Anonymity in Workplace Communication
Media used for regular communication in the workplace - instant messengers like Slack, Teams, or Google Chat; video conferencing tools like Zoom or Google Meet; knowledge bases like Confluence or Notion; or email - virtually eliminate anonymity, and for numerous good reasons. But anonymity is crucial to some workplace functions, like the ability to whistleblow, sharing personal information with healthcare providers, and employee net promoter score surveys (eNPS, designed to measure employee satisfaction and loyalty within a company) that anonymize responses to encourage employees to respond honestly without fear of retribution. Recently, I began wondering how important it is to be able to ask questions anonymously in the Q&A portion of company all-hands meetings. What impact does anonymity have on the quality of content? How do anonymous questions impact the perceptions of others? Should anonymity be permitted in some workplace communications? And, more generally, how can I create an environment that welcomes questions and develops question-asking skills? Both my experience and my intuition inform my opinion that anonymity, in some circumstances, is important, but I was curious to know what the research said on the subject.
What Is A Question?
Questions provide an indication of how an individual’s knowledge or belief system is organized and how it is reorganized as new knowledge is acquired. Questions play an important role in problem solving, forming concepts, and verbal learning. Questions elicit information and reduce subjective uncertainty and conceptual conflict. They can clear up doubt, perplexity, incongruity, contradiction, confusion, and irrelevance. But different types of questions, and how those questions are formulated, result in different responses. Epistemic questions serve the purpose of acquiring information and are generally subdivided into two categories: referential questions and evaluative questions. Referential questions are intended to provide context about situations, events, actions, relationships, or purpose (e.g., to a car salesman, “What was the best year for car sales?”); evaluative questions are intended to establish the addressee’s knowledge of the answer, like in an interview (e.g., to a mechanic, “Why is my car making that sound?”). Another type of question is the expressive question, which conveys attitudinal information to the addressee. The expressive content of the question is independent of its information content. For example, “What do you think of yet another business unit reorganization?” This phrasing expresses doubt, disbelief, and it implies a negative expectation, feelings independent of the content of the question. Expressive questions can, of course, be rephrased to be epistemic: “What benefits do we expect to see from another reorg?” It’s not only important to ask the right question; it’s just as important to ask the question right. People try to maintain a series of consistent beliefs and reduce cognitive dissonance, and questions are sometimes formulated in such a way as to strengthen a favorable belief or weaken an unfavorable one, which undermines the traits of a good question, which I call an effective question throughout this piece.
Social Impacts Of Question Asking
Question asking also has broader social impact. Questions can be used for impression management - to share what we know while managing others’ perceptions of us. A 2017 study in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology identified a strong relationship between people who asked questions and how well they’re liked: people who ask more questions are better liked by those engaged in the conversation, even when those people ask a lot of questions - but not if the questions redirect the topic to oneself for purposes of bragging, boasting, or dominating the conversation. Then, people end up disliking the questioner more.
Some people are also uncomfortable asking questions. The threat to one’s character (known as public depreciation) has been repeatedly found to affect question asking. This risk can lead to feelings of judgment, embarrassment, or hesitation, decreasing participation in and frequency of question asking and information exchange, subsequently decreasing the amount inclusive, diverse conversations. Gender also plays a role in question asking. A 2018 research article on women’s visibility in academic seminars concluded that women are much less likely to ask questions than men (but are more likely to speak up when the aggregate number of questions increases). It also suggests that women are more likely to ask questions to someone they’re familiar with, like someone in their own department at work. It wouldn’t be unreasonable to extrapolate this conclusion to other disciplines. Question asking can also be difficult for those with certain personality traits, like introversion, or conditions like depression, anxiety disorders, ADD/ADHD, trauma-related disorders, etc., particularly in a live format.
Psychological Safety
When a person feels psychologically safe, they’re more willing to take interpersonal risks, openly disagree, and speak up. We can be good questioners all day long, but if the environment in which we’re operating makes us feel psychologically unsafe (e.g., fear of reprisal, lack of respect, pressure to conform, or some of the characteristics of gender I mention above), there will be less willingness to ask questions at all. Degrees of psychological safety are subjective, and some people are more comfortable with open or contentious conversations and questions than others.
Anonymity In Question Asking
When public depreciation is a threat or people feel the environment is not psychologically safe, anonymity can be an equalizer. There are two forms of identity concealment in communications: anonymity (TA, true anonymity) and identified but confidential (IBC). The former describes situations where the acting person’s identity is unknown to anyone but themselves; the latter describes situations where the acting person’s identity is known by at least one party but not by others. TA confers many benefits. It can reduce groupthink by preventing the influence of dominant voices and group pressure, allowing for more inclusion and diversity of thought and opinion. It encourages questions on sensitive or contentious topics. It helps people feel more comfortable asking or answering questions they might otherwise be hesitant to ask or answer due to fear of public depreciation, increasing participation. In a 2002 study, researchers concluded that TA assessments of questionnaires about respondent health conditions were associated with better data quality. The study notes the “detrimental effect on data quality” of IBC assessments, whereas later studies showed that anonymity does not detract from answer quality.
In a 1975 study in the Journal of Management, researchers wanted to test employee responses to an eNPS survey under two conditions: TA and IBC. They placed employees in each group, then the employees filled out the survey; the responses from the TA group were completely anonymous while the responses from the IBC were known to some party but kept confidential from others. The employees knew their conditions. After they filled out their eNPS, their group was switched: the IBC group became the TA group and vice versa. Then another eNPS was administered. The conclusion was that the IBC responses were “statistically more positive in their responses than” the TA group, while TA group were statistically more negative in their responses. The researchers hypothesized that the IBC condition was more positive because they may have feared retaliation, “(e.g., losing their jobs if higher management discovers that they are not satisfied with certain aspects of their organization).” (At the time of the study, US unemployment was around 9%.) It wouldn’t be unreasonable to extrapolate this conclusion to present times.
But anonymity has drawbacks, one of the most obvious being lack of consequences for bad behavior like trolling, which, broadly, includes activities like flaming (vitriol), swearing, personal attacks, or generally violating some accepted standard of behavior. The phenomenon where people show a lack of restraint on the Internet is known as the theory of online disinhibition, and anonymity is one factor that could lead to “toxic disinhibition,” when the disinhibition becomes negative or harmful. In a workplace context, for example an all-hands Q&A, anonymity can contribute to more expressive questions than epistemic, and can (and frequently do) become venting or complaining. (In my article Feedback Isn’t A Gift, It’s A Gift Exchange, I discuss feedback versus complaining.) Vitriol is rare in workplace communications, even anonymously, but it can be found on sites like Blind, which is purpose-built to enable anonymous conversations about an employer. These negative traits of anonymity, unfortunately, are unavoidable, and can have the consequence of negatively impacting the perceptions of others, for example, by sowing doubt or confusion within the workplace, or tainting a company in the eyes of new hires or prospective employees. Moderation functions become increasingly important where anonymous questions are permitted.
Practical Application
Skill-building
Moderation functions are important to reduce trolling, but it’s a reactive approach. To be proactive, I work to improve question-asking abilities, and encourage an environment where epistemic questions are formulated. Author Andrew Sobel wrote, “Great questions are truly the stock-in-trade of great leaders… [T]he higher up you go in an organization, the more important it becomes to both ask more questions and to formulate the right questions.” During a recent team on-site, I guided my team through a “question-storming” exercise derived from the wonderful book A More Beautiful Question. In a typical brainstorming session, a problem is stated and solutions (i.e., statements) are generated. In a question-storming session, a problem is stated and only questions are generated. This exercise is designed to lead to the “more beautiful question:” the best question that can be asked to lead to the best solution. By training our question-asking muscles to ask better questions, we inherently become better active listeners, too.
Recognition
Praise the behavior you want repeated. Highlight the value of curiosity and a growth mindset. Emphasize that asking questions is a sign of knowledge-seeking, and publicly acknowledge people who ask thoughtful questions. Express gratitude for their willingness to seek clarification and contribute to the discussion. This can go for questions that are phrased more expressively: the questioner can be asked to rephrase the question, after which praise can be given for the contribution. Peers can also be encouraged to recognize and praise each other when someone asks a valuable question; peer recognition is a very powerful reinforcer.
Persuasive system design (i.e., gamification) is another option: Badges or awards can be introduced to recognize those who consistently ask questions, promote healthy discussions, and contribute to a positive learning environment.
Professional development and growth
Rewarding questioners with opportunities to develop their interests and curiosities shows that the company supports their desire to learn and grow. Including components to assess someone’s willingness to ask questions and engage in discussions in performance evaluations could encourage more people to disclose identities when asking questions. If someone’s question leads to a process improvement or other positive change, involve them in it and recognize their contribution. The tangible impact of their contribution encourages continued participation.
Dedicated question spaces
At previous jobs, I’ve seen open documents or other dedicated spaces (like internal forums) that are dedicated for employees to ask and answer questions be very successful. A steady flow of questions demonstrates that questions are valued, and the visibility into questions this medium provides can help the less-skilled see what good questions look like.
Conclusion
The widespread conclusion across decades of research on question asking and anonymity is that anonymity is important, especially for sensitive or contentious topics, and consideration should be given to offering ways to engage in conversations anonymously. Eliminating anonymous methods of question asking will lead to less participation and less diversity of thought, not to mention negative impacts to the perception of psychological safety, which would on the whole be detrimental. But because anonymity leads to more trolling, moderation mechanisms should be employed to reduce it, and an environment that encourages asking questions and recognizes those (even contentious) that further the discourse should be fostered.
Any questions?
References
Armenakis, A., Feild, H., Holley, W., & Bedeian, A. (1975). The Effects of Anonymity Versus Identified But Confidential Response Conditions In Organizational Research. Journal of Management, 1(1), 45-49.
Carter AJ, Croft A, Lukas D, Sandstrom GM (2018) Women’s visibility in academic seminars: Women ask fewer questions than men. PLoS ONE 13(9): e0202743. https://doi.org/ 10.1371/journal.pone.0202743
Guo, C. & Caine, K. (2021). Anonymity, User Engagement, Quality, and Trolling on Q&A Sites. Human-Computer Interaction, 5(CSCW1,141). https://doi.org/10.1145/3449215
Huang, Karen, Michael Yeomans, Alison Wood Brooks, Julia Minson, and Francesca Gino. “It Doesn’t Hurt to Ask: Question-Asking Increases Liking.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 113, no. 3 (September 2017): 430–452.
Kearsley, G. (2005). Questions and question asking in verbal discourse: A cross-disciplinary review. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 5(4), 355-375.
Sobel, A. (2013). Leading with questions: Ask, don't tell. Leader to Leader, 2013(67), 24-29.
van der Meij, H. (1988). Constraints on Question Asking in Classrooms. Journal of Educational Psychology, 80(3), 401-405.