You might be asking yourself, “What if I run a session and someone provides negative input that can be seen by everyone participating? How can I moderate that situation?” You might even be wondering, “How can I prevent this from happening?”

Let's start here...

All humans are subject to negativity bias. It’s totally normal. (According to Psychology Today, “A negativity bias just means that we notice and feel negative things more intensely than positive things—and negative things have a bigger impact on our mental health. So that means we could experience a bunch of positive things but the one negative thing could ruin our entire day.”)

The anonymous nature of POPin makes people feel safe to give their honest feedback. And we encourage session participants to do just that, because this helps leaders and change makers understand pain points that might otherwise go unnoticed and railroad initiatives—or worse, create an unhealthy work environment.

So, we recommend using these POPin best practices to manage negativity biases:

Host a session to Crowdsource problems/complaints. Think about this as giving the audience permission to communicate their negative experiences and thoughts. Then, host a follow-up session to Crowdsolve the top, voted problems/complaints. (You can always put constraints on the solution-ing part of the dialog. For example, “Assuming we can’t X, how should we solve Y?”)
Model the behavior you’d like to see. This might include attaching a selfie video to the session to spread a more positive mindset with participants.
Reinforce input that is constructive and helpful. Specifically, participate in your POPin by responding to comments—revealing your name to reassure participants you hear their feedback and will consider their suggestions. (“Oh, that’s a good nugget of information! I had no idea this was an issue.” Or, “This is a great idea. I would not have thought of this!”) Two-way feedback is what makes POPin better than a survey!
Don't be afraid to say no. Unfortunately time and budget have constraints. When the answer to a request must be "no," be clear in stating WHY. Your team will appreciate your honesty.

But what if the feedback is REALLY negative or inappropriate?

For those cases where someone is posting totally inappropriate comments and is making everyone uncomfortable, we do have an 'emergency cord' Archive feature.

This feature allows session Creators to archive content that they want to remove from public view. Again, this function is not meant to remove challenging or negative feedback that could be used in action planning—it exists to allow Creators to displace inflammatory or inappropriate comments from the main view without deleting them entirely.

To Archive a participant's post:

Select the ellipsis (...) next to the post.
Select 'Archive.'
Confirm that you want to archive the specified content.

After confirmation, the content will disappear from view. All content that is archived is viewable by (only) the session Creator, from the 'Archive' section of the POPin session. Archived content cannot be seen, voted on and/or commented on by any participants in the POPin.

Use the live Help chat to contact our Client Success Team if you'd like additional support on any of these topics.