Show HN: Anonymous Feedback Tool for Teams (runsignals.com)
Signals is a survey system that collects feedback from staff (mostly) but also clients and stakeholders in a business. It does this via SMS on a weekly schedule (the cadence can be changed but it works best when done weekly).
My co-founder and I started working on this nearly a year ago, having run similar small builds for over four years. This time we’ve tried to do it properly. The execution is relatively simple - similar to an eNPS (Net Promoter Score - a common way of measuring how consumers like your product or service), but we wanted a way to anonymously pass candid feedback from employees to managers and executives about their workplace experience, their jobs, new ideas... anything. And for it to be regular and easy to do.
We maintain the anonymity of the staff member (and let them know how many people are in the team receiving the question being asked, so they understand their level of safety). We show the team leads and managers a sentiment score and verbatim comments), but we do not associate the respondent details with those in the backend. This is somewhat different to currently existing tools that tend to use the term ‘confidential’, which means you're not anonymous if the admin permissions are high enough. Even those systems which claim to be anonymous can often have ways of twisting the data to unmask the users.
One of our team is working on natural language processing to understand, summarise and report on sentiment, comment themes and trends. We’re making it easy to add AMAs, poll clients and partner businesses, and we’re experimenting with sports organisations, unions, and within schools and education.
It runs over SMS (the highest response rate of any method we tested). Unfortunately, it does need a signup and confirmation (apologies) to try, but it’s free to test, and there’s no credit card required. Unfortunately, we only support the US, Canada, Australia and the U.K. at the moment but are looking to expand support as soon as possible.
We have only really been live for eight weeks now. We would love any feedback you have for us and hope you find it useful! You can email us at hello@runsignals.com if you have feedback or want to chat.
62 comments
[ 8.2 ms ] story [ 132 ms ] threadFor me, there's also our reputation - if we claim we're protecting users and then don't, our product would be over quickly.
(If anyone has any hacks to get on FirstNet, I’d love to hear them)
WhatsApp is ubiquitous, at least among millenials and above. I'm not sure what the zoomers are up to. It's unavoidable for parents especially because parent groups exist for everything from kindergarten to sports. Usage may decline in the years to come over Meta's data protection issues but there's no end in sight.
(Sorry if I missed that you had already tried or are planning those)
How do you prevent attacks that involve the employer having 209 fake respondents, and 1 actual respondent?
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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!
On your last paragraph - we're looking at incentive programs but we don't desperately need them. Over the long test timeframe, we've averaged 60+% each week for responses (40% within the first 60 mins) and one in two leave a comment with it. In all honesty, our current data is skewed by some companies in the system testing with us and not pressing their team to actively participate which has dropped the weekly average by ~10%. We're going to add a disengaged score (people who haven't responded for 3 consecutive weeks) and a super-engaged score (the opposite of that). Our customers have said they're more worried by the disengagement level than the negative sentiment because it means the team don't care at all.
Thanks again, this is some great stuff for us to think on!
>There are two sorts of businesses; The ones that know they need Signals, and the ones that don’t know they need Signals.
Also, that is quite a lofty proclamation!
And yeah, we know the Signals thing might cause some confusion. We're in a different world as a product but it's sure to come up. Funnily enough, when we registered the business we had shortened Signals Intelligence down and Intel's lawyers here got in touch within days to ask us about it. Ahaha.
> rewrite the following and remove personally identifying information: "you're not good at your job, you have a bad attitude, especially with Katelyn."
> "Performance in the job is not up to standards and there are concerns about attitude, particularly in interactions with colleagues."
Signals can have an impact if it's run executive level to all staff. It gives people a voice who can see inefficiency but don't have a forum to talk about it, and move past layers that are trying to preserve their roles / status.
Actually a really great idea perhaps.
In the HR space there is definitely a place for pseudonomous feedback/issue raising. Not anonymous where a disgruntled employee can raise 10 separate issues and appear as 10 disgruntled employees.
Not sure how your idea would work in practice but letting the employee choose a "ticket" sounds like a nice concept.
That said, it's still frequently obvious due to people's writing styles, the nature of their complaints, timing.
The decision for us to house the whole interaction within SMS was also a response to links in SMS getting much sketchier to click. Emoji responses are more expensive to run, but they're smoother to work with and more useful for team feedback.
While many managers won't do it, usually it's an innocuous thing like being able to move employees between teams and see where data moves that give things away. Not saying that's what's happening in OfficeVibe at all, but it's a common fault.
Writing styles and people exposing themselves is definitely an issue. One commenter here had a great idea on rephrasing through ChatGPT or similar to mitigate that issue.
1. A set of questions is created on which the employer would love to get answers to from employees.
2. If a company has 100 employees, 100 unique tickets are printed out on a piece of paper (it could contain a qr code which leads to the survey)
3. All paper tickets are placed in a bowl at the reception and employees are able to take a ticket each
4. Employee goes home, uses their phone to scan the QR code and fills out the survey, ensuring total anonymity. Each ticket has a unique ID, ensuring only one response per ticket. The empployer can not possibly know which ticket was taken from the bowl by which employee.
5. The results are in, and employers get 100% anonymous but 100% honest responses.
https://imgur.com/a/HmBC9fj
Just a blank page with "No Signals" in the center. Only when I allow stripe.com to load, do I see the webpage. I get it that stripe is required for subscription, but to prevent the site loading if stripe isn't enabled is not exactly nice I think.
Note: jquery.com, jsdeliver.net, and prismic.io allowed to load. licdn.com and stripe.com disallowed.
It’s been really good to get quick feedback on the happiness of our employees. It’s been interesting the ups and downs that come through. A lesson I’ve learned is you don’t want to be too reactive, as things change quickly depending on the week. But you can pick up trends over a few iterations (for us, it was people wanted more social events organized).
One thing we really wanted to solve was allowing people a chance to break out of management hierarchies and go direct to founders. Even in a small company like ours, we had some middle management that blocked feedback. This has allowed people to bypass that. It’s a modern “my door is always open” system that seems to work so far.
On the anonymity discussed here, I’d say it’s anonymous in terms of the platform hides everything from us. But when you’re small like us, you tend to be able to guess who said what based on tone or writing style. But I think the point about the kind of company that wants to use this is a good one. We are using it because we care about what our employees think, not as a way to trap people and use it against them.
If your manager wants to fire you they don't need to create a complicated ruse to get evidence that you're unhappy, or that you have opinions or think that they are a bad manager. None of which are anywhere near a justification for firing, anyway.
In fact, at most companies, telling your manager that you're unhappy and looking for work elsewhere is more likely to get you rewarded with a promo or bonus.
I've been part of teams and seen exit interview data reviewed openly with names, supposedly anonymous feedback twisted to unmask people and D&I surveys where really personal information has been shared in areas it shouldn't be. But that's just where I've been. I think part of what we're doing is a response to that.
The bigger part of it is rapid, in-the-moment responses to issues impacting the team, clients or partner businesses. Because this ideally works weekly, and responses need to be fast and short, it sort of fulfils a different need than a traditional survey. At least, we're seeing different data back with our test group so far anyway.
Hi, techdiff! When you say "U.K.," do you mean strictly the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, or does this include the Republic of Ireland also? I ask because a large number of our team is in Dublin, and I'm not sure if this would be viable.
If you wanted to test it from Ireland, let me know and we will add support for it.
On the roadmap, we have a task to base the number on the end-user location (based on the dialling code of their phone number), which will also allow us to vary the sending times based on their location. Currently, the survey will deliver based on the HQ location time.
I am not sure why you made it (or started with) SMS. Why not simply use web app?
On response rates, it's around 20% more responses via SMS than email or chat apps. This is the same for marketing delivered via SMS - the percentage is lower but compared to email, etc. it's relatively high.
In terms of the data quality - we think it's because SMS is not a "company owned" platform that could keep logs, etc. Maybe it feels safer for the end user so they're more honest.
Also, the interaction is fast and fun. We get responses initially via emoji and within the text comment you can hashtag and mention other staff. We're working on MMS support so people can send photos too. It's not globally supported but it works in the US at the moment.