Right to be anonymous? Not at some company meetings

But after a year that saw segregated elections, nationwide protests for racial justice and a global pandemic that put much of the business world into remote employment, many employers are questioning the practice. . Some companies are considering getting rid of anonymous issues completely. Others screen or edit potentially offensive ones.

As tech companies begin a new year, councilors say, it ‘s more important than ever to make employees feel heard and to get honest, bottom – up ideas. collected above for management. But the best way to do that is to debate: Is anonymity the most effective way for employees to raise grievances and get responses? Or does it undermine trust and transparency? Who benefits when names – or not – are linked to sensitive issues and who is at risk of not speaking at all?

“My personal philosophy is to get rid of them,” said Hubert Palan, chief executive of Productboard, a San Francisco-based product management software company with about 230 employees. “If someone asks an anonymous question, it doesn’t feel like publicity at all,” he said. “Are people afraid that if they ask anonymously, it will bring victory or punishment? ”

Like many companies, Productboard has held more meetings to make employees feel connected while working remotely. It now measures whether to continue to allow anonymous queries, which are not currently customized.

While most employees use their names, Mr. Palan has noticed more anonymous questions since everyone went isolated. He suspects that more than half of its employees are new – the company has laid off 130 over the past year. Most questions are helpful, but Mr. Palan has seen visitors, including investigations specifically into other people’s compensation and someone complaining that they have a bad relationship with their manager. .

“From the context, it was clear who he was,” he said. “It doesn’t look like that’s something you would release in front of the whole company.”

Anonymous queries have been Google’s mainstay for years and were generally fertile, said Laszlo Bock, who was chief executive of human resources with the company. Using a popular indoor device, questions – with or without names – were visible to everyone in a meeting, whether it was a 20-person meeting or a full-time gathering. Posts could be pre-submitted, unsaved and servers could “upvote or downvote” anyone, he said. (Google, with the Alphabet Inc., Inc.

has banned certain types of internal debates in recent years, but declined to comment on how it has handled anonymous queries from staff since Mr Bock left in 2016.)

There are many anonymous issues at work with anonymity on the rest of the internet, Mr. Bock said. “People who feel a kind of fear or anxiety or underrepresentation or neutrality, or who have neutral, non-judgmental ideas can use it to express their vision,” he said. “The disadvantage is that these systems appear to be declining to some extent to the lowest denominator type. ”

Mr Bock himself has recalled anonymous questions. Humu, the start-up human resources facility it now runs, used to let go but stopped in June. He said the company wants to create an environment where people feel safe talking while using their names, and that context is important when trying to deal with human concerns.

“Without knowing who it is, you often don’t have an important context,” he said. “As one of the people on stage responding, you want to provide a satisfying response. “If someone raises a question about costs, for example, it helps to find out if they work in sales (where costs are racked up) or in finance (where costs are investigated ).

At one famous event last summer, LinkedIn hosted a staff town hall to discuss the aftermath of George Floyd ‘s assassination. Microsoft employees Corp.

a property company was allowed to ask questions anonymously – an option not previously offered. Some took the opportunity to comment that the company’s CEO, Ryan Roslansky, later called offensive and horrific.

“Those of us in presenter mode couldn’t follow the comments in real time,” he wrote in a staff email published to LinkedIn. “[W]it offered the ability to ask questions anonymously with the intention of creating a safe space for all. Unfortunately, that made it possible to add offensive comments without accountability. ”

A company spokesman said they do not intend to allow anonymous questions again.

If more companies get rid of anonymous issues, underrepresented organizations and newer employees will suffer the most, said Akilah Cadet, CEO of diversity and organizational development consulting firm Change Cadet. “People who don’t feel safe now say nothing,” she said.

Over the past year, Dr Cadet has said that she has received requests from tech companies about how to handle questions such as “Why not a white history month? ”; “Why have conversations about diversity shifted to race instead of gender?”; and “Why is age not considered a diversity issue? ”

More recent questions have been like “When is our company doing well on its anti-religious commitment over the summer?”

On the flip side, others have questioned why they need to continue to participate in diversity workshops.

She suggests that, instead of filtering out unconscious issues, which may reflect bias from the moderator, companies can use them as an opportunity to express their values ​​on a particular issue, and whether they accept the tone or language used.

For example, she said, a company could say: “We received a view that our diversity efforts were no longer needed as a result of the new administration. We want to remind everyone that this is a lifelong journey. “

Slido, a company that develops a software tool for hosting corporate Q & As, says the number of hands-on sessions it will enable will more than double to 110,000 in 2020 from 45,000 in 2019

James Detert, who is a professor of leadership and organizational behavior at the University of Virginia’s Darden Business School, said hands-on meetings have become a means of communication since the pandemic struck.

“What people say when they say I need more communication from senior management is, ‘I need real opportunities to talk, communicate, say things and be heard. I need to realize that you know who I am and that you care, ”he said. “They don’t say: ‘Could we just have 80,000 town halls?’ ”

Instead companies may want to gather employees into smaller groups where they feel more comfortable using their names. “If I am a Chief Executive,” he said, “the important thing is that I get the undeveloped truth in some way.”

Jenny Dearborn, chief people officer at 650-person digital marketing startup Klaviyo Inc., formerly at a similar position at SAP business software provider, said she can’t think of a worse time to get rid of anonymous queries from hackers. -work.

“I’ve been through the dot-com chaos of the 2000s, the recession, and I never felt this,” she said. “Of course, everything is fine but you scratch the surface and one oh man is a concern. ”

When Ms Dearborn joined Klaviyo in August, she said she could feel the tension in the anonymous questions coming through an insider company webpage. They could be posted at any time, unprepared, and dealt with at daily monthly meetings. She saw everything from rants about compensation being tied to the U.S. dollar instead of bitcoin, to when the pandemic was over, to anger about a lack of proven action on the part of the company during Black Lives Matter protests.

Ms Dearborn says companies need to be prepared to get feedback they have asked for from employees. “That is the beginning, not the end,” she said. To better understand staff priority issues, she implemented an advanced feature for topics that could be addressed at manual meetings. She also began preparing applications for tone and reinforcing the repetitive ones.

However, she did not ask employees to use their names, a management practice she finds deaf.

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