SEE impacts has a grievance mechanism built in, allowing you to engage with your stakeholders through a quality-assured platform called TELL US. Once enabled, you can publish it to your website or as a standalone site tailored to your company branding and identity. Through TELL US, you can disclose your impact assessments interactively allowing visitors to explore what you have already identified before informing you of further findings related to your business operations.

Once enabled, you can set up TELL US from the dashboard's left-side menu panel. Here, you can customize the text and information shown to visitors as well as assign relevant users to manage incoming submissions. You can customize it with your branding and company identity, such as logo, header, name, and colors.

If you opt to disclose your impact assessments for one or more units, these will be available to visitors through an interactive matrix of all the areas for each of the social, environmental, and economic bottom lines.

Any submission is automatically assigned to a random user amongst the users collectively managing submissions for the entire account and/or one unit. So for each unit there will be at least one manager as well as at least two account-level managers for the organisation, collectively forming the collection of users able to see submissions for the unit.

If the visitor is not sure which unit the submission relates to, it can be sent to headquarters (account-level managers) only.

When a submission is available for management, a notification bubble will appear to the logged-in user on the grievance mechanism menu button with the number of available submissions. The user can access them by navigating to the inbox.

Managing submissions

Each submission in the inbox is listed (by default) in order of urgency, defined by the submission's earliest deadline. The fourth column from the right indicates the days left until the next deadline. The number is green until the deadline has passed, after which it turns red. Deadlines are defined by the number of days left until the end of the period within which the following action should be completed, according to how these periods are set up in the TELL US settings.

You can click on the icon in the next column to open a conversation with the submitter. A first response should be given within a set timeframe defined in the TELL US settings. Once you send a response, the submitter will receive a notification email allowing them to log in to the TELL US platform, read the response, and follow the progress of their submission.

Click the icon in the next column to access the tasks associated with the submission. Task management for TELL US works exactly like tasks used for draft assessments (see related article below). It is important to vigilantly manage and track the management of submissions between the users assigned to it through this system, as this is the only way to alert other responsible users to the progress and steps needed to provide for an effective grievance mechanism.

Lastly, click the icon in the outer column to track and make conclusions about the submission. It may either be: received, in progress, dismissed, or resolved. If the submission should be logged to track the effectiveness of listed indicators, such as grievances in follow-up assessments, you must adjust the report type, relation type, and unit if required. Then, check to transfer to the log and make a revised text free of any personal or identifiable information about the submitter. This is to anonymize the content which can be viewed by any other SEE impacts user following up on assessments, since such other users may not be authorized to view the submission itself, but should only be made aware of the existence of it and a general description of its nature. Also, you can adjust the area and the bottom line if needed. For example, the submitter may have submitted a grievance about the right to water (human right), but at the same time it should also be logged as a grievance concerning water use on the environmental bottom line.

Use the green refresh button at the top to renew all updated information in the inbox. You may also use the search option. Completed submissions no longer in received or progress mode are only included in the inbox when selected in the search options.