Feedback is a good tool. It motivates people to take action immediately. It provides transparency to those who seek it, and of course, it opens a channel of communication between a manager and a direct report or vice versa.
However, there’s one form of feedback that might create more trouble than it is worth. Anonymous feedback.
There are quite a few proponents of anonymous feedback, as they believe that it can do a lot of good. Conversely, there are quite a few who believe anonymous feedback can be damaging to an organization.
In order for you to gauge whether anonymous feedback would be a good fit, it is important to look at its upsides and downsides.
What are the upsides to anonymous feedback?
- It can help people voice controversial opinions. These opinions might be unpopular when they are stated publicly.
- It is always useful in the context of situations where abuse or harassment is involved.
- It can be used by employees who want to bring to light someone misusing their executive powers.
What are the downsides to anonymous feedback?
- Because it is difficult to pinpoint where the feedback originated from, it becomes hard to act on that feedback. And the very essence of effective employee feedback is that it demands immediate action.
- Anonymous feedback can destroy a company’s culture. Since no one knows the source of feedback, time and energy are spent on deducing who sent the feedback in the first place. As a result, trust is eroded and morale is affected.
- While it is possible that genuine feedback can be shared anonymously, one cannot deny that there are a few bad apples who will share malicious comments.
- More importantly, in some cases, even if feedback is shared anonymously, the resultant action taken by HR managers will remove anonymity.
There are a lot more caveats to anonymous feedback rather than positives. However, if you are still insistent on utilizing anonymous feedback at your organization, ask yourself a simple question.
Why is it necessary to allow anonymous feedback in your organization?
To answer that question, you need to consciously evaluate the work culture that exists in your organization. If employees are not comfortable sharing what they feel, then obviously there’s something that needs to be fixed. Maybe feedback is being shared and nothing is being done about it. Or maybe employees fear unfair retribution. That could imply that the present work environment does not feel safe enough.
However, if your evaluation of your work culture goes well and you think you are ready to institute anonymous feedback at your organization, there are a few things still left to consider:
- Who should oversee all this feedback?
- Should all anonymous feedback be visible to all employees or only selected complaints?
- What should be the procedure to follow when exceedingly serious complaints are made?
- And most importantly, how should employees be reprimanded when they make false or malicious complaints?
Answering these questions will help you control the flow of anonymous feedback to a large extent and make it easier to institute and use.
However, there’s one final thing to remember before you institute anonymous feedback. Anonymous feedback should not be looked at as an ultimate tool that will solve all problems. Like all other organizational tools, it is simply one way for you to figure out what is going on at your organization. Fixing those problems is up to the humans who work at organizations, not a tool.