How to Tell Your Boss Exactly How You Feel (Without Any Possibility of Retaliation)

What if there were a way to tell your boss exactly how you were feeling about the company’s decisions, expletives and all, in an untraceably anonymous fashion?

Company Surveys Don’t Work

At Mandy AI, we believe in building healthy companies.

The employee feedback system in most companies is a broken machine. It’s difficult for employers to get honest, meaningful feedback because so many of them lead toxic, anemic organizations in which eggshell-dancing employees fear for their jobs with every word they utter.

I’ve heard of companies that encourage their employees to respond to company surveys in a certain way in order to receive stock bonuses. I’ve also heard of companies that send “anonymous” surveys, only to track down and fire employees who provide honest, negative and legitimate feedback about the organization.

I recently polled several hundred workers on the issue of why it’s difficult for companies to get meaningful, honest feedback from their teams, even when they deliver survey after survey.

The number one reason given?

“Fear of retaliation.”

I don’t know about you, but that’s insane to me.

Fear of retaliation is what I feel when I walk too close to my neighbor’s growling dog. Fear of retaliation is what happens when you try to break up a fight on a basketball court.

Fear of retaliation isn’t what anyone should ever feel when a company asks them to provide honest and meaningful feedback and they do.

And yet, many workers feel this exact fear each day, in places where they deserve to feel safe, secure, and treated like human beings.

Why Employees Hate Traditional Surveys

Here are more of the answers people gave in my poll on why most feedback systems don’t work:

“The employees fear getting fired.”

“They don’t ask the right questions and they don’t let the employee have true anonymity when answering. Would also add that many likely feel as there is no hope of things changing even if they do voice their opinion.”

“There’s a lack of trust within the organization.”

“The system doesn’t really allow for managers at all levels to feel secure enough to listen to suggestions and send them up chain, or mid-levels are just too overworked to even care.”

“In past jobs, it always struck me that the companies were very open to customer feedback and reviews, but as an employee, I felt like even if there was a place or way for me to voice feedback, I didn’t know where or how.”

Most Companies’ Greatest Need

I’ve seen too many companies tolerate toxic environments, toxic relationships, toxic leadership, and toxicity in general. They don’t set high standards for how other people should be treated, and then when their people leave in droves, they scramble to try to prevent turnover. But often, their efforts are too little, too late. They don’t address the root issues of trust, security, and freedom, and only lightly treat the negative symptoms of these issues.

For many companies, their greatest need isn’t innovation, better marketing, or adaptation to new technologies. Their greatest need is usually a radical overhaul of their cultures, and a tidal wave of better engagement, trust, and basic human sensitivity.

As professional coaches and consultants, we built Mandy AI because we believe we can make a difference. We’ve sat in conference rooms with leadership teams that were all but destroyed, ravaged with mistrust, fear, hurt, and dysfunction. We wanted to build a way for leaders and their teams to have truly anonymous, honest, careful dialogue about the issues that matter to their organizations. We wanted to build a way for companies to understand their deepest human issues early, before disengagement, mistrust, and unnecessary turnover happens.

We’re acutely aware of how much money companies throw away because of unnecessary turnover, disengagement, talent attraction, and investing in fun, food, and foosball instead of building healthy feedback and strong relationships to make healthy cultures.

That’s why we built Mandy. Mandy offers the AI powered wisdom of consulting blended with the speed and efficiency of click-and-you’re-done technology. Mandy allows companies to gather truly anonymous data in a conversational format from their employees, customers, stakeholders, and beyond, about the big issues they’re facing, and meaningfully synthesizes this data to guide leaders to take action.

The Mandy Difference

Unlike traditional surveys, which can be laborious to design, cumbersome to send and receive responses from, and even more cumbersome to interpret, Mandy makes it easy for leaders to ask their people questions with the casual ease of typing into a phone and receive detailed notifications on how people feel and what actions should be taken.

Since launching in January, we’ve worked with a variety of users and industries, including leaders within Fortune 500 organizations, and have managed response rates and engagement data well above the average for traditional surveys. We’re helping leaders diagnose areas of toxicity in their organizations they didn’t know existed, and have gotten them to have tough, substantive conversations about their organizations, creating change early and saving the headache of dealing with disengagement and attrition later.

With Mandy, companies have the freedom to express exactly how they feel about what matters most, to the people who need to hear it most.

With Mandy, you can tell it like it is. Even if you have to use a few four-letter words to get your point across.

See how Mandy can transform the way your company does engagement here.

(This piece originally appeared on the Mandy AI blog.)