Right to be anonymous? Not at some company meetings

But after a year of divisive elections, nationwide protests for racial justice and a global pandemic that drove much of the corporate world into remote employment, many employers are questioning the practice. Some companies are considering cutting out anonymous questions altogether. Others screen or edit potentially offensive messages.

As technology companies enter a new year, advisers 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 up for debate: Is anonymity the most effective mechanism for employees to voice grievances and get answers? Or does it inhibit trust and transparency? Who benefits if names are attached or not to sensitive questions and who is at risk of saying nothing at all?

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

Like many companies, Productboard has held more all-hands meetings to make employees feel connected while working remotely. Now it is being considered whether anonymous questions, which are currently not moderated, should continue to be allowed.

While most employees use their names, Mr. Palan has noticed more anonymous questions since everyone got away. He suspects this is because more than half of its employees are new – the company has brought in 130 remotely in the past year. Most questions are constructive, but Mr. Palan has seen outliers, including asking for specific information about other people’s compensation and someone complaining about having a bad relationship with their manager.

“It was clear from the context who it was,” he said. “That doesn’t seem like something you can solve for the entire company.”

Anonymous queries were a staple of Google for years and were generally prolific, said Laszlo Bock, a former senior HR manager at the company. Using a popular internal tool, questions – named or unnamed – were visible to everyone in a meeting, whether it was a 20-person meeting or an all-hands meeting. Messages could be submitted in advance, they were not composed, and visitors could “upvote or downvote” any message, he said. (Google, owned by Alphabet Inc.,

has slowed down certain types of internal debates in recent years, but declined to comment on how it has handled anonymous employee inquiries since Mr. Bock left in 2016.)

Anonymous questions at work have a lot in common with anonymity on the rest of the Internet, said Mr. Bock. “People who feel a little scared or 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 inevitably to be relegated to the lowest common denominator of the discourse.”

Mr. Bock has soured himself on anonymous questions. Humu, the human resources startup he now runs, used to allow them, but closed in June. He said the company wants to create an environment where people feel safe to speak up while using their name, and that context is important in addressing people’s concerns.

“Not knowing who the person is often lacks important context,” he said. “When one of the people on stage answers, you want to give a satisfying answer.” For example, if someone asks about expenses, it helps to know whether he or she works in sales (where expenses are earned) or finance (where expenses are researched).

During a high-profile incident last summer, LinkedIn hosted an employee town hall to discuss the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder. Employees at Microsoft Corp.

owned company could ask questions anonymously – an option not previously offered. Some took the opportunity to comment that the company’s CEO, Ryan Roslansky, later called insulting and appalling.

“Those of us in presentation mode couldn’t follow the comments in real time,” he wrote in an email to employees published on LinkedIn.[W]e offered the opportunity to ask questions anonymously with the aim of creating a safe space for everyone. Unfortunately, that made it possible to add insulting comments without being accountable. ”

A company spokesperson said it does not intend to allow anonymous queries again.

As more companies get rid of anonymous questions, underrepresented groups and newer employees will suffer the most, said Akilah Cadet, CEO of Change Cadet’s diversity and organizational development consultancy. “The people who don’t feel safe now won’t say anything,” she said.

Dr. Cadet said she has been handling requests from technology companies over the past year about how to deal with questions such as “Why isn’t there a White History Month?”; “Why have conversations about diversity shifted by race rather than by gender?”; and “Why is age no longer considered a diversity issue?”

More recent questions have been along the lines of “When will our company get after the anti-racism pledge it made over 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 that could end up reflecting the moderator’s bias, companies can use them as an opportunity to bring out their values ​​on a particular topic and whether to use the tone or language being used.

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

Slido, a company developing a software tool for hosting business Q & As, says the number of all-hands sessions it facilitates 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 Darden School of Business at the University of Virginia, said all-handed meetings have become the go-to form of communication since the pandemic hit.

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

Companies would instead want to group employees into smaller groups where they may feel more comfortable using their name. “If I’m a CEO,” he said, “it’s important that I somehow understand the plain truth.”

Jenny Dearborn, chief people officer at Klaviyo Inc., a digital marketing startup with 650 employees, who previously held a similar position at enterprise software provider SAP, said she can’t think of a worse time to deal with anonymous employee inquiries.

“I’ve been through the internet crisis of the 2000s, the recession, and I’ve never felt this before,” she said. “Like, everything is fine but you’re scratching the surface and man oh man is there fear.”

When Ms. Dearborn joined Klaviyo in August, she said she could feel the tension in the anonymous questions that came through an internal company web page. They could be posted at any time, unfiltered, and were addressed with all hands at monthly meetings. She saw everything from rants about compensation pegged to the US dollar instead of bitcoin, to when the pandemic would be over, to anger over alleged inaction on the part of the company during the Black Lives Matter protests.

Ms. Dearborn says companies should be willing to respond to feedback they have asked from employees. “That’s the beginning, not the end,” she said. To better understand which issues were a priority for employees, she implemented an upvoting feature for topics that could be covered with all hands at future meetings. She also started editing entries for show and consolidating the repetitive ones.

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

“You have to 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.”