Social networks have a stigma: People worry that everything they type in will be seen by everyone else. Uh-oh. Rypple is different. It’s been carefully designed for the workplace, so users can control how public—or private—they want the shared information to be.
You can choose to share information with one person, a group, the entire company, or even anonymously, without having that information overshared with others.

Rypple has four ways to share

• Public — Your posts can be seen by all other Rypple users in your company
• 1-to-1 — Your posts can be seen only by one other Rypple user.
• Groups — Your posts can be seen by a group you’ve designated.
• Anonymous – Your posts cannot be traced back to you.

Each of these different modes matches a well-established type of workplace communication. Public sharing is obvious: You want everyone in the company to know what you’ve accomplished or what you need from others. One-to-one sharing is for boss-worker communications, to allow private feedback and coaching without others seeing it. Groups sharing is focused around goals you are working toward with a team. And anonymous feedback is something Rypple users must specifically request from others: “Please tell me what you think of the project so far, and I won’t ask who you are.”

Rypple’s privacy controls aren’t complicated, but it’s important to have a basic understanding of them.

Public

When you post to the main Rypple newsfeed – either an ‘Update’ or a ‘Thanks’ — what you write can be seen by everyone. That’s great for posts like, “Awesome job on the Acme demo, Pat!” Or, “we just signed a huge deal with Company Y.”

1:1

Private conversations are possible with anyone on your ‘Connected With’ tab. These are people you’ve invited to connect with you on Rypple, and should be your direct reports, your manager, or colleagues you work with frequently. Maybe a few others, but the idea is to keep it to your team.

You can share private notes with your connections, individually, without worrying they’ll be seen by, or accidentally forwarded to, someone else.

As a manager, you can also create Actions for an employee. These are private, unless you attach them to a Rypple Goal that is public. At that point, the Action also becomes public.

Loops, Rypple’s easy, lightweight, performance reviews, is a tool managers use to collect feedback on an employee at the end of a pre-determined period of time (a goal, a project, a quarter). When you are submitting peer feedback on a co-worker, Rypple lets you choose whether you would like the coworker to see it — or only his or her manager.

You’re always in control.

Groups

When you start a goal in Rypple, you can select one or more contributors to join the goal with you. To make it visible to just those contributors, make sure you mark the visibility as “private goal.” This way, any actions you or one of the other invitees make will be visible only to the group. And when a contributor you’ve selected accepts your invitation,  all of the actions associated with that goal become visible to them.

Anonymous

If you go to your Feedback page and ask a question of coworkers the replies will be anonymous — the respondees’ names will never be identified. To anyone. And only the person who requested feedback will be able to see the anonymous responses as they come in.

Carefully Considered

These private/public/anonymous settings may seem confusing and arbitrary at first, but as you use Rypple you’ll see that each of them has been thought through and adjusted to make for the best possible communications among coworkers.

Some messages only have an effect if everyone can see them. Some need to remain forever private, or even anonymous. Some start out private but, after the initial back-and-forth between manager and employee, are much more effective as public information.

To avoid confusion and eliminate concern, Rypple lets you know the visibility level right on the page. A message beside 1:1 items reads, “Visible to you and Bob only”; a message beside public items reads, “Visible to All Company X.”

Most important, Rypple is committed to keeping private communications private. Social networks have a bad reputation – one they’ve earned — for pushing their users to constantly share more and more information. In a workplace, that can stop people from talking. Rypple’s designers and developers think the opposite way: confidentiality on Rypple is something you can rely on.