Anonymous Reporting, Upgraded: Exciting New Features from Spot

At Spot, we’re always working to improve harassment and discrimination reporting for employees and HR. When the dashboard and admin tools were released in October 2018, we started out working primarily with smaller, newer companies and startups. Now, with DaVita, Monzo, and other enterprise customers on board, we’re rethinking how Spot can be used at scale.

Spot’s new features help HR classify reports and recognize trends. These upgrades also facilitate more meaningful communication with employees who report—while still protecting their anonymity.

Here’s what’s newly available in the Spot dashboard:

Send multiple rounds of follow-up questions.

Admins have always been able to use the bot to send a single round of follow-up questions to employees who report anonymously. We designed this two-way communication to preserve employee anonymity while allowing HR to follow up with employees and get the details they need to investigate and close a report.

We’ve found that it often takes more than one set of follow-up questions to properly look into incidents, particularly when reports are anonymous. The solution? Admins can now send multiple rounds of follow-up questions. Each set of responses gets added to the initial report in your dashboard.

Customize your organization’s report confirmation email.

When an employee submits a report via Spot, admins use Spot to send a confirmation email letting them know the report has been received. This step is important for acknowledging the employee’s concern and making them feel heard.

We’re now offering the ability for enterprise customers to customize your organization’s confirmation email. Rather than a generic message, employees who file a report will receive a response with important details such as HR contact information, next steps in the reporting process, and other details specific to your organization. In addition, admins now have the option to include their individual contact information each time they send a confirmation email. In the event that an employee is comfortable reaching out directly, they know who is dealing with their report.

More robust filtering and granular classifying of reports.

No two organizations are the same. Knowing that our customers are structured differently, we’ve built a feature for more robust filtering and granular categorizing of reports. Enterprise customers can now add custom categories to better classify reports and use that data in meaningful ways.

Categorization gives large organizations the ability to look for patterns and trends so they can make informed decisions about possible training opportunities or corrective actions needed to address recurring issues. By tracking categories such as incident type, location/facility, or department, companies can get an overview of the types of incidents occurring across the organization.

The categories can be based on each enterprise customer’s unique needs. For example, those with multiple locations can categorize reports geographically (e.g. San Francisco or Berlin office), structure (e.g. Food Services or Marketing), and theme (e.g. harassment and discrimination vs. retaliation vs. compliance issue).