Ahaha! That line on the site came from our awesome designer. Definitely a big call.
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.
Thanks so much for this one - great insight! We use eNPS as shorthand, it's the easiest way for people to grasp what we're trying to achieve but we're actually measuring through a binary initial question, followed by an open comment. The binary along with the timeframe seems to force an "on balance" measure of the week, so sentiment fluctuates with the business activity, initiatives, wins and losses. Within this, we're building features to gain context by asking the exec team on their comment against the week ahead of results, which is useful when taking a long view on sentiment moves. The best way to view the results you get from this is absolutely about detecting emerging issues, resolving ongoing challenges and improving communication. But the dream for us would be to tie business data into the commentary from staff, clients and stakeholders to form a rounded view of problems, and potential solutions.
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!
That's totally true. The initial version of this is still running at the company I set it up in. That was years ago. And I have spoken to people in recent weeks who have said they didn't trust it - they were shocked when I talked them through how and why it was. Ahaha. And they felt they'd missed an opportunity to say things.
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.
Good question! We encourage a weekly cadence - send the survey Friday morning, collect responses over the next few days. The exec team review the comments on Sunday night and present back in the all-hands on the Monday. This is the ideal.
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.
That's a risk for sure - we're based in Australia, you couldn't fire someone in the way you described here, but I understand that's not the case everywhere. It's something we're thinking about.
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.
Sure. But then the business starts taking off, and the MBAs start joining. In no time, they will find a way to maximize profit in a non-sustainable way, and now Mickey Mouse is the top reviewer in Fortune 500s.
It’s a fair concern that’s certainly on our very near roadmap. We’re adding an MFA confirmation on each phone number which helps validate respondents. Aware that it’s not a bulletproof solution, but it will close the gap another few inches.
I guess being even more realistic here: your team is 15 people, your organization is 1000+ people. It's not hard to get a phone number, just a prepaid SIM away. If questions are only going out to your immediate team, how is isolation achieved here? I just don't see how this is a plus to the employee, it can be gamed by the employer, it can be gamed by cliques of people submitting fake feedback about you or others.
I understand where you're coming from. While it’s not perfect, we think it’s a lot better than what’s out there, and we take these potential holes/gamification seriously and will make a point of addressing them in future iterations.
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.
Ahaha! Fair call. We're looking to support WhatsApp but SMS is handy because it's not an org owned platform. I've previously been in large corporates where chat logs etc. are maintained and might present a risk to the end user that's beyond our control. Also, response rates are way, way higher through SMS than any other delivery method.
What about a dedicated site or app? For teams that use something like Slack, you could send an automated reminder to click a link and fill out the survey.
(Sorry if I missed that you had already tried or are planning those)
integration with imessage would be the most valuable. where internet is strong, but cell signal is weak, SMS is really brutal. that's my life. any data that can't flow "over the internet" is just ridiculous at this point
I can do voice calls over WiFi, but SMS does not seem to ever go over Wi-Fi. Because I am rural and connection is so valuable, I carry two phones, one on Verizon, one on ATT+TMobile. Both are iPhones, but one of them is about 4 years old.
(If anyone has any hacks to get on FirstNet, I’d love to hear them)
Incredibly weird, I have the same issue with bad cell reception in a lot of parks, so I tend to go into airplane mode and can send and receive SMS on T-Mobile‘s network with VoWiFi just fine. Have you tried reaching out to them?
This is a great idea. Thank you! We will look into it for sure. We're looking at WhatApp, WeChat, etc. too and trying to decide the best way for us to let the staff decide how they want to receive the message.
If you're looking to expand to continental Europe, I'd strongly suggest WhatsApp if you want to stick to the SMS-style interactions. The only SMS messages I get are one-time verification codes and roaming notifications. Everything else is usually spam.
Good info, thank you! We were pushing on WhatsApp for South America and Asia (we tested through Singapore, Philippines, Myanmar, Indonesia and Malaysia but pulled back on the region because SMS carrier support is so varied. New Zealand is a nightmare too. But being well used in EU, we might need to bump this up the roadmap.
Telegram and Signal have been gaining some traction in Germany (don't know about other EU countries) but the former saw most of its adoption among "COVID skeptics" and has had some kind of falling out with the German government over refusal to cooperate with the authorities, so its reputation is mixed and its legal status going forward is unclear. Signal doesn't seem to suffer the same reputation but doesn't seem to control much market share.
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.
Thanks for the question! Absolutely understand the scepticism. We have a user ID that we match to the Twilio response, so staff can't submit multiple answers. We delete our data from Twilio after seven days at the moment (Twilio mandated min); we’re working on a 1-hour retention policy via their Rest API. We’re always working toward minimising any end-user identifiers back to comments.
For me, there's also our reputation - if we claim we're protecting users and then don't, our product would be over quickly.
Have your lawyers looked into whether anything can be done in the customer contracts, to help avert having to disclose this info to them (and all the damage that might mean for your trust-based business)?
