Case Study: Being Anonymous
CEO Uses GoWall’s Anonymous Capabilities to Get People Talking
Challenge
Emanuel Martonca, CEO of Thinslices, a European app development company, wanted to hear his employees’ feedback and ideas about the direction of the company. He used surveys and polls, which only 60 to 70 percent of employees completed. It was a decent return, but he wasn’t hearing from everyone and the ideas weren’t free-flowing. Plus, the surveys required several email reminders, and Emanuel had to give everyone at least a week to complete them.
He abandoned the surveys and tried a different, but more common format: The Employee Meeting. During weekly, one-hour meetings, he introduced four issues or questions and encouraged his staff of 70 to brainstorm.
Using this brainstorming format with a group of this size had major challenges. It was difficult to hear from everyone and diversity of opinion was constrained, especially within a limited time frame. And, it was impossible to track the feedback he did receive.
Solution – Enter GoWall
Emanuel used GoWall to increase and expand the conversation, as well as to document it. He coined these meetings “brainwriting sessions.”
He started by posting 4 unique questions into GoWall. During the meeting, he moved through the questions one by one, giving people time to provide their feedback. When his questions were sensitive in nature, he used GoWall’s Anonymous setting – this gave employees the freedom to provide honest feedback without hesitation.
Result
Emanuel finally heard from everyone! And employees had broken out of their silent and siloed survey environment. With GoWall, they were seeing each other’s viewpoints and building on them.
“Getting over 160 inputs in just 20 minutes brings a lot of value,” he said. “If we were to do this exercise without GoWall, it would take hours to gather and document the same amount of information, and it would be extremely inefficient and frustrating for everyone involved.”
He also observed that GoWall had an impact on the company culture and overall team morale. Everyone had an equal opportunity to share their opinion. “This helps us a lot in our quest to build a culture based on trust,” he said.
Emanuel also took advantage of GoWall’s asynchronous functionality and left the Wall open after the meeting was over. This enabled employees to contribute anything that hadn’t been covered during the session. After a few days, he closed the wall and exported the data. He could immediately use the data from the meeting to understand where employees stood on everything from the company’s mission and vision, to its culture, to its new policies.
By the Numbers
Here are the metrics from a brainstorming session that covered “The Culture of Learning.”
The four questions were:
- Do you feel that team discussion on this topic is helping you?
- How else can our company improve your work experience?
- What are your thoughts about our learning tool?
- How can we improve our culture of learning?