Sunday, May 16, 2010

Love or hate your workplace?

Ever wish you could speak out to the place you work (or worked) at anonymously? Want to talk to your colleagues about the company off the record? Well now you can. My former boss decided to leave the corporate world last year to co-launch trueinsider.com, a free site that gives rank and file employees everywhere the power to initiate positive change at work. Employees can anonymously discuss ways to improve their companies, either by writing a company review or posting in the virtual suggestion box. People can also vote on suggestions with thumbs ups/downs and the reviews are denoted with happy and sad faces. Vault.com also has a similar forum but charges a fee to view the content. Trueinsider.com also recently added an interesting feature that offers employers' management team the ability to respond to employees' comments or get votes on suggestions. I searched under one of the most reviewed companies on the site, Wal-Mart Stores, and saw a variety of comments. There's people just plainly needing a space to rant, but also people who use it more productively such as asking for ways to manage the sales floor, answering questions about salary raises, or making suggestions to improve job processes.


So what's my take? I think it's a great way to use social media for the workplace. It's also the beginning to bridging the big black hole between lower ranked employees and management, but it all hinges on how effective employers can use these comments to actively engage in communications with their employees to make improvements and build on successes. At some point, employers would need to take notice if potential employees start to look at reviews on this website before making their job decisions.

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