Employees Talk About Their Companies Anonymously on 'Blind' App
An app called Blind is allowing thousands of employees to talk about their companies anonymously.
Blind, launched by its parent company TeamBlind in South Korea in 2014, is an online community wherein users are encouraged to chat anonymously about their conflicts and troubles with their companies. The vision of the app is to provide empowerment to the employees who would normally not be able to voice out their concerns.
TeamBlind's CEO and co-founder Sunguk Moon told The Mercury News that the idea of Blind came as he noticed employees of a company he worked for at South Korea talking with one another in an anonymous chat platform. Moon said the chat board was shut down several years later as the employees were talking about sensitive issues about the company.
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Almost five years since its founding, Blind now has users from thousands of companies, including thousands of employees from Microsoft, Amazon, and Google.
Despite the liberty of speech that the app provides for its users, Blind still filters the content it gets.
"If we see something that is sexist, sexual harassment, racist, homophobic, discriminatory in some way, hate speech, revealing company secrets, trolling or bullying, invasion of privacy, we can take down that content," Kyle McCarthy, Blind's head of marketing, told CNN.
The app requires company email addresses from those who sign up for an account. After this, the employees are joined to their specific company board, which is only visible to the employees of the said company. Only after more than 30 employees had registered will private company boards be created.
While these boards are not controlled by the companies, employers may join to observe what the employees are discussing.
"We bring more communication to a place where there's a lack of communication — the workplace," said cofounder Kyum Kim to CNN. "You can actually see what employees think because they are not talking to a company; they're talking to each other."
