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‘Tis The Season To Be…..Honest – Unsaid brings the freedom of anonymous apps to unchartered territory – The office Christmas party

Unsaid a new Secret App for the Enterprise launched in the App story today.

Created by long time supporters of the Australian Startup Scene Kim Heras and Luke Carruthers from 25fifteen the app enables employees, for the first time ever, to share their thoughts, questions and feedback about the office Christmas party openly amongst their colleagues and with true anonymity.

Why An App for the Christmas Party?

Think of how important the office Christmas party is to work culture. The location and quality tells employees how well the company is doing and how much it values its employees. The lead up is a source of chatter as people prepare for everything from Secret Santa to fancy dress and more.

The event then unleashes work colleagues into a social setting that brings out the best (and funniest) in many creating water-cooler chat topics for weeks to come. So much of that talk however, resides in small pockets and cliques because there’s no place for employees to talk openly without fear of repercussion.

Until now.

Unsaid brings the freedom of anonymous apps to unchartered territory: your company.

For the first time, employees within companies (you have to have a company domain email address to join that company’s group) can speak openly, honestly about everything going unsaid at their workplaces. That doesn’t mean that anything goes, however.

A level of curation exists to allow community members to prevent inappropriate behaviour including harassment of any kind. Unsaid communities are created automatically once a user with a corporate email address signs up. From there, any subsequent user with an email address from the same domain will join that community.

A Bottom Up Approach To Internal Communications

“This is very much a bottom up approach to internal communication” said Kim Heras – partner at 25Fifteen, who were involved in developing the app. “Most other attempts to get a true sense of employee sentiment have always been top-down – and it’s hard to be honest when the person in charge of the communication channel is the one you may have an issue with”

There are obvious concerns about anarchy and Machiavellian behaviour in the enterprise that this app could enable, certainly there has been scathing criticism of the Secret and Whisper apps and the fact that they are both a seething pit of slander and liable as well as a place for indiscriminate lying, this app also probably opens the door on corporate liability for all sorts of harassment however Heras is building a corporate dashboard so company management can manage in appropriate behaviour while keeping the feedback useful.

I think this is needed, I know I could have used it in various corporate gigs, how corporate management allows it to be used remains to be seen.

Unsaid is available now from the App Store

 

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