You deserve a voice in your workplace

Frank’s co-founder writes about collaborating with coworkers to ensure you are heard.

By: Logan LaHive, co-founder at Frank

If you could change one thing about your workplace, what would it be?

Your company has endless tools at their disposal to manage you and understand the top issues in your workplace. One-on-ones, team meetings, town halls, surveys, and even surveillance tools to track your messages, engagement, and productivity. They control the tools, they write the survey questions, they decide which questions to answer, what actions to take, and what/who to ignore.

So you talk to a coworker at a happy hour. Send a gif over company-owned email or Slack. Or start messaging over text or Signal. You consider setting a meeting with your manager — but it feels risky and unproductive. You update your resume, and think about leaving… But will the next place really be better?

You deserve a voice in your workplace. You deserve a private and safe space to talk openly with your trusted coworkers. A place that is worker led, and for workers only. And, when you are ready, the tools to help ensure that your voices are heard.

We created Topics in Frank to give you a private space to talk to coworkers about the changes you want to make at work. You can start conversations in a workplace collaboration tool that management doesn’t own and isn’t invited to, with the coworkers you trust and have verified. You can spend time discovering what your coworkers are experiencing and learn that you’re not the only one who thinks things can be better. You’ll find a space to make connections and share what you really think. And, when you and your coworkers are ready, you can use Frank to create campaigns and ensure you are heard.

In Frank, Topics are organized hubs dedicated to the issues you care about. Each Topic is a place where you can chat with your coworkers, create issue-specific polls, keep important attachments, see useful resources, and discuss future solutions or even launch campaigns to make change. Topics help you:

• Communicate about issues that matter most to you. Focus on the conversations that you’re interested in. You don’t have to sort through a big group conversation to find the parts that matter to you.
• Catch up on the conversation on your own time. Channels make it easy for you to find the information that matters most to you. You can also easily catch up new members as your group grows larger.
• Keep an eye on the pulse of your coworkers. Learn more about issues in the workplace you haven’t experienced or aren’t aware of. Topics that you might not prioritize could be widespread issues hurting your coworkers and give you an opportunity to become an ally. You can also create polls to capture opinions or vote on direction.

Every private group on Frank starts with five default Topics (#General, #Pay, #Benefits, #Work-conditions, and #Coworkers) meant to help you start talking. You can create Custom Topics for the issues that matter to you and your workplace. There’s no issue too large or too small to be a Topic — it just needs to be something you and your coworkers care about. Ask yourself: “What do we talk about when management isn’t listening?”

Each Topic is a blank slate for you and your coworkers to share stories, ideas, and validation. You can discover common concerns across departments, locations, and roles. You can share views on a company issue and learn about how another team views it. You can propose solutions and brainstorm ways to make work better. And, if you sense there is collective support to demand change, you can launch a Campaign to turn conversation into action.

Frank is on a mission to empower every worker to have a voice in their workplace. You can’t trust your conversations are safe or private if having them on tools that management owns (Slack, email, surveys). Topics on Frank gives you a space to talk and ensure you are heard. Worker led. Workers only.

GetFrank.com is a space to privately talk and collaborate with coworkers, and tools to ensure that you’re heard. Want to use Frank in your workplace? Join Frank.