence
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The willingness to act on what the assessment reveals
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The value the organization’s context would add to the pilot
Registering interest does not commit you to anything.
It begins a conversation about whether your organization and the first cohort are a suitable match.
For practitioners and researchers
The group developing the first version will be curated to create useful disagreement - not assembled to produce easy consensus.
The first pool will include people with experience in areas such as:
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Human resources and people operations
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Organizational development
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Employee voice and speaking-up systems
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Occupational health and psychosocial risk
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Organisational accountability
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Agile and organisational change
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Assessment, assurance and standards development
The second pool will include researchers working on psychological safety, organizational behaviour, psychosocial risk, leadership response or ISO 45003 implementation.
You do not need to agree with the premise behind Vanguard Voices.
You do need to be willing to challenge it with evidence, experience and precision.
Applying does not guarantee a place. It puts you into the pool from which the working group will be curated.
The standard needs two kinds of early participants:
People willing to challenge how it is written.
Organizations willing to test whether it works.
FROM WORKING GROUP TO PUBLIC STANDARD
Three phases, on the record. No company has been certified yet.
That is the work.
Here's what that looks like:
2026: Write the First Version
A working group of 15 to 25 HR practitioners, researchers, and operators drafts the standard. The hardest question so far: what should trigger losing certification when a senior person breaks the standard. Based in Switzerland. Members from anywhere.
Phase 1
PHASE 2
2026 - 2027: Three companies measured first
The founding company shapes the standard alongside the working group and gets measured against the final version. Two pilot companies get measured separately to test the standard against different contexts. None of these three are paying customers; they are early-cohort participants whose results become the public proof base.
PHASE 3
2027 onwards: Open to any company
Annual renewal. Certification can be withdrawn publicly when standards are broken. Over time, alignment with ISEAL, the global body that oversees certification standards, so this sits alongside financial and environmental audits.
SUPPORTERS: WHY THIS WORK MATTERS
Early supporters commenting on the mission
Vanguard Voices is an important organization doing important work. If you don't yet know about Vanguard Voices, look into their work today for the good of your organization!
Ali Atkison
HRD* The Leadership Development Company
Vanguard Voices is not afraid to challenge and bring to light what we often want to keep under the carpet - and we need more of these types of conversations in the current world. Their mission is clear and urgent: to uplift psychological safety at work on a global scale
Patrycja Riera
Inclusion Advisor & Strategist
Creating a movement is not easy and takes someone like Jessica to put it all on the line. What she has already accomplished is impressive.
Justin Tomlinson
Author, Advisor, Thought Leader
Vanguard Voices is not afraid to challenge and bring to light what we often want to keep under the carpet—and we need more of these types of conversations in the current world. Their mission is clear and urgent.. I am excited to participate in the next chapter.
Jane Doe
HR Director at Tech Innovations Inc.
“Vanguard Voices is an important organization doing important work…. look into their work today for the good of your organization!”
John Smith
Patrycja Riera
CEO of Creative Solutions LLC
Vanguard Voices is not afraid to challenge and bring to light what we often want to keep under the carpet—and we need more of these types of conversations in the current world. Their mission is clear and urgent.. I am excited to participate in the next chapter.
Patrycja Riera
Inclusion Strategist & Advisor
Patrycja Riera
Common questions.
It is being designed as an independent assessment of whether an organisation meets public criteria for psychological safety at work.
The assessment would examine whether people can raise concerns, disagree, admit mistakes and challenge decisions - and what the organization does when they do.
It would use more than a single employee-survey score.
Under the proposed model, certification would need to be renewed regularly and could be suspended or withdrawn when published requirements are no longer met.
The standard is still being developed. No organization has yet been certified.
ISO 45003 provides international guidance for managing psychosocial risks within an occupational health and safety management system.
The Vanguard Voices draft uses that guidance as an important foundation while developing additional criteria focused specifically on employee voice, interpersonal risk, leadership response, retaliation and public accountability.
Vanguard Voices is independent of ISO.
The proposed Vanguard Voices certification should not be described as ISO certification.
Jessica Bensch
Founder of Vanguard Voices
What this work requires
The standard does not need polite agreement.
It needs practitioners willing to try to break it.
Researchers willing to challenge what the first version gets wrong.
Founders willing to let their organizations be examined before the answers are comfortable.
Vanguard Voices is currently founder-funded, without corporate sponsorship or revenue from certification clients.
That protects the early drafting process from sponsor pressure.
It does not, by itself, create independence.
Independence must be designed through balanced governance, published conflict-of-interest rules, qualified external assessment, separation of assessment from certification decisions and credible complaints and appeals processes.
Independence is not a slogan. It is an architecture.
That architecture must be in place before public certification begins.
THE VANGUARD VOICE, WEEKLY.
A letter from inside the building of the standard.
What we are seeing:
Patterns from practitioners, researchers and people who have lived the consequences of speaking up.
Specific. Unpolished. Unsanitized.
What is being decided:
The methodology choices.
The unresolved questions.
The disagreements changing the draft.
What is going into the first version - and what is being left out.
Straight to Your Inbox:
One letter each week.
Approximately 5 minutes to read.
For practitioners, founders, researchers and anyone who no longer believes courage can be the infrastructure.
