Tell it like it is

HONEST OPINIONS: Are there days when your colleague seems to spend more time on the phone with his girlfriend than actually working? Does the woman in the next cubicle talk so loudly that you can’t concentrate? Or maybe you share an office with a friendly, efficient co-worker who deserves a pat on the back.

If any of these scenarios seems familiar, you might want to visit Honestly.com, a new website that allows people to rate their colleagues — anonymously. Honestly.com began in March as Unvarnished.com, and invited people to tell “the unvarnished truth”. Users took Unvarnished at its word, with critics describing it as “a public bathroom wall for everyone on the planet” and “a completely evil social network”. Following its late-October renaming and relaunch, Honestly.com says it has changed its tone and even become a resource for employers who want to hire staff, or for entrepreneurs looking to start or increase the size of their businesses.

“The power of Honestly.com is less about the fact that you can leave somebody a one-star review, but instead in its ability to leave someone a four-star review,” says the site’s founder, Peter Kazanjy. “That’s the kind of information that is important information about people, and the information that is hard to access right now,” Kazanjy told ABC News. “Professional reputation resides in the brains of all your colleagues and co-workers. This is the place for productive conversation about this topic.”

Peter Kazanjy

"This is the place for productive conversation."

The site is now accessible only to people over 21 with valid Facebook accounts. It uses methods similar to those on other review-sharing sites such as TripAdvisor and Yelp. But Honestly.com remains controversial. Not only are all reviews anonymous, but users cannot delete reviews about themselves, a policy Kazanjy defends. “We have no problem banning someone if they don’t behave in a professional fashion on the site,” he says, adding that the site’s administrator can tell if people leave only negative reviews, or if they log in with false Facebook accounts.

“At the end of the day, we think that people are good,” he says. “We have seen that if you give them a platform where they can share their professional opinion, but they know there are incentives for good behaviour and disincentives for bad behaviour, then they don’t engage in bad behaviour. And I think we anticipate seeing that pattern continue.”