Reporting Code of Conduct violations at Entrepreneur First

This piece goes through the actions you can take if someone breaks the Entrepreneur First Code of Conduct and what will happen when you do so.

Read here to understand what you can do to make EF a more inclusive environment.

Reporting at EF

Part of EF’s power is its community of outliers around the world. The EF team are the custodians and guardians of this community. We want to know if you are put in a position that makes you feel uncomfortable, or if you believe you have been discriminated against.

It can be hard to talk about this. It can feel uncomfortable, or can feel like you’re “making a fuss”. It can feel like a risk to report — you’re not sure how you will be perceived for highlighting an incident. However when it’s not flagged, we don’t know about it and it means we can’t make it better.

We hope you will join the EF team in committing to make our community the most inclusive and supportive that it can be. We all play a part in that every single day and it’s up to all of us to recognise and say when things go wrong.

How to report and what happens when you do

If you believe someone has broken the Code of Conduct, there are a variety of ways to report this.

1. Tell a member of the EF team.

Reach out to the member of the EF team that you know best, or feel free to reach out to any senior member of the team (my and Matt’s door is always open to talk about this). If you speak to an Associate, this will be shared with the country General Manager who will then work with you on how to proceed.

Occasionally, you may not want any action to be taken. We encourage you to still let us know what has happened. We will support your decision if you don’t want to take action, but it’s important that we know and can help prevent incidents happening again.

At times, it may be appropriate to take action and this will only be done if it’s something you feel comfortable with. If you do want action to be taken, your country General Manager will take a written report from you on what happened and also take a report from the other person involved to understand their point of view. If it’s deemed there was a Code of Conduct violation, depending on the severity of what happened the accused individual may be given a warning, asked to leave EF, or have EF’s support removed.

2. Anonymous external reporting programme — Talk to Spot

It’s useful and important for us to know when incidents happen, however minor. You may be a bystander to the event and feel it was against the Code of Conduct, or you may be the person who experienced the incident directly. By sharing this with us it allows us to take action to improve our culture.

How do you know if you should report or not? If you see something that makes you uncomfortable, you should report it. This helps strengthen our community and ensure it’s the kind of place everyone feels comfortable. You can see some examples of inappropriate behaviour here.

If you would like to use an external reporting system, we have set up an Entrepreneur First account with Talk to Spot. Talk to Spot is a chatbot that allows you to record and submit Code of Conduct violations, big or small. Its chatbot interface walks you through a selection of questions to help build your incident report. You can write a couple of words, or full paragraphs.

This link takes you to the EF Talk to Spot portal.

The Talk to Spot interface

You can report anonymously, or you can attach your name to your report. If you attach your name, we will get in touch to see if you would like action to be taken.

If you report anonymously, we can also talk to you anonymously through the app. We won’t know who you are, but we can clarify details and find out what steps you’d like to take.

We really appreciate all reports as this helps us to understand what issues (that might not be visible to the EF team) are present in the community.

The Talk to Spot submissions go to Danielle Silvestro (People Lead at EF).

Read more about Talk to Spot here.

Together we are formidable

If you have anything to report, however big or small, we really appreciate the time, mental energy and emotion it takes to do so. We will work with you to get to the appropriate outcome and ensure that this doesn’t effect or impact your relationship with us.

If you have any concerns or questions about this, please email us or find us on global slack :)

Alice & Matt

EF Co-founders