If your unit is being asked to talk to Heardby

What this is

Each person on the unit is offered an anonymous conversation of about 15 minutes, by text, in English or Spanish. The interviewer is neutral and does not work for the employer.

What comes out is a report about the unit. It is never about a person.

What you get, and when

This report is shared for labor-management purposes. Don't use it to try to identify any employee, and don't circulate it beyond the local's officers.

When the employer chooses joint release, you get the identical report at the same moment management does. Neither side sees it first. It comes by a link that needs no account.

With a steward account, your unit’s reports live in one place, along with the record of what both sides committed to after each report. See below.

The steward account

When an employer chooses to sponsor a round jointly with the union, you get an invitation by email. Your steward account is your email address only; you sign in with a link we send you, with no password.

Before anything opens, you see exactly what your members will see: the promise screen, the areas the interviewer asks about, any text the employer wrote, and the labor-law confirmation the employer signed. You approve it or ask for a change. Nothing opens until you approve, and if the employer changes what members will see, you are asked again. Both names appear on the members’ screen only once you have approved.

Your account shows your unit’s joint reports and nothing else: the same report as management, released at the same moment, the trend from earlier rounds, and "Promises kept" with what management said next to what the union said. You can post the union’s own lines on the team page. You cannot create rounds, and you see no other team. If the employer removes your access, you keep the reports already released to you.

The five-person rule

A topic appears in the report only when five or more people raised it. Two or three people saying the same thing on a small shift is a short list of names; five is a pattern.

Any count under five prints as "Fewer than 5". The software enforces this. It is not a policy someone can waive.

One exception: if someone describes a safety hazard, harassment, a threat, discrimination or something illegal, it appears in the report even if only one person said it. It appears without anything that identifies who said it.

Verified counts

Every report carries a small “Verified counts” line with an id. Open it and Heardby recomputes, on the spot, how many distinct conversations there were, the five-person threshold, each theme’s count, and a fingerprint of the report. If the report was changed after release, the page turns red.

It shows no content: no theme wording, no answers, nothing anyone said. It proves the counts and that the report wasn’t edited, not that the wording is fair. You can download the attestation and keep it.

What the employer agrees to

Before any round on a represented team, the employer must record that it notified the union, when, and whom

These lines are from the Terms every employer accepts, and from the confirmation an employer has to check before running a round on a represented team.

• “A report describes a team, not a person, and must not be used to make or inform any decision about an individual’s hiring, promotion, pay, hours, discipline or termination.”

• “Not try to identify who said what, whether by timing, by wording, by running a round on a team small enough to make the math easy, or by any other route, including by recording which one-time code was given to whom, and not ask us for transcripts.”

• “You are solely responsible for complying with any collective bargaining agreement and labor law, including any duty to notify or bargain with a union before using Heardby.”

• “I have given the union notice of this round. I understand my bargaining obligations are mine, not Heardby's.”

• “Heardby's interviewer does not ask about union activity.”

What Heardby is not

It is not a grievance tool and not a substitute for the grievance procedure. It is not an investigator. It is not a survey the employer can tune: the employer cannot write or change the questions to steer the answers. It is not on either side.

Every employer sees the same promises on their screen, and their people see the same promises before they start. No employer can edit them.

What we keep

No names, emails, phone numbers, IP addresses or logins. The conversations are deleted twelve months after the report.

Questions

Write to hello@heardby.co. A person reads it.

The founder spent fourteen years across the table from five bargaining units and built this to be usable by both sides.