I'm not sure what separates this from a Google Form doc, or a SurveyMonkey, or any of the 100 other "anonymous" survey devices on the market already.<p>Regardless, as an employee I've learned to either ignore these things outright, or at least give the most artificially bland non-feedback possible. On many of the occasions in the past when I've given meaningful feedback... despite the "anonymity", that feedback has been repeated to me verbatim by a manager in later conversations. Often in a passive-aggressively angry or intimidating way.<p>It's a problem of population size. For company survey data to be all that meaningful, you have to AT LEAST segment the "anonymous" responses by location, group, etc. So even if the text doesn't include your individual name... it still narrows your identity down to a couple dozen people in a HUGE company, and probably just 2 or 3 people in a small company.<p>With that small of a population, it's really not that hard for managers to piece together who said what. My experience is that when management receives feedback they'd rather not hear, often they REALLY do want to piece together who said what. So whatever your noble intentions are in creating an "anonymous" survey system, I believe that human nature works against you on this. You're really just creating a honeypot trap to help root out "negative influencers".<p>Talk to your people. I know that a lot of employees roll their eyes at regular "1-on-1's", and a lot of managers don't like doing them either (so they're often not done very well). However, I just can't comprehend how anyone could consider themselves an effective manager without having those with every direct report on at least a bi-weekly basis, preferably weekly. If you're doing those right, then you'll have a strong relationship within your team even if everyone doesn't always see eye to eye.<p>Of course, 1-on-1's and manager-employee communication at the team level is a separate matter from COMPANY WIDE feedback. Upper management can (and usually does) have blind spots due to information getting blocked by poor managers in between them and staff. If you have a solution for bad managers, or for bad organizational structures that leave employees with either multiple managers or none at all, then you'd be a messiah. Generally, that's the last thing in the world that upper management really wants to tackle, though.
I'd respect you more as a manager if you caught me in the hallway and spent 2 minutes asking about <i>that thing</i> I was doing over the weekend, and were genuinely interested. Having me fill out this form every week would surely get on my nerves.<p>I'd pick the sad face every week and type "<i>this form makes me sad :(</i> "
The reality of every workplace I've been in is that it is never in your best interest to say you are unhappy.<p>If you are unhappy it is usually obvious and your manager usually knows about it -- if they haven't done anything to rectify the situation, they likely can't or won't do anything about it.<p>Saying you are unhappy just creates a more tense situation.<p>In my experience, the only option you have in these situations is changing your role or group within your organization or leaving your organization for another job.
<i>Weekly</i> happiness surveys? This is the "are we nearly there yet?" grade of annoying question.<p>Ctrl-F "privacy": no results. So in that case it's mandatory to always tick all the happiness boxes. You don't want to draw attention to yourself by being unhappy on record.
Wow that's so weird, I think I found a prototype of this software: <a href="https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1vxKCv9rScwm2sE3EKMeApuPkhdN8Dmo0qyelNmgOQJE/viewform?usp=send_form" rel="nofollow">https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1vxKCv9rScwm2sE3EKMeApuPkhdN...</a> (I would have made it faster but Google Docs breaks badly on mobile.)<p>"what do you think of the CEO" is a question that only the CEO is interested in the answer to. That's a silly choice of question. Not a single person will be honest.<p>You can use Google docs. Or you can just walk up to people and ask how they're doing. This just feels passive-aggressive.
So one of my annoyances at work is the mandatory "training" I have to do for compliance/legal/CYA reasons, which amount to wasting 20 minutes of my life with "are you an idiot?" type questions on, say, bribing foreign government officials.<p>I put those off as long as possible until the nag emails start escalating.<p>And now you want me to do a weekly survey on whether or not I'm happy?<p>Other posters have brought this up. What about privacy? How do I know my answers will be anonymous? The company is (assumedly) paying for this. They're the customer. Do I really think they're not going to get this information if they want it?<p>Annoyingly, if I have to do this, you've now made me think of all these issues. There is a cognitive cost with doing so.<p>What possible reward/benefit is there for being honest? No, no, "I love the Leader!"
I thought this would be an analysis of mails, meetings and Issue comments, looking for who talks to whom and which words are used. That would be really cool.<p>Just having a lot of polls doesn't tell much of a story, I think. Most people will simply not do them.
Ideally, management should be open to hearing criticism, and employees would feel safe giving their feedback. In reality, management is self -serving and hostile to dissent. If you get to the point where you have to make employees give comments anonymously, you're culture is already screwed up. And maybe you should focus on being less of a jerk boss.<p>As an employee, I would NEVER fill out this form. I'm the only guy in my department, and as soon as I started talking about aspects of my job, the boss would know who it is. And retaliate. Cuz he's a jerk.
I sent my team a link to <a href="https://www.retroospect.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.retroospect.com/</a> each week, the novelty wore off after 3 weeks.
Neat! This is like a super-customizable version of this tool my company sues called Morale (<a href="https://moraleapp.com/" rel="nofollow">https://moraleapp.com/</a>).<p>Anonymity is key in these things or employees won't be able to answer truthfully. I can't tell if Vibe Catch is anonymous or not. Anyway, managers don't always know when something is wrong when they are dealing with multiple projects and a bunch of different employees. Trends over time are usually pretty interesting in these kinds of apps too.
One big problem is the willingness to be honest. If you feel very unhappy and say so, even if it's anonymised there are probably means of finding out who it might be (or the boss might even assume) and maybe even based on that fear an employee won't be honest.<p>I think the idea of actually checking for this kind of thing is great, I don't just want to attack this, but I think it certainly requires a culture which is genuinely open to this kind of criticism, and in my experience that's incredibly rare.
I am not sure what bearing it has on this discussion, but I was intrigued to discover that this site is Finnish in origin: <a href="http://www.rakettitiede.com" rel="nofollow">http://www.rakettitiede.com</a>