SpeakUp – Internal Problem Solving

Nobody understands the ins-and-outs of a company like people working on the ground level. Unfortunately, corporate culture often makes it difficult for employees to speak up and voice their concerns without fear of repercussions. SpeakUp is a web-based application that tackles this issue head on, providing businesses with tools for employee-sourced problem solving and decision-making.

Encourage your employees to become part of the solution by creating a SpeakUp account and publicly posting a problem that your business is currently facing. For example, you might post “Our weekly meetings have gotten too long,” or “We are missing too many project deadlines.” Anyone at your company can post a solution to solve the problem, and those solutions can be upvoted or downvoted by other employees. In addition to offering solutions to other people’s problems, employees an also create their own posts from scratch with entirely new ideas to discuss. Any employee can vote or comment on an issue with SpeakUp, regardless of the person’s title or position within the company. Popular posts show up on the company dashboard, where key decision makers are able to approve, amend, or deny posts with the click of a button.

SpeakUp is a powerful collaboration tool that empowers people to speak up and address corporate issues head on. By curating their teams’ best ideas, managers are better able to resolve ongoing disputes in a way that leaves the majority of people satisfied with the resolutions they implement.

Practical Uses:

• Encourage a more positive working environment
• Bring everyone into important discussions
• Organize team input into a systematic way
• Reduce wasted time at team meetings

Insider Tips:

• Employees have the option to post anonymously
• Create separate Groups to organize a company’s SpeakUp account
• Managers can view the top voted solutions at any time
• SpeakUp can be useful for teams with just five or more employees

What we liked:

• SpeakUp was made with the end-user experience in mind
• Businesses are only charged based on the number of active users
• SpeakUp is useful for all different kinds of companies
• Managers still have the ability to amend or deny ideas they don’t like

What we didn’t like:

• Nothing

Alternatives:

• Officevibe – www.officevibe.com

Company Info:

• Launched: September 2014
• Privately Held
• Headquarters: San Francisco, California
• Founded by: Gregory Wade, Ray Gillenwater, Keith Barney, and Mark Wilkerson
• Web site: https://getspeakup.com

Costs:

• Free