Archived version 1.7 of 29.10.2026. Current version: What Kalisme must never be used for
Kalisme is a psychological wellbeing app, not a medical one, that you give to your teams: 13 books to read or listen to, short practices and Kal, an AI that listens and answers. In this charter, “you” always means the organization that signs it, and “we” means Kalisme. Our ethics charter sets out what we forbid ourselves. This one sets out what you commit never to do with Kalisme, and the one thing you commit to doing. It is attached to your contract.
7 commitments, which Kalisme can enforce against the organisation.
All 13 Kalisme books open with the same three words: “You’re allowed to”. They are permissions, not instructions. And a permission is easy to turn around.
“You’re allowed to stop before you break” grants a person a right. Said by a manager to someone who has just broken down, the same sentence becomes “you should have known when to stop”, and a failure of the organization turns into a personal fault.
Handing out permissions to people whose workload, headcount and management practices stay exactly as they were widens the gap between what they feel entitled to and what they actually get. That gap is a well-known engine of cynicism.
We will not sell a tool that produces that. This charter is the only way we have of refusing it in writing, before the signature rather than after the incident.
The first 6 say what the organization forbids itself, the 7th what it does. All of them bind the signing organization, not its employees, and they neither replace nor lighten any employer obligation: those exist beforehand and outlive them.
The organization undertakes not to invoke Kalisme, its language or the fact that it has been provided, in order to justify, maintain or increase a workload, a pace, understaffing, working hours or a known exposure.
Saying that a period is hard, and offering Kalisme alongside other things, provided it is never presented as the answer to that difficulty, nor as something given in exchange.
Kalisme is secondary prevention: it equips a person to face their work situation, it never acts on the situation itself. Workload, hours and headcount belong to primary prevention, which only the employer can carry out.
The organization undertakes not to invoke Kalisme in order to get a person to tolerate abusive behavior: bullying, sexual harassment, humiliation, discrimination, verbal violence, exclusion, or repeated breaches of what the law allows.
Nothing. This is the one commitment with no gray area. Anything touching a report never goes through Kalisme, at any point, in any form.
The work says the exact opposite, and it says so in its titles: “You’re allowed to say no to what steals your peace”, “You’re allowed to choose who you keep close”. A text that teaches people to set limits, turned around to silence someone who has just set one, no longer serves what it was written for. And a report remains a report: it triggers the employer’s obligations, it is not settled by a reading.
The organization undertakes not to present Kalisme as a substitute for, a step before, or a filter ahead of medical, psychological or social support, and not to scale back an existing service on the grounds that Kalisme has been introduced.
Mentioning Kalisme alongside existing services, never ahead of them in a referral path.
Kalisme is not therapy, not a medical device, not a human service. Nobody at Kalisme is in contact with an employee. A consultation at the employee’s own request is a right, free, confidential, and does not go through the management line: nothing offered here shortens it or comes before it.
The organization undertakes not to use Kalisme, its language or its usage figures to attribute to individuals a difficulty that comes from how work is organized: workload, headcount, role clarity, support, recognition, management practices.
Noticing that a team is struggling and acting on the causes. Kalisme has nothing to say at that point, and must not appear there.
No aggregate usage figure is a health indicator, and no result from this tool, good or bad, says anything about how your work is organized. A good number is not a clean bill of health, a bad number accuses no one.
The organization undertakes not to turn Kalisme into an expected standard of behavior: emotional composure, a required display of positivity, or the implicit dismissal of disagreement, tiredness or anger.
Publicly standing by Kalisme as a choice the organization has made. Not expecting a way of being from its employees, and not quoting it to end a discussion.
Kalisme sets no level to reach and does not rank the people who use it: there is nothing in it for management to expect or assess. Requiring someone to appear at peace adds emotional labor to their load, which is precisely the burden these texts set out to lighten.
The organization undertakes not to use Kalisme, the activation of a seat or fluency in its language as a criterion for judging a person: performance review, appraisal, promotion, transfer, probation, team composition, or any career decision. No benefit, bonus, challenge, ranking or named communication is tied to usage.
Nothing. Usage and non-usage enter no assessment, in any form, including praise: publicly commending those who use it creates the same pressure as reproaching those who do not.
There are two safeguards here, and only one of them is technical.
The technical safeguard holds. No table, no key, no log links a person to any content or use of the app. That data does not exist. Nobody can produce it: not you, not us, not under a court order.
This safeguard has two reservations, which we would rather state here. The first: Kal has daily limits. To enforce them, the server that carries messages to Kal counts those messages, seat by seat, for the day. That count holds no message. It serves only the current day, and is then erased.
The second: when the organization invites by email, the seat table keeps, for each person, the address used to invite them, whether their access is open, since when, and on how many devices. Your portal shows you this information, along with invitations still pending during the thirty days they last. That is what lets you resend an invitation, and withdraw the seat of someone who leaves the organization. The address is erased when the access ends, or thirty days after the contract ends. Nothing done in the app appears there. With a team link, no address is kept.
The human safeguard, however, does not exist at all. A judgment needs no data: one sentence in a meeting is enough. A technical safeguard protects data. No safeguard can stop a sentence spoken in a meeting. That is exactly why this commitment is written down.
The organization undertakes not to present Kalisme as a sufficient answer to a risk it has already recorded in writing: a risk listed in its risk assessment, raised by its employee representatives, or flagged by its occupational health service. On those findings, and on those alone, it examines the causes and tells its employee representatives what it does with what it finds, whether or not Kalisme is deployed.
No new survey, no imposed deadline, no promised result, no reporting back to us. One word sets the boundary of this whole commitment: “already”. It covers only the findings you have written down yourself.
This is the only commitment in this charter that asks for action, and that is what keeps the charter from being a mere promise to do no harm. The first 6 stop Kalisme from being misused. They require nothing to be done: an organization can follow them to the letter and still sit on a finding it recorded itself. We do not check this commitment, and we could not, because we see nothing of what goes on inside your organization. We write it down because this charter is handed to the people who can.
WHAT THIS CHARTER DOES NOT ASK OF YOU
A charter nobody can apply ends up ignored, which is worse than no charter at all. So here are its limits.
Any employee of the organization, any employee representative, any occupational health professional, without going through their management line and without informing the organization.
Write to ethique@kalisme.com, stating that this is a report under this charter.
The message lands in a mailbox read by the founder of Kalisme, and by nobody else. This is not an emergency channel: if someone is in danger, the emergency services, occupational health or the right to raise an alert are what answer, not us.
We do not qualify any fact under employment law, we are no substitute for the labor inspectorate, the employee representatives or the occupational health service, and we protect nobody against their employer. What we can do is stop supplying a tool that is being used to do harm. That is all we can do, and we would rather write it down than let it be hoped for.
This charter would be dishonest if it bound only you.
This charter is attached to the Kalisme Pro contract and handed to employee representatives in line with the applicable employment law. Every change is dated, explained and published: a commitment is never quietly weakened. It can be clarified, never hollowed out. Version 1.7 of 29.10.2026: clarity only. The charter now says first what Kalisme is, and that “you” always means the organization that signs it; the section “Reporting a breach” refers to “the person making the report” instead of addressing them as “you”; the explanation of commitment 6 is split into short sentences, without changing its scope. None of the organization’s 7 commitments is changed or weakened. Version 1.6 of 16.10.2026: the contract now bears the name our general terms give it. None of the organization’s 7 commitments is weakened. Version 1.5 of 15.10.2026: commitment 6 is reworded without changing its scope and, like commitment 5, now refers to the people who use Kalisme. None of the organization’s 7 commitments is weakened. Version 1.4 of 08.10.2026: commitment 6 adds a second reservation, setting out what the seat table keeps and what the portal shows when the organization invites by email; our own commitment in return is corrected so that it no longer contradicts what the portal shows; commitment 5 is reworded without changing its scope. None of the organization’s 7 commitments is weakened. Version 1.3 of 29.09.2026: acknowledging a report no longer comes with a set deadline, terminating after a well-founded report becomes an option rather than an obligation, and handing the charter to employee representatives follows the organization’s employment law. This translation is provided for information only: in the event of any discrepancy, the French version alone prevails.
Kalisme · Hakan Kaynar · version 1.7, October 2026.