Right to be anonymous? Not at some company meetings

But after a year that included a divisive election, national protests for racial justice and a global pandemic that has driven much of the business world to remote work, many employers are questioning the practice. Some companies are considering getting rid of anonymous questions altogether. Others are filtering or editing potentially offensive items.

As technology companies embark on a new year, consultants say, it is more important than ever to make employees feel heard and get honest, bottom-up feedback to management. But the best way to do this is up for debate: is anonymity the most effective mechanism for employees to raise complaints and get answers? Or does it inhibit trust and transparency? Who benefits when names are – or are not – linked to sensitive issues and who is at risk of not speaking out?

“My personal philosophy would be 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 really look like transparency,” he said. “Are people afraid that if they ask in a non-anonymous way, it will lead to repercussions or punishments?”

Like many companies, Productboard held more general meetings to make employees feel connected while working remotely. It is now evaluating whether to continue allowing anonymous questions, which are currently unmoderated.

While most employees use their names, Mr. Palan has noticed more anonymous questions since everyone was remote. He suspects it is because more than half of its employees are new – the company hired 130 remotely last year. Most of the questions are constructive, but Mr. Palan found discrepancies, including investigations into details about other people’s compensation and someone complaining about having a bad relationship with his manager.

“From the context, it was obvious who it was,” he said. “This does not seem to be something that you solve in front of the entire company.”

Anonymous questions have been a staple at Google for years and have generally been productive, said Laszlo Bock, a former senior human resources executive at the company. Using a popular internal tool, questions – with or without names – were visible to everyone at a meeting, be it a 20-person meeting or a general meeting. The posts could be sent in advance, they were not curated and participants could “vote positively or negatively” any of them, he said. (Google, owned by Alphabet Inc.,

has restricted certain types of internal debates in recent years, but has declined to comment on how it has dealt with anonymous employee issues since Mr. Bock left in 2016.)

Anonymous questions at work have a lot in common with anonymity on the rest of the Internet, Bock said. “People who feel a little scared or anxious or underrepresented or unpopular, or who have unpopular views, can use anonymity to express their perspective,” he said. “The disadvantage is that these systems seem to inevitably degrade to the lowest common denominator of discourse.”

Mr. Bock himself was irritated by anonymous questions. Humu, the human resources startup he now runs, used to allow, but stopped in June. He said the company wants to create an environment where people feel safe to speak when using their names, and that context is important when trying to address people’s concerns.

“Because I don’t know who the person is, an important context is often missing,” he said. “As one of the people on the stage responding, you want to give a satisfactory answer.” If someone questions expenses, for example, it helps to know whether they work with sales (where expenses are accumulated) or with finances (where expenses are calculated).

In a high-profile incident last summer, LinkedIn received a city official to discuss the consequences of George Floyd’s murder. Microsoft employees Corp.

The owner company was allowed to ask questions anonymously – an option not previously offered. Some took the opportunity to make comments that the company’s CEO, Ryan Roslansky, later called offensive and terrible.

“Those of us in presenter mode were not able to track comments in real time,” he wrote in an email to employees that was posted on LinkedIn. “[W]and we offer the possibility to ask questions anonymously with the intention of creating a safe space for everyone. Unfortunately, this made it possible to add offensive comments without accountability. ”

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

If more companies get rid of anonymous questions, under-represented groups and younger employees will suffer the most, said Akilah Cadet, CEO of Change Cadet, an organization and diversity and development consultancy. “People who don’t feel safe now are not going to say anything,” she said.

Last year, Dr. Cadet said she received requests from technology companies about how to deal with questions like “Why isn’t there a month of white history?”; “Why did conversations about diversity change to race instead of gender?”; and “Why isn’t age being considered an issue of diversity?”

The most recent queries have been of the type “When is our company fulfilling its commitment to anti-racism made over the summer?”

On the other hand, others are wondering why they need to continue participating in workshops on diversity.

She suggests that instead of filtering out insensitive questions, which may end up reflecting the moderator’s bias, companies can use them as an opportunity to declare their values ​​on a given subject and tolerate the tone or language being used.

For example, she said, a company might say: “We received a comment that indicated that our diversity efforts were no longer guaranteed due to the new management. We want to remind everyone that this is a journey of a lifetime. “

Slido, a company that develops a software tool to host corporate questions and answers, says the number of general sessions it facilitates has more than doubled to 110,000 in 2020 from 45,000 in 2019

James Detert, professor of leadership and organizational behavior at the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business, said that general meetings have become the mandatory form of communication since the pandemic’s arrival.

“What people are saying when they say I need more communication from senior leaders is: ‘I need real opportunities to speak, talk, say things and be heard. I need to have the feeling that you know who the hell I am and you care, ‘”he said. “What they are not saying is, ‘Could we only have 80,000 city halls?’ “

Instead, companies may want to bring employees into smaller groups, where they feel more comfortable using their names. “If I’m a CEO,” he said, “what matters is that I understand the raw truth in some way.”

Jenny Dearborn, personal director of the 650-person digital marketing startup Klaviyo Inc., who previously held a similar position at business software provider SAP, said she can’t think of a worse time to get rid of anonymous employee questions. .

“I went through the dot-com crisis of the 2000s, the recession, and I never felt that,” she said. “Like, it’s okay, but you scratch the surface and man, man, there’s anxiety.”

When Ms. Dearborn joined Klaviyo in August, she said she could feel the tension in the anonymous questions coming from an internal company page. They could be posted at any time, without filters, and were addressed at general monthly meetings. She saw everything from complaints about compensation linked to the US dollar instead of bitcoin, to when the pandemic would end, to anger over the company’s alleged lack of action during the Black Lives Matter protests.

Ms. Dearborn says that companies need to be prepared to act on the feedback they have requested from employees. “This is the beginning, not the end,” she said. To better understand which issues were a priority for employees, she implemented a favorable voting feature for topics that could be addressed at future general meetings. She also started editing submissions for tone and consolidating repetitions.

She did not, however, require employees to use their names, a managerial practice she considers deaf.

“You must 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.”