Right to be anonymous? Not at some business meetings

But after a year that included divisive elections, national protests for racial justice, and a global pandemic that drove much of the business world to remote work, many employers question the practice. Some companies are considering getting rid of anonymous issues altogether. Others project or edit other potentially offensive ones.

As technology companies start a new year, according to advisors, it’s more important than ever to make employees feel listened to and 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 file complaints and get responses? Or does it inhibit trust and transparency? Who benefits when names are – or are not – linked to delicate questions and who runs the risk of not speaking at all?

“My personal philosophy would be to get rid of it,” said Hubert Palan, CEO of Productboard, a San Francisco-based product management software company with about 230 employees. “If someone asks an anonymous question, it really doesn’t seem transparent,” he said. “Are people afraid that, if they ask for it anonymously, it will have repercussions or punishments?”

Like many companies, Productboard has held more hand-held meetings to make employees feel connected while working remotely. It is now being considered whether to allow anonymous questions, which are currently not moderated.

While most employees use their names, Mr. Palan has noticed more anonymous questions since everyone walked away. He suspects it’s because more than half of its employees are new – the company got 130 remotely over the past year. Most questions are constructive, but Mr. Palan has seen extraordinary values, including inquiries about details about other people’s compensation and someone complaining about having a bad relationship with their manager.

“From the context, it was obvious who he was,” he said. “It looks like you’re not fixing this in front of the whole company.”

Anonymous questions were a staple at Google for years and were generally productive, said Laszlo Bock, the company’s former senior human resources executive. Using a popular internal tool, questions (with or without names) were visible to everyone in a meeting, whether it was a 20-person meeting or a hand-held meeting. Posts could be submitted in advance, were unselected, and attendees could “vote positive or against,” he said. (Google, owned by Alphabet Inc.,

has slowed down certain types of internal debates in recent years, but has declined to comment on how he has handled employee anonymous 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 scared, anxious or under-represented or unpopular, or have unpopular opinions, can use anonymity to express their perspective,” he said. “The downside is that these systems inevitably seem to degrade to the lowest common denominator of discourse.”

Mr. himself. Bock has been aggravated by anonymous questions. Humu, the human resources start-up he now runs, used to allow them, but stopped in June. He said the company wants to create an environment where people feel safe speaking while using their name, and that context is important when trying to address people’s concerns.

“By not knowing who the person is, you often lack an important context,” he said. “Because one of the people responds on stage, you want to give a satisfactory answer.” If someone asks a question about expenses, for example, it will help to know if they are working in sales (where expenses are extended) or in finance (where expenses are investigated).

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

owner companies were allowed to ask questions anonymously, an option not previously offered. Some took the opportunity to comment that the company’s general manager, Ryan Roslansky, later considered offensive and frightening.

“Those of us who are in presenter mode were unable to track comments in real time,” he wrote in an email to employees posted on LinkedIn. “[W]I offered the opportunity to ask questions anonymously with the intention of creating a safe space for everyone. Unfortunately, this allowed us to add offensive comments without accountability. ”

A company spokesman said he has no plans to allow anonymous questions again.

If more companies are eliminated from anonymous questions, the least represented groups and newer employees will suffer the most, said Akilah Cadet, CEO of the consulting firm Change Cadet, which is dedicated to diversity and organizational development. “People who don’t feel safe now won’t say anything,” he said.

Over the past year, Dr. Cadet said she has filed applications from technology companies on how to handle questions such as “Why is there no month in white history?”; “Why have conversations about diversity changed to race instead of gender?”; and “Why isn’t age considered a diversity issue?”

The most recent queries have been in the line of “When does our company fulfill its commitment to the anti-racism it made during the summer?”

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

He suggests that instead of filtering insensitive questions, which could end up reflecting the moderator’s bias, companies can use them as an opportunity to expose their values ​​on a particular topic and whether they tolerate the tone or language used.

For example, he said, a company might say, “We received a comment indicating that our efforts on diversity were no longer justified because of the new administration. We want to remind everyone that this is a journey of all life “.

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

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

“What people say when they say I need more communication from top leaders is,‘ I need real opportunities to talk, dialogue, say things, and be heard. I need to have the feeling that you know who the hell I am and that you care, “he said.” What they don’t say is, ‘Could we have 80,000 town halls?’ ”

Companies may want to bring employees together in smaller groups where they can feel more comfortable using their names. “If I’m a CEO,” he said, “the important thing is that somehow you get the truth without varnishing it.”

Jenny Dearborn, director of the 650-person digital marketing startup Klaviyo Inc., which previously held a similar position to business software vendor SAP, said it doesn’t think of a worse time to get rid of anonymous employee questions. .

“I’ve experienced the common denominator of the 2000s, the recession, and I’ve never felt it,” he said. “Anyway, everything is fine, but the surface is scratched and man, oh man, there’s anxiety.”

When Ms. Dearborn joined Klaviyo in August, she said she could feel the tension of the anonymous questions that were being raised through an internal company website. They could be posted at any time, unfiltered, and addressed monthly meetings by hand. It ranged from US dollar-related compensation spending instead of bitcoin, to when the pandemic would end, to rage over the company’s alleged inaction during Black Lives Matter protests. .

Ms. Dearborn says companies need to be prepared to act on the feedback they have asked employees. “This is the beginning, not the end,” he said. To better understand what issues were prioritized with employees, he implemented an optimistic function for issues that could be addressed at future meetings by hand. He also began editing tone submissions and consolidating repetitions.

However, he did not require employees to use their names, a management practice that seems deaf to him.

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