Where can an employee report undesired conduct?

Misconduct is usually reported internally by an employee, directly to the employer

An employee dealing with bullying, (sexual) harassment, aggression or discrimination typically reports this to their manager, to a trusted contact person, or to the reporting channel that the employer has set up for this purpose. Article 3 of the Working Conditions Act requires an employer to have a policy on psychosocial hazards at work, and this policy must in practice enable an employee to have somewhere to turn. The law does not prescribe a fixed form: it can be a trusted contact person, a separate reporting line, or the same channel used for integrity reports.

The latter is common: many organisations set up a single reporting point for both breaches and misconduct, precisely because an employee often does not immediately know which category something falls under. For the statutory timeframes, this distinction does make a real difference. The seven days for an acknowledgement of receipt and the three months for information about the assessment under the Whistleblower Protection Directive apply to reports of a breach as defined in that directive — not automatically to every incident of misconduct between colleagues. Whether a report of misconduct also counts as a breach depends on its nature and scope; a large part of reports of misconduct do not fall under this, and instead follow the occupational health and safety part of the policy, with the employer's own approach to this.

Where this comes from: Working Conditions Act Article 3 and the Whistleblower Protection Directive

Article 3 of the Working Conditions Act requires an employer to have a policy on psychosocial hazards at work, without prescribing a specific reporting channel. The Whistleblower Protection Directive establishes a separate statutory channel with fixed timeframes, but that channel is intended for reports of a breach as defined in that directive. Which of the two applies to a specific report of misconduct is for the employer and its reporting procedure to determine.