The challenge of handling difficult conversations at work is nothing new, but the use of technology to do it is still burgeoning. Many apps like Memo and Secret were available for anyone to download and use but eventually failed because they were unable to foster a desirable community. Blind, on the other hand, may be on to something with its exclusivity policy and choosing to initially launch in South Korea.
TeamBlind, the creators of Blind, first noticed a curious uptick in downloads after Korean Air employees started using the app to discuss the events surrounding the daughter of an executive who infamously berated a flight attendant for serving her nuts in a bag instead of on a plate. Employees took to Blind to discuss and share what they knew about the incident anonymously. It was later revealed that details of the incident initially appeared in Blind and had eventually leaked to the mainstream media, and not the other way around.
Within a week after the so-called “Nut Rage” incident, Blind’s founders saw the app’s general sign-up waitlist number soar by at least ten times, signaling a value corporate workers saw in having a safe outlet where they could freely voice their concerns and share their knowledge in the workplace without fear of reprimand or losing their job.
As Blind’s reach and availability has grown to over 1,500 companies in Korea, it has made large splashes in major South Korean media outlets for its role in reshaping the country’s corporate culture.
According to a December 28, 2015 article by The Korean Herald, for example, Doosan Group Chairman Jeongwon Park backpedaled on a decision to include junior employees in a company-wide voluntary retirement scheme after executives noticed a series of posts by younger employees on Blind about the layoff. Doosan Group is a South Korean conglomerate company that has been listed in the Forbes Global 2000 Companies List since 2007.
“In Asia, we’re actively changing the work culture that is here today,” said Alex Shin, Head of U.S. Operations at Blind. “When you have over 90% of your employee base on one app that is third party to your company, and you can talk openly about work, you can have a huge influence.”
Blind is proving to be a trusted space for corporate employees to provide real-time and honest feedback they otherwise would not be able to because of bureaucracy and office politics.
According to a Microsoft employee who has been with the company for 10 years, Blind is especially valuable in cases such as product launches and policy changes.
“When we have a product launch, it’s good to hear people’s feedback - the real feedback of what we think internally. There’s definitely some cheering and warm feedback, but there’s also that kind of raw criticism that we sometimes lack in the official channel, so hearing both sides of the story for product launches and also policy changes, I think, is very valuable,” said the Microsoft employee, who wished to remain anonymous.
“I feel that there are senior people using the app, so those people I’m sure use the feedback and make the changes as necessary because it’s different from sending an email blast where nobody would step up to give their criticism," she said.
Some Blind users have reported the app making a difference in their workplace. (Photo: Anonymous... [+]
A product manager from Amazon said her colleagues used the app to have internal discussions about competitor launches as well.
“For instance, like when Google launches a new product, we have insider discussions on how the product idea started, who worked on it, what the insider jokes are or stories behind the product launch,” said the Amazon employee who wished to stay anonymous.
Blind also has a second feature called Lounge, a different channel where users from other companies from the same industry can interact. In this channel, users can see each other’s usernames and company names next to each post.
TeamBlind itself was born after its founders, Sunguk Moon and Yung Joon Jung had used an internal forum at Naver - the Google of Korea where they previously worked - that was shut down after a sensitive topic had made executives uncomfortable. It was then that the two employees created a similar product but made third party and anonymous for employees to frankly communicate with each other in order to create large changes in the workplace.
Differences in how Blind users in Korea and the U.S. use the app have determined the differing layout and content in each respective country. For example, since Korean users broadly associate themselves with their organizations, and American users gravitate more toward their work specialty, TeamBlind plans to alter the U.S. version to have role-specific content directed at users based on their roles while promising anonymity and privacy.
In both countries, salary and compensation were the top searched queries, but vastly differed thereafter. In Korea, the next most searched queries were about advice, relationships, and venting about their workplace. Meanwhile in the U.S., users frequently searched for terms such as “interview”, “Google”, “Uber”, “Facebook”, and “Airbnb,” indicating a prominent interest in new opportunities and generally exchanging information amongst each other.
TeamBlind has its heart set on impacting work culture in the U.S. and other parts of the world, which is why it’s officially based in San Francisco. Despite having some conundrums, such as a lack of marketing campaigns and targeting enterprises while enforcing exclusivity (at least 200 employees from the same company must be verified via their work email to be able to use it), the app has organically captured users from valuable startups in the U.S., including: Apple, Tesla, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, LinkedIn, and Facebook.
The company says 15% of all Yahoo employees, 12% of all LinkedIn employees, and 10% of all Microsoft employees are using the app. Blind is currently available to at least 110 technology and hardware/semiconductor companies in the U.S. and plans to add Big Four accounting firms.
While some companies have internal company forums, the lack of anonymity prevents it from being a place where employees can honestly express themselves. At Facebook, where transparency is revered, the company’s internal forum is usually filled with trivialities, according to an employee who is an active contributor on Blind.
Screenshot of how Blind users use the app for personal and professional inquiries. (Photo: Anonymous... [+]
“The concerns that come up are more granular and day-to-day, like someone forgot to clean up their mess in the cafeteria, or reminders like, ‘Make sure you clean it up,’ whereas on Blind, they’re more high level and more industry-focused contributions,” said a Facebook employee who wished to remain anonymous. “There have been legal questions too that were surrounding age discrimination and I think it was nice to be able to set that straight, because in my personal experience as a recruiter here, I’ve had candidates who will say to me, ‘Facebook is too young for me. I’m too old to work there.’ And that’s definitely not true. It was a good opportunity for me to just be very direct without having to step on anybody’s shoes and say we’re actually an extremely diverse culture and we’re very supportive of diversity here. So it’s nice to be able to set straight some misconceptions, too.”
The growing gender gap, low wages, net worth, and job security are all equally controversial topics in the U.S., yet they are not comfortably and openly discussed in the workplace. As a result, progress in these areas have occurred only in small leaps and bounds thanks to individuals like Pinterest engineer Tracy Chou who pushed tech companies to disclose their diversity numbers, or Nature writer Melanie Stefan who convinced Ivy league professors to publish their CVs of failures.
The presence of anonymous internal outlets such as Microsoft’s now defunct Mini-Microsoft blog, and messaging and forum apps such as Glassdoor, Yik Yak, BetterCompany and Waggl demonstrate a clear desire and market for open conversations at work. But Blind may be benefiting from its exclusivity. Yik Yak, for example, has been tumbling in the App Store since it became known as a public bulletin with no accountability where students were cyberbullying each other.
Despite its growing user base, Blind has been able to maintain a friendly, professional community. The company claims only 0.17% of its discussions/posts have eve been flagged and removed by the community.
Zerzar Bukhari, a Microsoft employee, says he expected a growing community to mean more bad apples and trolling, but the community has remained the same.
“Even if you ask a question that’s already been asked, people are polite. They won’t flame you for doing that or not searching previous threads and things like that. So it’s a very welcoming community,” said Bukhari.
A challenge for Blind, however, is that new users need to use their company email for verification, which concerns prospective users. But TeamBlind says it takes painstaking measures to ensure privacy and anonymity, going so far as to patent its security methods, which is built in a way that even TeamBlind employees would not be able to identify users.
For users willing to try the app, Blind is an effective avenue for comparing specific roles across companies, getting honest feedback on product launches and company policies from often silent voices, and a peaceful way of creating meaningful change in America’s modern workplaces.
"In the workplace, you have water cooler rumors, and the Blind app is currently at the stage where you only have a couple of people there, so if you hear something, you don’t really know if it’s true. But when you have really high penetration in the company, that app becomes almost an official source of information, and I think making that transition is going to be hard for Blind to do here, but if it does do it, I think it’s going to really cement its place in the workplace anonymous chat," said Bukhari.
The way users interact with Blind also seem to be extremely telling about company culture, says Shin, who sometimes connects with voluntary user champions for research.
“Amazon’s very social, because everybody’s really young, everybody’s just a transplant to Seattle, so most of the discussions are about dating or how to find a dentist, whether they should move somewhere, or about the different neighborhoods. Microsoft, on the other hand, is a 40-year-old company, so they’re more about investments, retirement, and they get really excited about Satya and the new directions they’re going. They’re really happy that Ballmer’s gone or something like that. These are people with a lot more tenure. So the voices are different, even though they’re just 15 miles away from each other. That’s fascinating,” said Shin.
Blind is backed by DCM Ventures, a capital venture firm that manages over $2.8 billion. DCM Ventures was co-founded by David Chao, who frequently appears in Forbes’ Midas Lists, including this year’s with a ranking of #61.
