How should disclosure of employee comments be handled?

TalentMap recommends as much transparency as possible. The ideal is to share all comments “as is” but very few management teams have the fortitude. Full buy-in is needed from your CEO for this approach. For most organizations, the following seems to work:

• All members of the senior team see all comments

• Directors see all comments that fall in their respective portfolios

The challenge is how or whether to disclose comments to managers.

Is the manager’s group large enough to protect anonymity?

It’s human nature to try to guess who said what. Typically comments are NOT to be shared when a manager has less than 20 direct reports.

Is it possible to share comments without causing too much upset?

Some managers are sophisticated and can put “hurtful” comments in proper context, but there are many less able to do so, and they’ll struggle with negative comments.

A way to bridge these issues is to provide managers with a random or representative sample of comments from the larger department or division. In other words, all managers in a given department get the same set of comments. This approach gives managers exposure to the tone and nature of verbatim comments, which can be very direct and personal.