Voice of the Employees Resonated in Online Bamboo Forests

Abstract

While employee voice has been realized a critical element of organizational success, many employees often remain silent and withdraw useful information and ideas. In this paper,we present how employees utilize existing social media platform in a creative, collective way to anonymously share their voices—a phenomenon called the bamboo forests in Korea. We present the key characteristics of bamboo forests including self-mention and connectivity, and discuss the main topics and sentiments of such bamboo forests. Our analysis indicates that employees find such anonymous platform useful. We provide insights on the potential for utilizing the voice ofthe employees online.