Right to be anonymous? Not at some company meetings

But after a year that included divisive elections, nationwide protests for racial justice and a global pandemic that has led 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 review or edit potentially offensive material.

As tech companies begin a new year, advisors say, it’s more important than ever to make employees feel heard and to gather honest bottom-up feedback for management. But the best way to do that is to debate: Is anonymity the most effective mechanism for employees to voice their grievances and get answers? Or does it prevent trust and transparency? Who benefits when names are – or not – attached to sensitive issues and who may not speak at all?

“My personal philosophy would be to get rid of it,” said Hubert Palan, managing director of Productboard, a San Francisco-based product management software company with approximately 230 employees. “If someone asks an anonymous question, it doesn’t really sound like transparency,” he said. “Are people afraid that if they ask non-anonymously, it will lead to repercussions or punishment?”

Like many businesses, Productboard has hosted more hands-on meetings to make employees feel connected while working remotely. Now he’s wondering whether to continue to allow anonymous questions, which are currently not moderated.

While most employees use their names, Mr. Palan has noticed more anonymous questions since everyone left remotely. He suspects that’s because more than half of its employees are new – the company has recruited 130 remotely over the past year. Most of the questions are constructive, but Mr. Palan saw some outliers including compensation inquiries from other people and one person complaining about having a bad relationship with their manager.

“From the context, it was obvious who it was,” he said. “It doesn’t seem like something you solve in front of the whole company.”

Anonymous questions have been a staple at Google for years and have been generally productive, said Laszlo Bock, the company’s former senior human resources executive. Using a popular internal tool, questions – with or without a name – were visible to everyone in a meeting, whether it was a 20-person meeting or a full-hands meeting. Messages could be submitted in advance, they were not organized, and participants could “vote for or against” any one, he said. (Google, owned by Alphabet Inc.,

has curbed some types of internal debate in recent years, but declined to comment on how it has handled anonymous employee questions 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 in some way scared or anxious or under-represented or unpopular, or who have unpopular views, can use anonymity to express their point of view,” he said. “The downside is that these systems inevitably seem to degrade towards the lowest common denominator of discourse.”

Mr Bock himself is bitten by anonymous questions. Humu, the human resources startup he now runs, was allowing them but shut down in June. He said the company wants to create an environment in which people feel safe to express themselves using their name, and that context is important in trying to address people’s concerns.

“By not knowing who the person is, you often miss important context,” he said. “As one of the people on stage to answer, you want to give a satisfying answer.” If someone asks about expenses, for example, it’s helpful to know if they work in sales (where expenses are accrued) or finance (where expenses are studied).

In a high-profile incident last summer, LinkedIn hosted a town hall of employees to discuss the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder. Microsoft employees Corp.

a company owned by the 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 appalling.

“Those of us who were in presenter mode weren’t able to follow comments in real time,” he wrote in an employee email posted on LinkedIn. “[W]We have offered the opportunity to ask questions anonymously with the intention of creating a safe space for everyone. Unfortunately, this allowed offensive comments to be added without liability. ”

A company spokesperson said he had no plans to re-authorize anonymous questions.

If more companies get rid of anonymous questions, underrepresented groups and new hires will suffer the most, said Akilah Cadet, CEO of diversity and organizational development consultancy Change Cadet. “People who don’t feel safe now won’t say anything,” she says.

Over the past year, Ms Cadet said she has responded to requests from tech companies on how to deal with questions such as’ Why isn’t there a White History Month? ? ”; “Why have conversations about diversity shifted to race rather than gender?”; and “Why is age not taken into account more as a diversity issue?”

The most recent requests have been of the type “When is our company meeting its anti-racism commitment over the summer?”

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

She suggests that instead of filtering out callous questions, which might end up reflecting moderator biases, companies can use them as an opportunity to state their values ​​about a given issue and whether they tolerate the tone or language used.

For example, she says, a company might say, “We received a comment that our diversity efforts were no longer warranted due to the new administration. We want to remind everyone that this is a trip of a lifetime. “

Slido, a company that develops a software tool for hosting corporate questions and answers, says the number of hands-on sessions it facilitates has more than doubled to 110,000 in 2020, up from 45,000 in 2019.

James Detert, professor of leadership and organizational behavior at the Darden School of Business at the University of Virginia, said show of hands has become the go-to form of communication since the start of 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 say things. ‘be heard. I need to feel like you know who I am and that you care, ”he said. “What they don’t say is, ‘Could we have just 80,000 town halls?'”

Rather, companies might want to bring employees together in small groups where they would feel more comfortable using their names. “If I’m a CEO,” he said, “what’s important is that I sort of get the unfailing truth.”

Jenny Dearborn, director of human resources at 650-person digital marketing start-up Klaviyo Inc., who previously held a similar position at enterprise software vendor SAP, said she couldn’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 alright but you scratch the surface and man oh man is there anxiety.”

When Ms Dearborn joined Klaviyo in August, she said she could sense the tension in anonymous questions coming from an internal company web page. They could be viewed at any time, unfiltered, and were discussed in monthly meetings with all hands. She’s seen it all, from rants about compensation tied to the US dollar instead of bitcoin, at the end of the pandemic, to anger at the company’s alleged lack of action during protests. Black Lives Matter.

Ms. Dearborn says companies need to be prepared to respond to feedback they have solicited from employees. “This is the beginning, not the end,” she said. To better understand priority issues with employees, she implemented a voting feature for topics that could be discussed in future meetings by show of hands. She also started editing submissions for tone and consolidating repetitive submissions.

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

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