Glossary term
Escalation Procedure
Subject: Governance, Internal Control and Audit
Also known as: Escalation Matrix, Escalation Process
An escalation procedure sets out when and how an issue, incident or breach must be passed to a more senior person or body, within what time, and who must be told at each level.
Explanation
Problems are often noticed by junior staff who cannot fix them or do not know who should. An escalation procedure removes the guesswork. It names the triggers, such as a limit breach, a data incident, a customer complaint of a certain type or a suspected fraud, and the route upward, from line manager to head of function to executive committee to board or regulator. Each step carries a deadline. The escalation matrix is the table form of this: severity on one axis, level and time on the other. Good procedures also cover what happens if the first recipient does nothing, by offering a way to bypass them. Reporting lines for ethical concerns usually sit alongside, so that people can raise issues without going through someone implicated. Hours lost between noticing a problem and a senior person hearing of it are often what turns a small issue into a large one.
Example
At a payments company, the procedure says a system outage lasting over thirty minutes goes to the head of operations, over two hours to the chief executive, and any customer money affected to the compliance officer, who decides on notifying the regulator. When an outage hits the three-hour mark, the on-call manager follows each step and logs the times.
Not to be confused with
- Whistleblowing
- Escalation is the routine, expected upward route for issues. Whistleblowing is reporting outside or around the normal route, often about wrongdoing.