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> and let them know how many people are in the team receiving the question being asked, so they understand their level of safety How do you prevent attacks that involve the employer having 209 fake respondents, and 1 actual respondent?
> and let them know how many people are in the team receiving the question being asked, so they understand their level of safety How do you prevent attacks that involve the employer having 209 fake respondents, and 1 actual respondent?
It’s a fair concern that’s certainly on our very near roadmap. We’re adding an MFA confirmation on each phone number which helps validate respondents. Aware that it’s not a bulletproof solution, but it will close the gap another few inches.
However, the general consensus is distrust when it comes to that, especially if things are not going well. You can claim how much you want that it's anonymous, people won't believe you.
Your peer Mickey Mouse gave you a rating of 1/5 stars. Your rating is now 1/5 stars. Now we can fire you legally without repercusions. Mickey Mouse's feedback is fully anonymous, and real. Trust me, this is good for you.
In all the testing we've done; the feedback is generally honest but professional. The more pointed feedback is often a call for help from the team, and the manager needs help/training to improve. For example, in one test, we uncovered a manager forcing their team to work insane hours, on their days off, etc., without any additional pay or time in lieu - IMO, they deserved to be fired but were just given coaching.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ahaha! Fair call. We're looking to support WhatsApp but SMS is handy because it's not an org owned platform. I've previously been in large corporates where chat logs etc. are maintained and might present a risk to the end user that's beyond our control. Also, response rates are way, way higher through SMS than any other delivery method.
integration with imessage would be the most valuable. where internet is strong, but cell signal is weak, SMS is really brutal. that's my life. any data that can't flow "over the internet" is just ridiculous at this point
How do you find the data is used? Do people actually change their behaviour based on feedback?
The best companies using it talk to the comment themes (always starting with the most pointed and critical comments) and discuss the details around them and how they're going to remediate the issue, or take advantage of the opportunity.
The worst ones ignore the hard comments. This guts the trust the staff have in the exec team (because the staff WILL talk about what they say in it) and the culture of the company is impacted.
The companies who genuinely buy into this, change their workplaces quite a bit over time. From micro things like the wrong coffee in the kitchen, through to how they're being treated by managers, how the team works together or how they create their product or service.
I come from a professional services background and the people closest to the clients had the best answers to their issues. But due to hierarchy, I often didn't get to hear them. This gave me a direct line.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It’s a fair concern that’s certainly on our very near roadmap. We’re adding an MFA confirmation on each phone number which helps validate respondents. Aware that it’s not a bulletproof solution, but it will close the gap another few inches.
I guess being even more realistic here: your team is 15 people, your organization is 1000+ people. It's not hard to get a phone number, just a prepaid SIM away. If questions are only going out to your immediate team, how is isolation achieved here? I just don't see how this is a plus to the employee, it can be gamed by the employer, it can be gamed by cliques of people submitting fake feedback about you or others.
If the team is 15 people, you get that information in the initial message and you can determine how safe you feel, and how honest you want to be in your return to it. No doubt, it's less safe at 15 people than at 300 people. But we want to let the end user make the decision.
In terms of the employer or staff gaming it - there's two sides to that, what's happening that would cause them to put the effort in to do it? I mean, a pre-paid sim for enough numbers and to spend the time for setup, etc. It's not a small investment. Not discounting that there's a few people in the world that would, but I think that's a fairly extreme edge case. I think we're trying to work a problem that prevents smart people from contributing to a better workplace because of bad managers, politics, career climbers, etc.
Companies with a culture that would allow that kind of behaviour are unlikely buyers for us too. The anonymity raises too much risk for management around bad behaviour being exposed. And once a comment is on the record, there's some level of accountability at an exec level.
"Our future vision is building towards an ideal mix of automated analysis working with machine learning, natural language processing and sentiment analysis, alongside best-in-class consultancy via human-in-the-loop systems when issues or opportunities are identified." - from the blog.
Interesting. I could see this tech being a good on ramp to a consulting practice, but the applications of sentiment analysis are much trickier, since almost anyone writing in a corporate environment is going to have roughly the same detectable sentiment, independent of content. (look at sentiment samples if you need to convince yourself). I'm sure there's signal there, but reliably deriving insights for heterogeneous companies out of anonymous survey data is definitely a tall order. The big consultancy groups in the US certainly are using deep learning to determine topic trends in their client communications. That's a very straightforward thing to measure compared to sentiment, which is trying to measure how people feel based off word choice, so I'd encourage you to focus on that first.
The only other issue see with this, from a survey product perspective, is how you get people to actually complete the survey if it's anonymous. If not enough people complete the survey, it'll skew towards the people most motivated to complete it, but without knowing who completed the survey and who didn't, you can't follow up individually with reminders to ensures surveys get completed so the data is representative. Maybe non-responses aren't actually a big deal, but those response rates (and your incentive schemes) will likely impact any downstream analysis on that data set.
Anyway, fun to think about this stuff. Good luck folks!
I like the idea of having a steady stream of feedback, Amazon has its "daily connections" that's asks you one question, with a desktop client, that works very well. However, the general consensus is distrust when it comes to that, especially if things are not going well. You can claim how much you want that it's anonymous, people won't believe you.
Convincing people it's a safe space is one of the biggest challenges for us. It's part of the reason we think SMS is great (it's not a company-owned platform), and we make an effort to describe our process for the staff so they can understand it. But it's definitely something we will need to work hard at.