Speak Up

Speak Up Logo

Inspiration

Daria Storozhkova is a Masters in Management student at London Business School who interned in the First Asian Department in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation. While interning, she was told that "she should better find a husband rather than become a diplomat". This is a form of harassment that Daria faced herself in the workplace. There has always existed harassment in the workplace - it could be caused by either males or females. This is a problem that is most prevalent in the Tech and Investment Banking Industries due to the skewed ratios in these places. Advait Jayant, Abhinav Bhardwaj, Anna Plaschke, and Daria Storozhkova are four Masters students from LBS who are passionate about making the workplace safer.

What it does

Speak Up is a B2B solution for employers to be able to create their organisation into a safer place. The solution allows employees to anonymously (if they choose) report incidents of harassment. The consumer-facing platform provides the victim the opportunity to chat with the investigator and ask for psychological and emergency reports. The employer-facing platform allows the administrators the options to send confirmation email, notify the reporter via email, ask for external consultation, or close the report. This platform also showcases the data of cases over the past month, distribution of cases, and the trends of harassment.

How we built it

We prototyped the entire application in Figma. The slides were created in Microsoft Powerpoint and Canva. The final video was edited in Final Cut Pro.

Challenges we ran into

As none of us are experts in prototyping, it took us a while to figure out how to use Figma.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

By the end of the hackathon, we were able to create a fully-pitchable prototype of Speak Up - an application that serves an absolute necessity in the marketplace. We are proud to be able to pitch a solution to an age-old problem that causes employees stress and poses harm towards their mental health.

What we learned

We learned how to develop an idea along with its prototype in the span of less than 48 hours.

What's next for Speak Up

Market Extension: Speak Up application is firstly oriented on the UK market, however the firm wants to extend its product to other European countries first and then penetrate other markets that face severe harassment problems, such as Russia and India.

New services: While penetrating the market, Speak Up offers B2B services to businesses and may also sell its tailor-made application to companies to work under the firm’s brand. In the future Speak Up firm will provide new B2C services to individual users to write online reports and seek legal and psychological support. In such case Speak Up will work as a platform for connecting users, lawyers and psychologists as well as users and their firms.