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Comment by RealityNow | Hacker News Reader

Our CEO has flat out told us that it's incredibly hard for him to get honest feedback from anyone (except for maybe the board and investors), and another executive echoed this. Nobody wants to question the almighty CEO to his face.

Nothing against the CEO. He's an extremely friendly and approachable person. Most people just fear questioning authority and power, and the CEO in a modern day corporation is revered similar to a king in a monarchy. It's always been like that at every company I've worked for.

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Your CEO may be an exception, but every time I've seen some given honest feedback after a CEO asked for it, and it was against the CEO's position, they had their career at that company tanked. Most of the time when a CEO asks for feedback in a meeting it feels like that speech Saddam Hussein gave where all his detractors we're dragged out of the building. At this point a CEO would have to make a concerted effort to publicly get corrected and take that advice just to get past the culture that all of his peers have built in the US. Even then people are going to be hesitant because there is no protection for an employee who speaks up

It's not possible to implement some type of anonymous feedback system?

My company sends out periodic anonymous surveys as an attempt to garner feedback from the employees.

The only problem I see is if employees, for whatever reason, don't believe such a system is truly anonymous and thus refuse to give honest feedback. I don't see that being a common trend though.

If so, it probably signals more serious problems between employees and the higher-ups ...

Too many companies have eroded employees trust by lying that something is anonymous when it is not.

I personally will never trust any such survey at work.

I live when we are emailed "anonymous" surveys with a query string. It's even better when they are engineering specific surveys because at that point you have to question if they even think you can do the job if they thought they could get blatant tracking like that past any engineer

I saw such everytime too. These tracking params are to guarantee that the survey is filled only once by a person. But tracking is possible if email and the survey match is stored somewhere. It is all up to trust.

I've seen anonymous surveys that ask for the team you're on. Way to narrow down the possibilities management.

My favorite is where there is a remote team and it asked for team and location. That pretty much uniquely identified everyone. I made sure to give stellar reviews and praise for all things there :-)

When I worked at Google we did "Googlegeist" (our anonymous feedback system). Many of my peers would hold back because they thought management was keeping tabs on what feedback we gave...

The trackingest company on the planet not tracking its own employees seems very far-fetched!

Heh, I assumed it was tracked and gave profuse accolades to the management team.

it is possible, but most of the times it's not anonymous. I.e. after an anonymous survey for some ridiculous "company of the year" award (by a third party mind you..) it was identified that some women didn't vote the place as meritocratic or equal opportunities. They were dragged into a meeting room to "discuss" about their views. This served as a lesson to all these women and all of their colleagues to never trust "anonymous surveys" in the workplace, ever.

I never trust claims that any given survey is anonymous. To me that's a lie to gently coerce employees to tell the truth.

Not that I give a crap anyway, I still tell the truth knowing full well it might be used against me. If they can't handle honesty, they need to surpass 16-year old mental age. And I can find another job before my notice period expires.

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