Right to be anonymous? Not at some company meetings

But after a year that includes divisive elections, nationwide protests for racial justice and a global pandemic that has driven much of the business world to remote employment, many employers are questioning the practice. Some businesses are completely considering getting rid of anonymous questions. Others investigate or edit potentially offensive persons.

As technology ventures begin a new year, advisers say, it’s more important than ever to make employees feel heard and to gather honest feedback from the bottom up to management. But the best way to do this is under discussion: Is anonymity the most effective mechanism for employees to draft grievances and get answers? Or does it hinder trust and transparency? Who benefits from it if names are added to questions or what is not related to it and who runs the risk of not speaking at all?

“My personal philosophy would be to get rid of them,” said Hubert Palan, CEO of Productboard, a San Francisco-based software company with about 230 employees. “When someone asks an anonymous question, it doesn’t really feel like transparency,” he said. “Are people afraid that it will lead to consequences or penalties if they do not ask it anonymously?”

Like many companies, Productboard held more events to make employees feel connected while working remotely. Now it is being considered whether we should allow anonymous questions, which are not currently moderated.

While most employees use their names, Mr. Palan noticed more anonymous questions as everyone is remote. He suspects this is because more than half of his employees are new – the company has set up 130 in the past year. Most questions are constructive, but Mr. Palan has seen outliers, including investigating details of other people’s compensation and someone complaining about a bad relationship with their manager.

“From the context, it was clear who it was,” he said. “You don’t seem to be solving anything in front of the whole business.”

Anonymous questions have been a major factor at Google for years and were generally productive, said Laszlo Bock, a former senior executive at the company. Using a popular internal tool, questions – with or without names – were visible to everyone during a meeting, whether it was a meeting of 20 people or a meeting. Posts could be submitted in advance, they were not compiled and the participants could “vote or vote down” a given position, he said. (Google, owned by Alphabet Inc.,

has stalled certain types of internal debates in recent years, but declined to comment on how it has handled anonymous employee questions since Mr. Bock did not leave in 2016.)

Anonymous questions at work have a lot in common with anonymity on the rest of the internet, Mr. Bock said. “People who are kind of scared, anxious or underrepresented or unpopular, or have unpopular views, can use anonymity to express their perspective,” he said. “The downside is that these systems seem to inevitably break down to the lowest common denominator of the discourse.”

Mr. Bock himself took care of anonymous questions. Humu, the beginning of human resources he now operates, allowed it earlier, but stops in June. He said the company wants to create an environment where people feel safe speaking their names, and that context is important when trying to deal with people’s problems.

“By not knowing who the person is, you often have an important context,” he said. “As one of the people answering on stage, you want to give a satisfactory answer.” For example, if someone asks a question about expenses, it helps you to know if they work in sales (where expenses are compounded) or in finance (where expenses are examined).

In one sensational incident last summer, LinkedIn hosted an employee’s town hall to discuss the aftermath of the murder of George Floyd. Microsoft employees Corp.

company that was allowed to ask questions anonymously – an option not offered before. Some took the opportunity to comment on what Ryan Roslansky, the company’s CEO, later called offensive and heinous.

“Those we had in presenter mode could not detect the comments in real time,” he wrote in an email to employees published to LinkedIn. ‘[W]e provides the ability to ask questions anonymously with the aim of creating a safe space for all. Unfortunately, this made it possible to add offensive remarks without liability. ”

A company spokesman said he did not intend to allow anonymous questions again.

If more companies get rid of anonymous questions, it is the under-represented groups and newer employees who suffer the most, said Akilah Cadet, CEO of Change Cadet. “The people who do not feel safe now will not say anything,” she said.

In the past year, dr. Cadet said she has directed requests from tech companies about how to deal with questions such as: “Why is there no white history month?”; “Why have conversations about diversity shifted to race instead of gender?”; and “Why is age no longer considered an issue of diversity?”

More recent inquiries are in the line of: “When does our company make their commitment to anti-racism that it made during the summer?”

On the other hand, others have wondered why they should continue to participate in diversity workshops.

She suggests that instead of filtering out insensitive questions, which may ultimately reflect the moderator’s bias, they can use it as an opportunity to state their values ​​on a given issue and whether they are the tone or the language. used is tolerated.

According to her, a company could say, for example: ‘We have received a remark indicating that our diversity efforts are no longer justified due to the new government. We all want to remind ourselves that this is a lifelong journey. ‘

Slido, a company that develops a software tool for hosting Q & As, says the number of sessions that make it possible has more than doubled to 110,000 in 2020, from 45,000 in 2019.

James Detert, a professor of leadership and organizational behavior at the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business, said all meetings have become the best form of communication since the pandemic.

“What people say when they say I need more communication from senior leaders is: ‘I need real opportunities to talk, to dialogue, to say things and to be heard. “I need to feel that you know who I am and what you care about,” he said. What they are not saying is, ‘Can we only have 80,000 town halls? ‘”

Instead, companies want to gather employees into smaller groups where they can feel more comfortable using their names. “If I’m a CEO, ‘he said,’ what’s important is that I will somehow get the unsophisticated truth. ‘

Jenny Dearborn, Chief Executive Officer of 650 Marketing Company Klaviyo Inc. for 650 people, who previously held a similar position at SAP provider, said she could not think of a worse time to get rid of anonymous questions from employees.

“I went through the dot com bust of the 2000s, the recession, and I’ve never felt it before,” she said. “Like, everything’s fine, but you scratch the surface and man oh man there’s anxiety.”

Then Mrs. Dearborn joined Klaviyo in August, she said she could feel the tension in the anonymous questions coming up on the company’s internal website. It could be posted at any time, without filtering, and was addressed with all hands during monthly meetings. She has seen everything from rations about compensation linked to the US dollar instead of bitcoin, to when the pandemic was over, to anger over alleged lack of action by the company during the Black Lives Matter protests.

Me. Dearborn says businesses need to be willing to respond to feedback they have asked of employees. “This is the beginning, not the end,” she said. To better understand what problems are prioritized among employees, she has implemented a voting function for topics that can be discussed during future all-encompassing events. She also began editing submissions for tone and consolidating the repetitions.

However, she did not demand that employees use their names, a management practice that she finds tone-deaf.

“You need to have a culture built on trust and transparency,” she said. “The way to do that is to make people feel safe where they are, not where you are.”