Anonymous chat apps are quickly picking up steam in the workplace, providing employees with a platform to discuss concerns and complaints, offer advice, and provide unfiltered feedback in novel ways. These technologies can be helpful to managers — but you wouldn’t think so from much of the press surrounding them.
Blind, one of the most popular of these apps and dubbed “HR’s worst nightmare” by TechCrunch, offers employees the opportunity to provide raw feedback, which is “the antithesis to HR’s utopic vision of a manageable and orderly corporate culture.” The New York Times has looked at the trouble anonymous feedback gives employees and managers, citing expert research that anonymous peer reviews are just as political and subjective as any others.