This week on T3 I review the employee community/communication/engagement/feedback tool Hyphen.  Hyphen is a mobile app that allows employees to communicate anonymously, but within a company parameter.  Only those with an organizational email can sign into and message within the Hyphen app for that company. The organization controls who gets in and taken out through this email feature. Although, any employee, with an organizational email, can start using Hyphen.

Employees, at all levels, can use Hyphen at anytime, anywhere, through their mobile device.  Everything they post is anonymous.  This keeps the conversation open from free of retribution of what is said.  It’s community moderated, so users can flag inappropriate content, and once you get flagged three times, you get put in a penalty box.  Any flagged material gets taken down.

Too often, as companies get larger, the real opinions get lost. With Hyphen, that will no longer be the case. Also, an individual can easily ask for timely, anonymous, unbiased feedback.

The 5 Things I really like about Hyphen: 

1. It’s free to users, but if the organization or HR wants to use a dashboard that will get them data analytics and some more control, that cost per user.  It doesn’t give HR access to which user posted what, or who they actual users are, but it will give them so fairly robust analytics.

2.  Executives can easily use Hyphen to get real time feedback on anything.  Hyphen can configure the app to have your executives or leadership, show up differently, so your workforce knows that a question or feedback is coming from someone on the executive team.  I love this!  Most executives complain about the filtering of information that makes it to them. It’s so vanilla and politically correct by the time they hear it, they don’t know what to really believe.

3. Hyphen can break out groups within your workforce, allowing team leaders to ask questions to their group only, or give feedback that way as well, without the rest of the company seeing the stream.

4. Hyphen can be used by individual employees to build 360 groups and gather feedback about their performance, or ask questions on virtually anything.

5. I like the community moderation and the organization’s ability to shut off employees who leave the organization.  Every company would love to have a communication tool like this, but fear where it might go because of the anonymous feature. Hyphen has found a way to make both worlds happy.

Check it out. Your employees might already have, and be using it.

T3 – Talent Tech Tuesday – is a weekly series here at The Project to educate and inform everyone who stops by on a daily/weekly basis on some great recruiting and sourcing technologies that are on the market.  None of the companies who I highlight are paying me for this promotion.  There are so many really cool things going on in the space and I wanted to educate myself and share what I find.  If you want to be on T3 – send me a note.