Everyone knows that you can’t be an effective leader if you’re not willing to listen to the people you lead. But there are so many ways of doing that, some more useful and constructive than others — and some more useful and constructive in some situations and contexts than in others. This post, unfortunately, is not one in which I’m going to offer clear advice based on my experience — instead, I’m going to raise complicated and as-yet unresolved questions based on my experience. Hopefully these questions will be helpful to others wrestling with the challenge of soliciting feedback.

When I came to my current position leading the library at Brigham Young University, I inherited from my predecessors a program we call the Pulse Survey, which is sent once a month to all non-student library employees. The survey consists of three parts:

1. A single question to which employees are invited to submit a free-text answer. Past questions have included “What could we do to better include all voices in decision-making, especially those from underrepresented roles or perspectives?” and “What motivates you to do your best work each day at the library?”.
2. A “Kudos” section, which gives employees the opportunity to praise someone else in the organization.
3. A “Suggestion Box” section, which gives employees the chance to suggest changes or improvements to library policy or practice.

Historically, all responses to the Pulse Survey have been anonymous, and all responses have been shared with all library employees. (The only exception being when an employee submits a response that is in some way patently inappropriate, such as a direct personal attack on another employee or a response that reveals confidential information. Such responses are redacted from the publicly-distributed version of the survey results.)

As one might imagine, the anonymous nature of this survey is a mixed blessing.

On the one hand, there is tremendous value in providing a forum for people to speak their minds freely without fear of retribution. The leadership team has gained valuable insights into the thinking and concerns of our staff by offering that freedom — insights that we certainly never could have gotten from in-person conversations or meeting discussions.

Anonymous public feedback is always a mixed blessing.

On the other hand, there is significant risk in providing a forum for people to speak their minds freely without accountability. At times the Pulse Survey has, unfortunately, served as a platform for axe-grinding and for intemperate and sometimes uninformed criticism of colleagues, policies, and practices — comments that also would almost certainly never have been made if the commenters were not anonymous.

Of course, there are other limitations inherent in gathering information by means of a voluntary and anonymous survey. Response rates tend to hover around 20%, which means that even when a clear majority of respondents express a particular view, we can’t be certain that the expressed view is representative of the library staff’s feelings generally — it may only be representative of those most motivated to respond.

Over the past year, we had noticed an uptick in negative (and, particularly, in unconstructively negative) Pulse responses, and while we recognize the value and importance of such responses (even when they’re not very constructive), we also began to suspect that the Pulse format was starting to create more negativity than utility, and started talking about what we might do to reconfigure it so that it would encourage less axe-grinding and more useful feedback, while still preserving a forum for critical or negative input.

One change with which we are currently experimenting is an alteration in our anonymity policy: now, instead of all Pulse responses being shared publicly with all in the library, we tell survey respondents that while all responses will be reviewed by the library’s leadership team, only signed responses to the survey question and the Suggestion Box section will be shared publicly. (Kudos, signed or not, will still be shared with everyone.) Our hope is that this compromise will strike a good balance between making sure that people can still offer critical responses to the library administration, and not providing a public forum for unconstructive spleen-venting.

Will this prove to be the right balance? We don’t know. At this point we’re in trying-stuff-out mode. I’d be interested to hear from readers who have other ideas, or who approach this issue in a different way in their institutions.