by Jim Toes

At or around the time when Mark Zuckerberg was in elementary school, someone within Merrill Lynch’s HR Department had an “out-of-the-box” idea to make anonymous surveys part of the year-end review process for all employees. Co-workers within similar departments had the ability to log onto a company site, scroll through hundreds of names and write anonymous comments. By the time I walked in to receive my year end review, my boss Steve had already dealt with scores of complaints on personal attacks and demands for the identities of the individuals. In describing his response to this problem, I recall Steve making the following statement.

“Look, Toesy this anonymous survey thing isn’t going so well. So, I decided to delete the top and bottom remarks people made about each other. For example, in your case someone wrote, ‘perhaps the best trader in the room’. We both know you are not that, so I took it out. Don’t feel bad, because I also took out the worst comment as well…’A village is missing an idiot’.”

“Co-workers within similar departments had the ability to log onto a company site, scroll through hundreds of names and write anonymous comments. By the time I walked in to receive my year end review, my boss Steve had already dealt with scores of complaints on personal attacks and demands for the identities of the individuals.”

In 2015 STA will be sending out a handful of simple surveys on a wide range of topics. Two weeks ago we ran a test and the results, as measured by the amount of responses exceeded our expectations. Before you read the results, please know we employed a similar censorship approach used by Steve.
To those who wrote over the top compliments, we thank you. To those whose remarks were well, less than flattering and landed at the bottom, we appreciate your remarks equally as much and please know that even though you do not see them on our website, we did read them. We hope you can respect our decision and more importantly, we hope you will continue to fill the surveys out. We want to hear from everyone and we welcome constructive criticism.