The Anonymous Feedback Trap: Why it Actually Undermines Psychological Safety

Anonymous surveys are meant to encourage honesty and trust – they don't.

Anonymous feedback is considered one of the best solutions to encourage people to speak up and provide constructive criticism. The idea of anonymous feedback is appealing: by shielding a respondent's identity, people will feel safe to provide honest and constructive feedback.

Sadly, this common management practice has the opposite effect.

Traditionally, many consultants endorsed anonymity as the key solution to increase feedback at work. The assumption is “if answers are confidential, people will be more candid.” However, anonymity sends the wrong message: it inherently reinforces the idea that the team is not safe to speak up.

In this article, I discuss why anonymity often backfires and how to create a culture of open feedback.

5 Ways Anonymous Feedback Harms Trust

You may need anonymous feedback at times and that's fine. The problem is when organizations default to anonymity when it comes to giving and receiving feedback.

A few years ago, when I was the CEO of an ad agency, I contacted one of my EVPs, who had less than seven months in the company, to talk about his 360-performance review. Before I could say anything, he started ranting about how inaccurate and unfair the feedback I provided was.

I had to interrupt the rant to tell him why I wanted to talk to him in the first place. I hadn’t been able to provide my input because of a last-minute crisis – and I wanted to apologize.

His face said it all. He had wrongly assumed that a piece of anonymous feedback he disliked came from me, but I haven’t provided any.

I can go on and on with similar stories. Most of the time, anonymity feeds confusion and distrust – even when used with positive intent.

Here are five ways anonymous feedback harms trust based on insights working with our clients.

1. Anonymity sends the message that the team is not safe

When organizations encourage employees to provide honest feedback because it’s anonymous, they send the wrong message. They’re unconsciously telling people that it’s not safe to speak up.

Anonymity reinforces a culture of fear and mistrust. If people trust each other, why should they provide feedback behind their colleagues' back

2. People think anonymity disguises a witch hunt

Anonymous feedback is not always secret. Many companies have weaponized it, making people suspicious. If the system can remind someone that they haven’t completed the survey, it can also identify who said what.

Anonymity can set off a witch hunt. When leaders don’t like the news, they often look for a culprit. They assume that the negative feedback came from individuals they deem problematic. The fear that leaders will try to guess “Who said it?” – or, even worse, ask HR to find out – is pervasive in the workplace.

When people assume negative intent, their response will be anything but honest. They won’t answer what they think but what their managers want to hear.

3. Anonymous feedback doesn’t encourage ownership

Good leaders expect team members to be accountable: to own their mistakes, not hide them. Anonymity does precisely the opposite. When people don't attach their names to the feedback they provide, they don’t have a sense of ownership over the issues they raise.

The same applies to leaders. If one person raises an issue with their manager, it establishes an underlying contract between them. The manager will feel responsible for getting back to that person with a solution. However, that accountability is not there when leaders receive confidential feedback.

I stop counting how often teams complain that nothing happens after they complete anonymous surveys – leaders sit on top of thousands of answers without the pressure to act.

4. Anonymous feedback is often unspecific

Anonymous feedback can result in shallow and unspecific comments that don't shed light on the actual root cause of the issue. Ratings, for example, are biased – some people are too soft and others too harsh when evaluating their colleagues.

Often anonymous surveys are unreliable, failing to provide context or insights.

Consolidating confidential results is also misleading: responses from outliers are washed out by the lowest common denominator.

5. Anonymous feedback doesn't promote dialogue

Anonymous feedback is a one-way street. There are always two sides to every story. One person’s perspective doesn’t tell the whole thing.

Anonymous feedback doesn't foster dialogue and exchanges between team members, especially when people have different opinions.

Also, when the survey findings don’t match with what leaders believe, they often ignore the truth. The lack of dialogue makes it easier for cognitive dissonance to take over.

Psychological Safety: the Chicken and Egg Dilemma

The importance of promoting psychological safety has gained more attention in recent years. However, most leaders fail to move from theory to practice. They understand the benefits but struggle to facilitate courageous conversations with their teams.

Promoting psychological safety in the workplace creates a chicken or egg situation: what comes first, feeling safe to speak up or speaking to increase trust?

The answer is both. It’s a two-way process where team members must take small steps to speak up – even if they don't feel completely safe – and leaders must model the expected behaviors.

Psychological safety is not something that teams either do or do not have. There are different levels. It’s more like a muscle that needs to be continuously developed and trained.

Not encouraging people to speak up could be as damaging as trying to move from zero to one hundred. Just as you wouldn’t expect someone who’s not fit to run a marathon, you have to start small. The secret to promoting psychological safety lies in building muscle.

Here are some tips for developing the psychological safety muscle, little by little:

1.    Encourage small wins: Start with minor, low-stakes conversations, and celebrate when team members speak up. This will help build confidence and reinforce the idea that sharing ideas is safe. For example, with many teams, we facilitate practicing open feedback without the manager being involved.

2.    Break down people into smaller groups: People feel safer speaking to one or two colleagues than in front of everyone. The 1-2-4-all technique is perfect for progressively building trust.

3.    Listen actively: When team members share their thoughts and ideas, listen actively and without judgment. Ask clarifying questions to encourage people to go deeper and show that you care.

4.    Leverage the outliers: When we facilitate courageous conversations with our clients, we look for common themes and for what “everyone is thinking, but no one is saying.” Outliers not only “tell it as it is” but also model courage, inspiring others to speak up

5.    Celebrate failures: When team members take risks and fail, celebrate their efforts. Use the opportunity to learn and improve. This will reinforce the idea that taking risks and sharing ideas openly is safe.

Getting people to talk to each other in the open is vital. It doesn’t matter if team members don’t address the most sensitive issues at first. Give them time. Focus on building the psychological safety muscle – one conversation at a time.

The Power of Open Feedback

Feedback is a gift that keeps giving. It’s critical to the growth and success of any team or organization. Feedback helps both givers and receivers. So, why keep it secret?

Anonymous surveys have been a popular way of gathering feedback, but open feedback is a more powerful tool. Open feedback encourages people to be accountable, fosters a culture of trust and psychological safety, and positions feedback as constructive rather than harmful.

Open feedback is seen as constructive because it’s given with the intention of helping the recipient improve their performance or behavior – not to criticize or belittle someone.

Turn feedback into a gift

People are afraid of feedback because they think of it in terms of positive or negative. Feedback is not bad or good. It’s just information that can help us improve.

Being too harsh can be as damaging as being too nice. Train your team to always present both sides of the story.

To improve your team’s performance, ask both: “What’s working?” and “What’s NOT working?” If team members are giving feedback to each other, have them acknowledge “I like that…” (what they want their colleagues to continue doing) and “I wish that…” (what they want them to start or stop doing).

Integrating both sides of the feedback coin will help you see feedback as a gift. Some you will like, others you probably won’t. Ultimately, it’s about practicing to become better feedback givers and receivers.

Encourage people to own their feedback

When feedback is given openly, people are more likely to take responsibility for their words and actions. This helps build a sense of ownership within the team, which is essential for achieving high levels of success.

Netflix’s “pick up the trash” or IKEA’s “never with your hands empty” principles promote a culture of ownership. Rather than waiting for someone else to fix something, it inspires people to act.

Tackle issues early on

Building a culture of regular, open feedback prevents minor issues from escalating. The Stinky Fish is a metaphor for the issues teams don’t talk about. The longer they avoid them, the stinkier they’ll get.

Avoid building conflict debt by ignoring issues and letting them pile up. Rather, train your team to speak up about minor issues.

Practicing feedback in the open builds the psychological safety muscle by tackling issues early on.

Promote a culture of collective feedback

Open feedback fosters an environment where team members can freely discuss their ideas and opinions. This promotes active listening and empathy, essential for building strong relationships within the team.

Giving feedback collectively – as one – encourages collaboration and teamwork. It shifts the conversation from “How can I play better?” to “How can we improve as a team?”

The All Blacks, the New Zealand national rugby team, review videos of previous games and then get together for collective feedback sessions. The players review their performances, holding each other accountable with facts or data. There are no hard feelings. Feedback is about improving how they play as a team.

Replace blame with learning

Anonymous feedback makes it easy for people to point fingers or blame others. Discussing issues in the open as a team can shift the conversation. Rather than finding a culprit, it invites people to identify the root cause and prevent similar incidents from occurring in the future.

Atlassian, Google, and Etsy use Blameless Postmortems to replace blame and finger-pointing with open feedback.

A blameless postmortem is a structured process to review an incident or failure. The term "blameless" refers to the fact that the focus is on identifying improvements, not assigning blame or fault.

From Anonymous to Safe Feedback

While anonymous feedback may seem like a quick and easy way to gather input, it reinforces the idea that your team is unsafe.

There are only a few circumstances in which it would be risky to provide feedback openly and, thus, anonymous feedback can be justified in certain situations where it would be risky to provide feedback openly. Examples include confidential issues such as harassment or discrimination in the workplace, safety or ethical issues, such as whistleblowing, or when there are big power imbalances.

Open feedback is a powerful tool for fostering a culture of trust and psychological safety within a team or organization. It encourages people to own their views, helps tackle issues early on, encourages dialogue, and positions feedback as constructive rather than harmful.

Building the psychological safety muscle takes time – it requires a long-term commitment from the top. Start small and train often. I strongly recommended that leaders engage professional facilitators to mitigate any unintended consequences.

By leveraging the power of open feedback, your team can achieve better outcomes, build stronger relationships, and ultimately achieve greater success.

Thank you for reading Fearless Culture 😊 I share content around workplace culture, collaboration, and team building. I’d love to hear your feedback!

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