Anonymity

The tl;dr

• All conversations on Signals are seperated from the member and their messaging channel of choice.
• Members own emoji tones and gender are reset to baseline emoji defaults to keep the space safe for great responses.
• Each survey shows how many others are participating to avoid targetted responses. Speak your mind.

How are we protecting your anonymity?

When the company adds Members into their Organisation's account, we take three data points:

1. Your name – We use this to address you in the survey SMS messages.
2. Your company email address – We use this to contact you within the company environment (like the welcome email) to pass on verified communications from the organisation.
3. Your mobile phone number – Formatted with its international code, we use this as the system-user-ID for the Member, and to send you surveys.

From this data, we use the mobile phone number, which normally looks something like this: +61407123456 And apply a cryptographic process known as 'salting' to obscure it, turning it into something like this: f0e178dd19a561436873790b91dc44c8. Learn more about salting.

Control of your information

We aim to offer Members control over their information. Your company is instituting this tool to get your help in improving the company. Participation should be to your benefit. But for many reasons, some people may not want to be involved and so we are creating ways in which you can adjust your level of participation.

You are able to block the number you're receiving survey messages from. Our system uses hundreds of different phone numbers, which might mean you still receive the messages and need to block additional numbers. You may be in a situation where this option best suits your needs, but it does limit the data your organisation has to work with on improving the work experience for you and the team.

Responsible Use, Leaders are people too

The system provides you with an opportunity to offer feedback on the business, management and conditions. That only works if people comment in good faith and maintain a respectful approach to the dialog with the people who are responsible for making changes. Abuse of the system by members means that the feedback starts to become dismissed, rather than actioned. With that in mind, there's two key points we'd like to leave you with.

The aim of Signals is to create better managers and better workplace experiences through an honest, respectful dialog between people. Success with Signals relies on leaders using the information they receive. They need to talk to the team about issues raised, fix issues with the workplace environment, pass on praise, be open and trust that the feedback has been given in good faith.

But it's always important to remember that managers and leaders in a business are people too. They are learning, have failings, have their own personal stresses and issues that can sometimes impact the way they communicate or their ability to address feedback which might be really important to you individually, or as a team.

Respect and understanding flows both ways. Give them time to learn and react to the feedback, use subsequent surveys to add detail, context and further their understanding of the problems you're raising with them.

This mutual understanding and respect will build stronger, higher performing teams over time and give you a better and more engaging career than one spent locked in an "us and them" battle.

Appropriate Feedback

Signals is a place for all kinds of feedback - the coffee is bad, the design team did an awesome job last week, the bathrooms are gross, the pitch team were incredible, and more. On rare occasions, we see people trying to submit feedback that isn't appropriate for the space, things like airing personal disagreements between two people, making unfounded accusations, or for raising serious criminal conduct.

Anything which rises to the level of criminal conduct should be dealt with through the HR team, police or relevant authority immediately.

Because of the level of member anonymity in Signals system, management may be limited in the action they can take off the back of the feedback submitted in the survey. They need to meet a minimum threshold of validated information before they can take action as an organisation, so while Signals can help communicate an issue, getting action may need further involvement beyond Signals.

Anonymity puts a lot of power in your hands within the organisation. Using it responsibly and respectfully is key to the future success of it, and growth in the work place.

FAQs

Why don't we offer an opt-out?

Good question! Obviously this is the easiest way for you to choose not to participate. However, if we do that, you become part of a suppression list and this may offer a point of identification to your organisation, which may be read as a 'career limiting move'. Instead we aim to offer the ability to suppress your number silently through Signals. Doing this means you will not receive survey messages, but your organisation will not know you have made this choice.

Your organisation will be presented with a percentage of users who are 'disengaged'. This metric should drive management and leadership to think about how to re-engage that percentage.

If they address your concerns, you have the ability to silently take your number off the suppression list and rejoin the surveys. This is a metric of feedback which should be a valuable objective to your leadership team over time.

Are there limitations to my anonymity

Of course, we have some limitations on this, the two key ones to keep in mind are:

Using identifiable information in your comments back to the survey — If you choose to add information which could identify you back to the leadership team in the comments, then that's not something we can stop. While we'd encourage you to identify yourself when offering praise to team-mates and leadership, if you're providing constructive feedback, it might be best to ensure that your wording doesn't betray where the comment is coming from.

Small Organisations — For companies with less than ~20 Members in their send list, it can become easy to identify individual respondents to the survey. If you're part of a small organisation, or the survey is only going to a small team within the organisation, it's something for you to consider when offering feedback.