Receiving Anonymous Feedback from Your Team

Problem

"Within remote teams I was working at a satellite office. We were intending to move into a larger area of our building but decided against it. We determined that we didn't want to grow at that particular location and instead wanted to focus on building the team elsewhere. There is always worry and concern about scaling products and scaling the teams accordingly and in this particular case it had created some dis-ease about the future of the office."

Actions taken

"We wanted to get a sense of just how much dis-ease this decision had caused among the employees, to get an idea about how individuals were thinking about things. We also wanted to shape how we communicated with the teams. For these reasons, we implemented various tools which allowed for anonymous feedback. We quite heavily used the tool Officevibe and found it to be very helpful. Some people seemed more inclined to open up in an anonymous fashion as opposed to in person. It allowed us to receive feedback and think about the key points that we wanted to spearhead in terms of how we communicated decisions. Ultimately, everyone was safe based off of the original decision we made not to grow, but at the same time it was important to listen to the undercurrent that was going on."

Lessons learned

• "Ignoring the undercurrent within an organization has a tendency to backlash. It is best to deal with it head-on."
• "Other various issues came through as a result of seeking out anonymous feedback for this particular case. Therefore, we received information not only about people's dis-ease about not expanding, but also it helped inform me about other situations that needed to be addressed and changed as well."
• "As a manager, anonymous feedback can be a little bit frustrating because sometimes I thought that we could have probably worked on something if someone came up to me and we actually met. At the same time, I appreciated the feedback, getting to know about how people thought about the general dynamics of the office, and learning how the team was growing the cultural side."