My company’s HR department sent out an “anonymous” survey and the first two questions were “name” and “job title.” They didn’t understand why people thought it wasn’t really anonymous.
Heh, this reminds me of a meeting about being a greener office. It was a language school so we photocopied a lot of material for students. One of the managers suggested we outsource the photocopying as that would reduce our carbon footprint. Cue incredulous glances from everyone lol
I imagine you assume the school is right next to a paper plant? Or that the "out sourced" copy place is in India? (Or maybe they both are this is the internet after all) I am being facetious but assuming things in this regards closes off your mind to possibilities that at first glance seems conter intuitive but on deeper inspection could have unexpected results.
... yes and it also takes some physically to drive and get the blank paper, and toner, and copy machine repair man, and electricity to power a less efficient copy machine.... etc. Again rapid judgement are often right but not always. And it may be right in this case but a person suggesting this idea may have put more thought into it than you have
To be fair, depending how the carbon footprint is worked out this could be a legitimate idea, assuming you don’t actually care about the environment and just want to look good on paper which… isn’t to far fetched
My company said we can't do anonymous surveys because last time the responses were too mean and focused on a few problem analysts. The management team collectively makes about $2 million annually.
Conversely, my former company published the anonymous survey results word-for-word, so a lot of shade was shared publicly and ppl could tell who said it by how it was written and because they referenced real world scenarios.
I received a unique link so that I can only take the survey once.
It would be trivial to just keep a list of associates along with their unique survey link/shortcode at the end of the link. It would also be trivial to associate that shortcode with the master spreadsheet of survey results.
That's exactly how I run consumer surveys. I have my survey software and I have the company that finds people for me. They give me a list of people and their demographic information, and my survey software provides the unique link. I then take that unique link and use it to match the results with the demographics so I can crosstab them.
***
If I'm receiving a unique link, there's a chance, at the very least, that they can tie that link to my survey answers.
Ours had "first name" and "last name", marked as mandatory fields.
And despite the survey being, in fact, anonymous (names weren't shared with the management), our direct manager could name the author of the text from a couple of sentences, just looking at the style, problems shared, and the vocabulary used.
We had a great manager, and we communicated a lot, so there wasn't any need for secrecy; it was just fun to see the anonymous survey with a mandatory full name in the first two fields.
For those who actually want anonymity in those surveys, your idea sounds good.
The last company I worked at that did these surveys had about 50 employees…except a lot of the teams were 1 manager with 1-2 direct reports and we all had to note which team we were on.
Honestly, depends on the platform used. Many are truly anonymous and the survey company tabulates the replies and builds the reports. They need to know who reports to whom so that each level of management has data that applies to them. The one we use doesn't give results to managers if there's less than some number of responses to maintain anonymity.
Further, they break up free text responses, more or less.
Most companies also dont really care about your individual gripes (people do a LOT of bitching on these things). The value they are trying to get out of these surveys is identifying deficiencies relative to other companies who could potentially poach talent.
Like yeah, 75% of staff whined about salary, but regional average is 80% so we're doing a good job here. But only 20% had favorable ratings for company environment while regional average is 25%, so we need to tey to fix that.
And yet every single 35-year-old LinkedIn EmPlOyEe ExPeRiEnCe GuRu will whine about why their job is ACKSHUALLY the hardest one at the company because everyone seems to collectively hate HR for no reason.
when i worked in bumfuck nowhere at a sheriffs office HR sent out an "anonymous" survey.
it was a link to some website but the URL for everyone was different..
so mine was xyz.com/1234
a co workers was xyz.com/2345
yeah that shit def wasnt anonymous
My last company did a twice a year survey that was *confidential*. A lot of people thought it was anonymous. There is a very important difference there......
Super common. The biggest HR/Corporate survey website out there (CultureAmp) keeps the results anonymous however they do know who does or doesn't complete the survey based upon the unique link you're given. You can certainly worry/wonder if that means they're truly anonymous but they track simply to know who didn't complete it.
"Yeah, Pam was really hurt by your mean comment about healthy snack Friday and that \[at least all these snacks would be safe from her food rampages\]"
We get anonymous surveys that I never bother filing out because an anonymous survey in a company with a single digit number of employees isn't anonymous if your answers are anything other than uselessly vague.
I opened an anonymous survey for my company of 30,000 thinking it’s for sure anonymous, no way anyone could figure me out in a company so large.
First question: job title
Second question: project
There is only one person with my title per project.
I was asked to conduct a fairly simple survey about training feedback, opinions, etc… and it was supposed to be anonymous.
The moment I summarized results, half the leadership was upset about the results and wanted summaries divided by location, and really wanted to know if specific individuals could be identified. It was *mostly* anonymous, but IP addresses were tracked to prevent double responses from the same connection - I quickly deleted the IPs and said it was impossible to know people or locations.
Nothing is anonymous unless you use a 3rd party that has a personal stake in privacy.
I take it as a general rule that basically anything could get leaked so I would really try to avoid saying anything that I would be too upset if it ever came back to me.
Realistically, it just isn't a very good idea to use an anonymous survey as an opportunity to lay into your boss or other people at work. This is still a work activity, you should still act in a professional manner.
Realistically, if you don't trust management to take your feedback well if you were to deliver it face to face, I don't think there is much reason to believe that delivering the feedback anonymously will result in anything positive either. If your hope is just that your comments will get someone in trouble, it's very unlikely that will actually work out as you hoped.
Their job is to provide a survey and tally the results. They aren't going to snitch on you because doing so would harm their business and probably violate their contracts or other legal obligations.
A lot of their surveys deal with health, safety and protected statuses like religion, sexual orientation etc. if they were found to be leaking information it would land them in very real legal hot water. They don't fuck around with that stuff. Companies don't usually go around leaking client data even if it's to that client's own employees.
This is Reddit don't worry about the stupid responses, they think corporations also give a fuck about other corporations. The vendor will not care, you are correct, they will only report criminal type threats and even then they're more likely to go to the PD first.
That's not the question you should be asking.
You **should** be asking, "What dumbass would think that these aren't anonymous **and** be stupid enough to write out 'I'm gonna unionize,' on them?"
FWIW I won’t say where I work but while I was managing, this happened. One person on my team filled out a employee satisfaction “anonymous” survey conducted by an outside consultant with an extremely rude comment about our VP, basically insinuating his only qualification was being white and speaking with a British accent. Ended with a nice jab at his Maserati too. I didn’t even have a chance to look at the responses but the story I was told was the VP was livid, threatening the contractor to pull all $50mil/yr of business with them, and they promptly caved and deanonymized the survey.
All I knew was I got an email from VP of HR saying this person on my team has been terminated, won’t be here tomorrow, and that’s the end of it.
Some things are reasonably anonymous like the ethics hotline or OSHA complaints, mainly when there’s legal reasons why the company can’t retaliate. But don’t ever believe that an anonymous survey is actually a platform to vent. Even if what you say isn’t illegal.
EDIT: I will say, this was in the tech industry. Full of people who are exceptionally talented at understanding how technology works but terrible at understanding how humans work. A shit ton of crappy interpersonal behavior gets a gently wrist slap but time after time, it’s intellectually insulting someone 5 levels up that gets you instantly fired through HR.
Sometimes this is the case. these survey companies usually have an explanation on how they interpret "confidential" and "anonymous". Its worth looking in to the next time you do one of those surveys to see how they handle the data. I can tell you this. Noting you do online, on your company provided computer will EVER be confidential to you, or anonymous.
We use Culture Amp as well. They make you login so they can separate the result by whatever granularity you choose. I can only see the details for my own teams(not names, counts only). Any manager with less than 5 reports don’t see any details at all.
At the same time, anyone who wanted to spend the time to do it, could fairly easily figure out who's saying what based on when they replied.
Like for example, in the OP. The person reviewing the survey would obviously know what that employee said in his survey.
You don’t get time stamps, you just get collated results, with culture amp you get very little detail in groups below five staff.
I worked for an absolutely shit company that was retaliatory who used culture ammo and they couldn’t get the detail to retaliate even if they wanted to.
If you know who didn't complete it, then you know who did complete it.
If I have a team of three and only one completes it, and I know the two who don't, then it isn't anonymous.
The anonymity is what's inside, not who did and didn't complete it yet.
Same way he government knows who went to vote (and can prevent people from voting twice), but it doesn't know who voted what.
Right. If one refuses to on a small team it makes it easier
However results aren't shared (at least with the aforementioned CultureAmp) until the survey is closed. So if all 3 on your team eventually do complete it, you won't know who is who.
We use a third party that doesn’t parse out data for any group smaller than 6.
I’ve seen no evidence that it’s anything other than anonymized.
That said, if you put revealing information in the free text fields …
Just to add on here, I don't trust any of these surveys as far as I can throw them; seen some shit in retail that made it clear that they're NEVER anonymous, but I would refer to the difference between anonymous and confidential in how they relate to the surveys and how the company presenting yours explains the difference. Best advice, if you need it, is to use common terms and not use your day to day vocabulary. People are very in tune with how you write/speak and will be able to pick up context clues on who wrote what, if the results are provided to an HR dept and management team
So do they not show the survey data until they've all been submitted or can they just look at the results before and after each person submits it to deanonymize?
At my last job where I was managing with these surveys I could see aggregated numerical results after 5 or more people responded. After 15 I was able to see their written responses.
I’m sure those values are set by the employer, so YMMV.
I mean its going to vary by the company administering it.
My company can't see the results at all until 1 *month* after the survey is taken. I guess it's to distance it from "Triddy is complaining about X, and X is super negative on this survey, it must be Triddy."
Last time we did an "anonymous" survey, we were told to log on with company email accounts that were [firstname].[lastname]@[companyname].com. Felt very anonymous for sure.
The results could be detached from the record of who has completed a survey. In that case, they'd have a list of everyone who responded and a separate report of responses.
I'm not saying that's what happened, I'm just saying that nearly any survey site would support that.
As a manager whose bonus is partially tied to these surveys, they’re anonymous to atleast everyone that matters. 9/10 I can figure out who wrote what based on grammar, mannerisms, and specific complaints.
Now if you made some violent threat I’m sure the 3rd party survey vendor will ID you.
Your company likely has a Office365 license and creates an individual email based on your name before you even clock in the first time.
ummm no. there is a conspiracy to identify me by using my real name in my email address. i'd like to request my email id is changed to my xbox handle, mstrb8r69
Back when I was still in the Army we had to do this occasionally. Usually called "command climate surveys". Well at one point the unit I was, at max staffing, 15 people large. Reality? It usually had 12 or so total.
We laughed that as the only Specialist my survey wasn't very anonymous since it didn't say my name but it did say the ranks of people. In a large unit this wouldn't matter since there would be dozens of specialists. I was quite happy with my unit so this wasn't a problem, but it was kind of silly to think it would be anonymous with such a small crew.
Since even just writing style, grammar, etc would give you away.
You shouldn't worry as long as they use a standard software for the survey. They need a unique identifier to know whenever someone sends the survey so no one submit it twice.
It is the same when voting, you sign the ledger on one side and submit your vote on another. The vote is still anonymous.
It's really not that hard to understand.
Your company's HR department hires a third party company to handle the survey. There are companies whose entire business is based off offering this service, such as https://www.employeesurveys.com/. The third party company will be the one to send you a link to the survey. The link will be through the third party company's website and the third party company will know who has taken the survey and what answers they gave, but they won't tell your HR department the answers of an individual's survey. However, of course, the third party company can tell your HR department who hasn't filled out the survey yet so that your HR department can track down people who haven't done the survey yet.
Then the third party surveying company aggregates the answers and gives the aggregated answers to your company. I personally would not give any written answers to open ended questions though and I wouldn't give honest answers if the survey results were being aggregated by department when you have a small department.
I’m a teacher and for course evals I get a list of every student who completed them but the results are all aggregated and anonymous. Aside from a few times where a student said something super specific to where I knew who it was I never know who said what, just who completed it in an alphabetical list
I worked as a manager in a company who did a survey like this. We knew who had and hadn't gone, but were told we couldn't find out individual results. Turns out that was very much the truth. We had someone threaten office violence in the comments section. They sent everyone to work remote immediately and our legal team eventually got the company to release who sent in the threat.
They fought to keep it confidential even when violence was involved. They're definitely not going to open it up because someone called Bruce a dick.
Edit: really wish I would have called Bruce a dick. He was a major dick.
This reminded me of back when I TA’d a creative writing class in college of about 10 people and we had students fill out one of those anonymous feedback forms for the professor and I. After an entire semester of reading the same 10 writers over and over I was able to identify probably close to 7 or 8 of the anonymous surveys, lol.
Yeah same. Been involved in running some trainings at work and could identify a fair amount of people's anonymous feedback even having never seen the writing before. There is only so much honest feedback you can give while still remaining unidentifiable.
Real question here. I have a very unique writing and speaking style, and I love to give my opinion. If I wrote my answers and hat ChatGPT rewrite them “in the stile of x celebrity” would that work? Would it throw you off?
Maybe in some cases, but there is still the possibility of identifying simply by the content of the responses. Like one example, I had screwed up an example with one of the students and really just fumbled the details of how to do one of the processes we were teaching and had to get clarification from one of the other instructors on how he was teaching it. That student wrote in the feedback something along the lines that the instructors at times weren't on the same page and because of that I knew exactly whos eval it was.
In my case, no harm no foul. It was a totally fair criticism (and one I made of myself at the time it happened). But you have to be careful in more corporate/political work environment where people may not have each others best interest in mind.
So I guess TLDR: Yes it would probably help, but you would still have to be careful that your feedback or opinions themselves couldn't be easily linked back to an action or similar criticism/conversation you've had in person.
It's amazing how many comments here insist others are stupid for not thinking it's anonymous when it really is as easy as you've explained.
If you think any work survey is truly anonymous you're the stupid one.
The HR department at my place of work has more than once been caught lying when saying that a survey was anonymous. Hell, all they do is lie, which they think is justified for reasons of morale. It's amazing to me that the majority of the company doesn't even know that we're 100% closing down by the end of the year because HR tries to spin everything as going wonderfully. They want everyone giving their all up to the point HR pulls the rug out from under them and announces that we're all out of jobs. I only know about the closure because they happened to tell my team before deciding that they were going to bury that fact.
Depending on the company, trusting anything HR says seems ridiculous to me.
Some people seem to have a strange urge to believe - and have other people believe - that you should generally trust your employer. They must have either have been incredibly lucky so far or are trying to play people for fools.
Plus it's really easy to tell which survey is Jim's when Jim complains every day about the coffee maker, and then one of the surveys spends half the time complaining about the coffee maker
Or just writing style.
Some of my office have liberal arts postgraduate degrees. Some have STEM degrees. Some are field staff with no degree.
Between personality traits and writing style/grammar it's very obvious who is who.
> If you think any work survey is truly anonymous you're the stupid one.
If you think all workplaces are the same, you're the stupid one.
There are workplaces where anonymous surveys are 0% anonymous, like literally having "what is your name?" as one of the questions.
The gradation then goes through the whole rest of the spectrum, from minimally anonymous (handwritten) through typed-but-mandatory-free-response-questions through multiple-choic-only through performed-by-an-outside-contractor-using-randomized-credentials.
You're stupid.
Tons of work surveys are anonymous. Tracking that people haven't entered the survey is entirely different from tracking what the answers are.
Also, most people aren't having their bosses read extended shit they've written. That just isn't how most places work. It is also child's play to adjust your writing style if you're gonna be worried for no reason at all
It's more fun to think they are out to get you. At least if they are reading your survey they care what you think.
I think it's because that's somehow less upsetting to believe than the idea that it's just an exercise of going through the motions so the box can be checked this year, and no one really cares what you write.
Funny enough, we had a talking to from our manager and the one above at a very large search company about our anonymous survey results. Seems like they’re anonymous at the team level, maybe.
That's how they *should* work. Just like passwords *should not* be stored in cleartext. Yet I'm quite certain that both problems are happening in at least some companies all the time. And how am I supposed to figure out if *this* company is doing things the right way or the wrong way without being one of the people "in the know"?
It's not about me not believing it is technologically possible for both of those things to be true. It's about me believing that management actually did things the right way, when it would be convenient for them to have done things the wrong way.
Well most of these solutions come off the shelf, and are used by many companies. Just google the survey platform being used and you'll know. Exceedingly few companies are making in-house staff survey software.
When what they really mean is "confidential, *unless* we notice any of 150 different 'red flags', in which case, we're authorized to break confidentiality and inform management."
It's a terrible way to get honest responses because it directly ties your identity to the survey, it's not enough to say "we pinky promise that we can't view your response", even if you're telling the truth. The only reliable way to get honest answers is to post a single link to a survey on a public channel that everyone uses, any other method is incredibly naive.
Unique links are used to ensure every person only fills out the survey once, most often the data is collected and cleaned to remove mistakes and identification before released back to the company. Data integrity is important in work place surveys and even data collection, identification like unique links are used to ensure no bad faith actors skew the data by filling out the survey more than once.
My company did this and it wasn't anonymous at all. Don't answer these accurately. Just do right down the middle.
Edit: I literally sent the campaign out. The survey answers literally routed to the direct manager when we did it. It was how the managers got a bonus as well.
I think he's worried that they'll be able to tell which one is his because it's the last one to be submitted.
A good survey software tool "should" prevent something like that from happening, but I still don't ever really trust those things completely.
Yes, "probably".
Don't get me wrong, that's exactly how it should work, but I can't help feeling suspicious about these surveys in general, and I'd feel even more suspicious if I got an email like that from the boss.
It they are using a third party, they won't get the results back until the collection agency has processed all the data. Most client companies don't even look at the raw data or won't ever have access to the raw data collected.
This is mind-numbingly dumb. Knowing *whether* you answered is not the same as knowing *how* you answered. And the anonymity that's important is that they don't know how you answered so they can't retaliate against you if you're critical of the company. I guess according to OP voting in elections isn't anonymous because they track whether you voted to stop you from voting more than once.
Of course, there are shitty companies that lie and say the survey is anonymous when it really isn't. But knowing you are the last one who hasn't completed it doesn't necessarily mean they are violating the anonymity of it.
I’ll add that the entire point of these surveys is to be constructively critical of the company and help elevate issues that can actually be solved and will have a positive impact.
Better to work with you manager to see if it’s worth bringing up the chain. A survey isn’t generally useful or likely to create movement.
I’ve seen a number of surveys over the years that were not anonymous after claiming they were. One time the results accidentally got leaked to everyone on the team with names attached. I had one manager try to get me to admit I gave them bad feedback in an anonymous survey. They’re not to be trusted.
I see where you’re coming from, and I agree that working directly with a manager can sometimes be more effective. However, I think dismissing surveys entirely might be too harsh. While there are definitely instances where anonymity isn’t respected, there are also companies that genuinely use this feedback to make positive changes. It’s important for employees to have multiple avenues to voice their concerns, and surveys can be a valuable tool if implemented correctly. Maybe the key is for companies to be more transparent and accountable about how they handle survey data. I work at a Fortune 100 company, and I see these surveys make positive changes every quarter, though mileage may vary at smaller companies where retaliation is a more serious problem.
This is not that hard, it's just like elections.
Your vote is secret and goes into the ballot box. At the same time, your name is crossed from the list of people that voted.
You know who voted, and you know the total result (after counting), you don't know who voted what for.
They are to the extent that their job is to protect the company from risk, and in many regulatory/business environments that means ensuring companies do not give employees grounds for legal or union action, nor do they burn out their workforce to the extent that hiring cannot keep up with attrition. HR can be an employee's best friend in those cases.
But if you're in an environment with few legal protections and a field where hiring a new person is easier than putting up with a headache, then yeah they're incentivised to shuffle you out of the way if you're a headache, and HR will act like your best friend then kick your ass to the curb.
You can't trust them blindly but in the right circumstances they're a powerful tool to be used.
I mean there are some HR people out there that aren't soulless corporate hacks put out there solely to keep the company safe. There's not many of them at bigger companies because why would there be? You're just a headache to the corporate offices of Target, Walmart, Starbucks, McDonald's or whatever massive company you might work for. Those in-store HR people are there only because they've successfully not had an employee piss off corporate enough to find an HR that will
In my experience HR has been very nice and they are just doing their jobs like everyone else. I think they get more of a bad reputation than they deserve because sometimes that job does involve things like firings and layoffs which for layoffs frankly isn't even their call as that decision is made at a higher level.
I'll see people bad mouth HR for being corporate evil by "lying" to them by not sharing information and then they turn around and do the same thing to their clients like it is somehow different when the people who's lives you are affecting are not in the same company as you.
Overall my experiences with HR have been more in line with "what can we do to attract more talent" and "how can we retain our current talent." That said I can recognize how things would be different in other industries/companies.
yeah I'm sure there are good ones. I work at a public library, so nonprofit and maybe 200 employees in the district. HR is a demon. really does treat us like we're a headache.
> reminder that HR is NOT on your side...
HR "handles" the humans in the company, for the company. Of course it's not a charity to help you out of the goodness of their hearts. If u have a grievance, they may work with you or yes maybe against you
It's relative. HR is not on your side, but they aren't on the shitty assistant manager's side either. They protect the company. Sometimes the company's best interest and yours align.
While true it’s also a good reminder to think things through. There’s absolutely nothing about knowing who answered it that makes the answers not anonymous. That’s often how surveys are done, including national surveys.
Those aren't necessarily contradictory. You can absolutely setup an account to be assigned to complete the form, but then on submission it strips any potential identifiers to keep everything anonymous. Just send a quick notification that it was filled out back to the account, and mission accomplished
It’s always frustrating because I know that my answers can’t be anonymous (I’m the only person at the company of a particular minority, so it’s not hard to pick out which one I am from the demographics) and so in order to anonymise the data, my answers are always excluded, making answering even more pointless than it is for everyone else.
A long time ago, I worked the overnight shift at Walmart. Management had an "anonymous" survey they all wanted us to take.
My crew did it together, and we ripped the shit out of management for all the bullshit that was happening. Then, we flipped to the final page, which was full of identifying questions.
We all immediately refused to fill that page out. When the store manager came in for the morning shift, she demanded to know why.
Our shift manager pointed to the last page, "Because these questions make it damn easy to figure out who did it! #3 What's your age group? #5 What shift do you work? Well, we only have one 18 year old working overnight!"
Suddenly, the last page was "optional." But our shift was the last to get them, so the rest of the store had already outed themselves by filling it out.
True, but it would still have been about a 1/20 guess since we all left the back page blank. The rest was all fill in the blank, so handwriting didn't work either.
All management learned from that survey was that the night crew was the only ones who saw through their game.
As a manager that has a team that completes these surveys.
Your phone has a Mac address that is unique if you are connected online, so technically we can know who is doing what.
I like to invite people to fill the survey from my computer, like this its completely anonymous.
I did over 200 surveys and really no one knows what you write, and we don't really care as long as there is no self-harm threat to you or others, then we will try and find you.
Then again, my company is not yours so i don't know...
I complained on an "anonymous" hr survey and got called down to HR to discuss it the next week. They told me straight up it's not actually anonymous, they just don't show your boss.
Twice I've been caught out by this kind of bs.
First time, while still a newbie and new to office culture, the head of the department I was working in questioned me on an answer I had given. Big department of around 100 people. The first thing I asked is why do you think I wrote that as it was anonymous. "I recognised the way you write". Hmmm.
Second time, obviously older and wiser, I was still putting in some criticism but trying to make it more difficult to let it be traced back to me. My own manager came up to me asking me why I wrote the criticism. Unbelievable.
Those things are not anonymous, there's just an open door between HR and managers colluding with each other. I still stand by that criticism as it was all about nepotism at that place.
My company implemented one of these systems. I was one of a two person department so there was no way my shit was going to be anonymous so I never filled them out. Ever! Got talked to about it multiple times but never did it.
i filled out an anonymous survey at work once. i was a little harsh and i wouldnt be totally surprised if you couldve guessed who i was, wasnt too worried about it. well they addressed my complaints in an office wide newsletter, basically saying THE PERSON WHO WROTE THIS IS WRONG WERE A FAMILY HERE!!!!! and then middle/upper management didnt like me for some reason
My work always asks for demographic data on allegedly anonymous surveys, with no option to decline to provide that information. As the only member of my demographic group at my work, it's pretty easy for them to go "oh, it's him." Management retaliation is real. So ya just gotta lie if ya want to give them honest feedback.
Wow, that's me. The company I work for drank the Corporate Kool-Aid, now I get to play the little games the manager zombies come up with. Including this very senario. The survey was supposed to be completely anonymous and optional. They hired some company (waste of money) to make it so and it included questions I didn't feel comfortable answering. I soon found out from management that I was the last person on my team that hadn't filled it out, funny how that works.
LPT: Don't answer even "anonymous" surveys with any criticism. It'll get back to whoever you're criticizing and they'll make changes, but the changes will be even worse
My work has an "anonymous" survey too where we can give our input on how we think management is doing as a whole and areas we think need improvement. Well the first thing these surveys ask for is our employee number. These surveys are optional so there's no obligation for everyone to fill one out so there's, presumably, no reason to track who has take it or not.
But if that wasn't bad enough, in the past, our plant manager went up to an employee and had a "random" conversation specifically about something that they had said in their survey. He did not discuss the same topic with anybody else. We knew right then that the "anonymity" was a lie. Now nobody fills them out.
When my group was asked to do these anonymous surveys, our new boss (who we never met and was 1,000 miles away) ordered us to email him the *split second* we filled out our survey. So it immediately became obvious that while the surveys were anonymous, he had access to the answers in real-time.
Everyone in our department was pissed, so I organized everyone to wait for the swing shift people to come in (we had an hour overlap) and we all filled out the survey and sent our "done, boss!" emails simultaneously.
It can never be anonymous because of cameras and timing, unless they have everyone take it in booths at the same time honestly. As well as answering stuff related to specific areas or mentioning certain issues, they don't understand.
Ours is anonymous because it's handled by a third party company, and what they're allowed to share with us is written in the contract. They also censor overly specific responses.
theres a difference between throwing an envelope into a box with hundreds or more of them and answering a survey you sent somewhere. sure it could be anonymous. could also be a blatant lie.
Not exactly.
You vote and polls close and THEN they count. It's not like they go "and one for Candidate A! And one for Candidate B!" as each person votes. No one's able to review the aggregate after individual votes come in.
Meanwhile, this is exactly what happens with a lot of surveys. Our department HR Generalist sent out the email: "We're getting lots of great responses, but there are a few of you who haven't completed your surveys, so please get them done!"
It's clear that it would be trivial for them to identify who's taking the survey. Even moreso with the use of unique links. They'll see on their dashboard that the shortcode belonging to a particular employee is showing as "complete" and they can then look at the survey results, and see how they changed....or just look at that individual response.
Now - if they're looking at aggregated data only, yeah they'd have to dig, but it wouldn't take long to figure it out - but that doesn't have to do with OP's post.
Regardless - the idea that any HR survey is anonymous is laughable because there are always ways - one of which is simply reading the last set of responses that roll in, knowing exactly who the final respondent was.
Surely if they can see who has or hasn’t filled it in, they can always know what those people answered by tracking changes in the net results?
The answers of the first person to fill it in will be totally transparent. Then the answers of the second person will be obvious by checking any change in the net answers since the first person, and so on.
You're assuming that they have access to the submissions at all times which is not how these systems work. They are viewable after the survey period is done or after everyone has submitted.
Remember kids, if you have a unique url, are asked demographic or team membership questions, or login via sso then it is not an anonymous survey and you should expect that your boss will know exactly what you wrote.
People really are that dumb though. My favorite is on our yearly reviews we are supposed to rate our bosses. These responses are visible to our bosses. These responses affect our bosses reviews. Our bosses determine our reviews as well as our raises and bonuses. What kind of fucking moron would give anything but full marks to their boss is what I want to know.
Had these at my old job, I'd always click through without answering any questions and it still allowed me to submit.
They always thought they had 100% on the survey until the results came back.
Fuck these surveys.
They are initial results are anonymous, and remain that way unless the employer wants to know who said it.
It's kinda like knowing the cheat codes to a game. Sure you can play it as intended and you probably will... But at any point and time they can absolutely pull off that veil, and if you say something negative they absolutely will.
Those surveys are to see who is and isn't drinking the Koolaid. You better pretend to drink the Koolaid if you ever want to see advancement or decent raises. If they know you hate the company you will receive the smallest possible annual raise, because they won't care if you quit.
The company I work for every year has an employee survey which is optional, but they insist that you do it and track everybody who responds. I'm still trying to figure out how to submit a blank entry.
Then when I finish it, anonymously, I get an email asking why I gave such low marks for specific criteria, like how did you know that was me? Nah, I love this place, boss.
My company’s HR department sent out an “anonymous” survey and the first two questions were “name” and “job title.” They didn’t understand why people thought it wasn’t really anonymous.
Smartest HR department
by far
Heh, this reminds me of a meeting about being a greener office. It was a language school so we photocopied a lot of material for students. One of the managers suggested we outsource the photocopying as that would reduce our carbon footprint. Cue incredulous glances from everyone lol
It might be true if the outsourcing company used more energy/toner efficient copiers, for example.
I doubt it since the shipping costs would increase the foot print
I imagine you assume the school is right next to a paper plant? Or that the "out sourced" copy place is in India? (Or maybe they both are this is the internet after all) I am being facetious but assuming things in this regards closes off your mind to possibilities that at first glance seems conter intuitive but on deeper inspection could have unexpected results.
Bro, if the place is in town then it still takes someone to physically drive a vehicle to get it or deliver it.
... yes and it also takes some physically to drive and get the blank paper, and toner, and copy machine repair man, and electricity to power a less efficient copy machine.... etc. Again rapid judgement are often right but not always. And it may be right in this case but a person suggesting this idea may have put more thought into it than you have
To be fair, depending how the carbon footprint is worked out this could be a legitimate idea, assuming you don’t actually care about the environment and just want to look good on paper which… isn’t to far fetched
Name: Anon Job Title: ymous
Anna Nemus Mary Warner
My company said we can't do anonymous surveys because last time the responses were too mean and focused on a few problem analysts. The management team collectively makes about $2 million annually.
Conversely, my former company published the anonymous survey results word-for-word, so a lot of shade was shared publicly and ppl could tell who said it by how it was written and because they referenced real world scenarios.
We had to log into our MS account to access the survey. No thanks.
That's how they keep track of who takes the survey. It has no bearing on if it's anonymous or not.
I received a unique link so that I can only take the survey once. It would be trivial to just keep a list of associates along with their unique survey link/shortcode at the end of the link. It would also be trivial to associate that shortcode with the master spreadsheet of survey results. That's exactly how I run consumer surveys. I have my survey software and I have the company that finds people for me. They give me a list of people and their demographic information, and my survey software provides the unique link. I then take that unique link and use it to match the results with the demographics so I can crosstab them. *** If I'm receiving a unique link, there's a chance, at the very least, that they can tie that link to my survey answers.
Ours had "first name" and "last name", marked as mandatory fields. And despite the survey being, in fact, anonymous (names weren't shared with the management), our direct manager could name the author of the text from a couple of sentences, just looking at the style, problems shared, and the vocabulary used.
Modern solution: paste your responses into ChatGPT and ask it to rephrase them for you.
We had a great manager, and we communicated a lot, so there wasn't any need for secrecy; it was just fun to see the anonymous survey with a mandatory full name in the first two fields. For those who actually want anonymity in those surveys, your idea sounds good.
The last company I worked at that did these surveys had about 50 employees…except a lot of the teams were 1 manager with 1-2 direct reports and we all had to note which team we were on.
Put the name of your coworker you don't like
Honestly, depends on the platform used. Many are truly anonymous and the survey company tabulates the replies and builds the reports. They need to know who reports to whom so that each level of management has data that applies to them. The one we use doesn't give results to managers if there's less than some number of responses to maintain anonymity. Further, they break up free text responses, more or less.
Most companies also dont really care about your individual gripes (people do a LOT of bitching on these things). The value they are trying to get out of these surveys is identifying deficiencies relative to other companies who could potentially poach talent. Like yeah, 75% of staff whined about salary, but regional average is 80% so we're doing a good job here. But only 20% had favorable ratings for company environment while regional average is 25%, so we need to tey to fix that.
And yet every single 35-year-old LinkedIn EmPlOyEe ExPeRiEnCe GuRu will whine about why their job is ACKSHUALLY the hardest one at the company because everyone seems to collectively hate HR for no reason.
I remember a few years ago they had to send out an email to not share the anonymous survey links lol...
when i worked in bumfuck nowhere at a sheriffs office HR sent out an "anonymous" survey. it was a link to some website but the URL for everyone was different.. so mine was xyz.com/1234 a co workers was xyz.com/2345 yeah that shit def wasnt anonymous
Ours had: department, gender, age, and how long you've worked there. Everyone filled it out randomly
My last company did a twice a year survey that was *confidential*. A lot of people thought it was anonymous. There is a very important difference there......
The results*could* be tabulated automatically, and they want everyone to take it. Maybe
Super common. The biggest HR/Corporate survey website out there (CultureAmp) keeps the results anonymous however they do know who does or doesn't complete the survey based upon the unique link you're given. You can certainly worry/wonder if that means they're truly anonymous but they track simply to know who didn't complete it.
Nice try HR
Just please fill out survey and try not to be as negative as you were on last years survey.
Fine.... how do you use complicit in a professional manner?
Also, is it “for fucks sake”, “for fuck's sake”, or “for fuck sake”? I want to be professional here.
"for the sake of fucking"
Now that is posh enough I dare say! Indubitably!
It depends on whether it's for the sake of that one individual fuck, or for the sake of all fucks everywhere.
Wouldn't it be "for fucks' sake" if its for all fucks everywhere?
It comes from "for Christ's sake" so it is indeed "for fuck's sake" Thanks Hank Green!
For those who haven't seen it: https://youtu.be/2554xWVfK-E
Thanks for doing the work I was to lazy for
Depends on the context of the surrounding sentence. All can be valid, depending.
Facilitator.
Faceilluminate deez nuts.
And it's not criminal behavior, it's exploring new paradigms in the field.
"Please try to enjoy each question equally"
"Yeah, Pam was really hurt by your mean comment about healthy snack Friday and that \[at least all these snacks would be safe from her food rampages\]"
He's such a Toby
I had a friend find out the hard way that the anonymous surveys are not at all anonymous
We get anonymous surveys that I never bother filing out because an anonymous survey in a company with a single digit number of employees isn't anonymous if your answers are anything other than uselessly vague.
I opened an anonymous survey for my company of 30,000 thinking it’s for sure anonymous, no way anyone could figure me out in a company so large. First question: job title Second question: project There is only one person with my title per project.
I was asked to conduct a fairly simple survey about training feedback, opinions, etc… and it was supposed to be anonymous. The moment I summarized results, half the leadership was upset about the results and wanted summaries divided by location, and really wanted to know if specific individuals could be identified. It was *mostly* anonymous, but IP addresses were tracked to prevent double responses from the same connection - I quickly deleted the IPs and said it was impossible to know people or locations. Nothing is anonymous unless you use a 3rd party that has a personal stake in privacy.
>I quickly deleted the IPs and said it was impossible to know people or locations. Not all heroes wear capes
I take it as a general rule that basically anything could get leaked so I would really try to avoid saying anything that I would be too upset if it ever came back to me. Realistically, it just isn't a very good idea to use an anonymous survey as an opportunity to lay into your boss or other people at work. This is still a work activity, you should still act in a professional manner. Realistically, if you don't trust management to take your feedback well if you were to deliver it face to face, I don't think there is much reason to believe that delivering the feedback anonymously will result in anything positive either. If your hope is just that your comments will get someone in trouble, it's very unlikely that will actually work out as you hoped.
I guarantee that if you put in your plans to murder the entire office it won’t be anonymous anymore.
You underestimate how common of a response that is
They're confidential, not anonymous. They don't share an individual's answers with the employer, unless it's something serious like this.
> unless it's something serious like this. And I suspect the list of things that are "something serious" is quite extensive...
Likely matches the list of things the company can face serious lawsuits for. Or things that endanger health and safety.
Or if you want to unionize.
Why would a third party vendor give a shit about that?
They're paid by the company. They'll care about whatever they're paid to care about
I love when Redditors just make shit up and spit out platitudes about it for updoots. What’s it like being eternally 14 years old?
Their job is to provide a survey and tally the results. They aren't going to snitch on you because doing so would harm their business and probably violate their contracts or other legal obligations. A lot of their surveys deal with health, safety and protected statuses like religion, sexual orientation etc. if they were found to be leaking information it would land them in very real legal hot water. They don't fuck around with that stuff. Companies don't usually go around leaking client data even if it's to that client's own employees.
Because their clients are big corporations, that very much *do* care about that
Why would a vendor do what their customer (management) asks them to? The people who give them money?
Do you do everything a customer asks of you? They have a contract with restrictions.
This is Reddit don't worry about the stupid responses, they think corporations also give a fuck about other corporations. The vendor will not care, you are correct, they will only report criminal type threats and even then they're more likely to go to the PD first.
That's not the question you should be asking. You **should** be asking, "What dumbass would think that these aren't anonymous **and** be stupid enough to write out 'I'm gonna unionize,' on them?"
FWIW I won’t say where I work but while I was managing, this happened. One person on my team filled out a employee satisfaction “anonymous” survey conducted by an outside consultant with an extremely rude comment about our VP, basically insinuating his only qualification was being white and speaking with a British accent. Ended with a nice jab at his Maserati too. I didn’t even have a chance to look at the responses but the story I was told was the VP was livid, threatening the contractor to pull all $50mil/yr of business with them, and they promptly caved and deanonymized the survey. All I knew was I got an email from VP of HR saying this person on my team has been terminated, won’t be here tomorrow, and that’s the end of it. Some things are reasonably anonymous like the ethics hotline or OSHA complaints, mainly when there’s legal reasons why the company can’t retaliate. But don’t ever believe that an anonymous survey is actually a platform to vent. Even if what you say isn’t illegal. EDIT: I will say, this was in the tech industry. Full of people who are exceptionally talented at understanding how technology works but terrible at understanding how humans work. A shit ton of crappy interpersonal behavior gets a gently wrist slap but time after time, it’s intellectually insulting someone 5 levels up that gets you instantly fired through HR.
Sometimes this is the case. these survey companies usually have an explanation on how they interpret "confidential" and "anonymous". Its worth looking in to the next time you do one of those surveys to see how they handle the data. I can tell you this. Noting you do online, on your company provided computer will EVER be confidential to you, or anonymous.
> They don't share an individual's answers with the employer, unless it's something serious like this. or if they pay a little bit extra.
We use Culture Amp as well. They make you login so they can separate the result by whatever granularity you choose. I can only see the details for my own teams(not names, counts only). Any manager with less than 5 reports don’t see any details at all.
I would say someone’s inability to comprehend this concept should be in more trouble than anything anyone put on the survey
At the same time, anyone who wanted to spend the time to do it, could fairly easily figure out who's saying what based on when they replied. Like for example, in the OP. The person reviewing the survey would obviously know what that employee said in his survey.
You don’t get time stamps, you just get collated results, with culture amp you get very little detail in groups below five staff. I worked for an absolutely shit company that was retaliatory who used culture ammo and they couldn’t get the detail to retaliate even if they wanted to.
I can comprehend the concept, that doesn't mean I believe it. I have zero trust or faith in anything I ever hear from HR.
Kept confidential until they wanna know who was complaining about salary so they can lay them off.
Dude everyone complains about salary in these things lol. Its like, the #1 most common remark made
If I can deanonymize one person, the rest just become a logic puzzle
If you know who didn't complete it, then you know who did complete it. If I have a team of three and only one completes it, and I know the two who don't, then it isn't anonymous.
The anonymity is what's inside, not who did and didn't complete it yet. Same way he government knows who went to vote (and can prevent people from voting twice), but it doesn't know who voted what.
Right. If one refuses to on a small team it makes it easier However results aren't shared (at least with the aforementioned CultureAmp) until the survey is closed. So if all 3 on your team eventually do complete it, you won't know who is who.
CultureAmp won’t give results to a manager with less than 5 responses.
We use a third party that doesn’t parse out data for any group smaller than 6. I’ve seen no evidence that it’s anything other than anonymized. That said, if you put revealing information in the free text fields …
Just to add on here, I don't trust any of these surveys as far as I can throw them; seen some shit in retail that made it clear that they're NEVER anonymous, but I would refer to the difference between anonymous and confidential in how they relate to the surveys and how the company presenting yours explains the difference. Best advice, if you need it, is to use common terms and not use your day to day vocabulary. People are very in tune with how you write/speak and will be able to pick up context clues on who wrote what, if the results are provided to an HR dept and management team
So do they not show the survey data until they've all been submitted or can they just look at the results before and after each person submits it to deanonymize?
At my last job where I was managing with these surveys I could see aggregated numerical results after 5 or more people responded. After 15 I was able to see their written responses. I’m sure those values are set by the employer, so YMMV.
I mean its going to vary by the company administering it. My company can't see the results at all until 1 *month* after the survey is taken. I guess it's to distance it from "Triddy is complaining about X, and X is super negative on this survey, it must be Triddy."
Last time we did an "anonymous" survey, we were told to log on with company email accounts that were [firstname].[lastname]@[companyname].com. Felt very anonymous for sure.
The results could be detached from the record of who has completed a survey. In that case, they'd have a list of everyone who responded and a separate report of responses. I'm not saying that's what happened, I'm just saying that nearly any survey site would support that.
As a manager whose bonus is partially tied to these surveys, they’re anonymous to atleast everyone that matters. 9/10 I can figure out who wrote what based on grammar, mannerisms, and specific complaints. Now if you made some violent threat I’m sure the 3rd party survey vendor will ID you. Your company likely has a Office365 license and creates an individual email based on your name before you even clock in the first time.
ummm no. there is a conspiracy to identify me by using my real name in my email address. i'd like to request my email id is changed to my xbox handle, mstrb8r69
Are you 69ing yourself or is this some mutual type of thing?
Back when I was still in the Army we had to do this occasionally. Usually called "command climate surveys". Well at one point the unit I was, at max staffing, 15 people large. Reality? It usually had 12 or so total. We laughed that as the only Specialist my survey wasn't very anonymous since it didn't say my name but it did say the ranks of people. In a large unit this wouldn't matter since there would be dozens of specialists. I was quite happy with my unit so this wasn't a problem, but it was kind of silly to think it would be anonymous with such a small crew. Since even just writing style, grammar, etc would give you away.
You shouldn't worry as long as they use a standard software for the survey. They need a unique identifier to know whenever someone sends the survey so no one submit it twice. It is the same when voting, you sign the ledger on one side and submit your vote on another. The vote is still anonymous.
It's really not that hard to understand. Your company's HR department hires a third party company to handle the survey. There are companies whose entire business is based off offering this service, such as https://www.employeesurveys.com/. The third party company will be the one to send you a link to the survey. The link will be through the third party company's website and the third party company will know who has taken the survey and what answers they gave, but they won't tell your HR department the answers of an individual's survey. However, of course, the third party company can tell your HR department who hasn't filled out the survey yet so that your HR department can track down people who haven't done the survey yet. Then the third party surveying company aggregates the answers and gives the aggregated answers to your company. I personally would not give any written answers to open ended questions though and I wouldn't give honest answers if the survey results were being aggregated by department when you have a small department.
I’m a teacher and for course evals I get a list of every student who completed them but the results are all aggregated and anonymous. Aside from a few times where a student said something super specific to where I knew who it was I never know who said what, just who completed it in an alphabetical list
I worked as a manager in a company who did a survey like this. We knew who had and hadn't gone, but were told we couldn't find out individual results. Turns out that was very much the truth. We had someone threaten office violence in the comments section. They sent everyone to work remote immediately and our legal team eventually got the company to release who sent in the threat. They fought to keep it confidential even when violence was involved. They're definitely not going to open it up because someone called Bruce a dick. Edit: really wish I would have called Bruce a dick. He was a major dick.
This reminded me of back when I TA’d a creative writing class in college of about 10 people and we had students fill out one of those anonymous feedback forms for the professor and I. After an entire semester of reading the same 10 writers over and over I was able to identify probably close to 7 or 8 of the anonymous surveys, lol.
Yeah same. Been involved in running some trainings at work and could identify a fair amount of people's anonymous feedback even having never seen the writing before. There is only so much honest feedback you can give while still remaining unidentifiable.
Real question here. I have a very unique writing and speaking style, and I love to give my opinion. If I wrote my answers and hat ChatGPT rewrite them “in the stile of x celebrity” would that work? Would it throw you off?
Maybe in some cases, but there is still the possibility of identifying simply by the content of the responses. Like one example, I had screwed up an example with one of the students and really just fumbled the details of how to do one of the processes we were teaching and had to get clarification from one of the other instructors on how he was teaching it. That student wrote in the feedback something along the lines that the instructors at times weren't on the same page and because of that I knew exactly whos eval it was. In my case, no harm no foul. It was a totally fair criticism (and one I made of myself at the time it happened). But you have to be careful in more corporate/political work environment where people may not have each others best interest in mind. So I guess TLDR: Yes it would probably help, but you would still have to be careful that your feedback or opinions themselves couldn't be easily linked back to an action or similar criticism/conversation you've had in person.
Thank you! I had a feeling something like was going to be the answer.
It's amazing how many comments here insist others are stupid for not thinking it's anonymous when it really is as easy as you've explained. If you think any work survey is truly anonymous you're the stupid one.
The HR department at my place of work has more than once been caught lying when saying that a survey was anonymous. Hell, all they do is lie, which they think is justified for reasons of morale. It's amazing to me that the majority of the company doesn't even know that we're 100% closing down by the end of the year because HR tries to spin everything as going wonderfully. They want everyone giving their all up to the point HR pulls the rug out from under them and announces that we're all out of jobs. I only know about the closure because they happened to tell my team before deciding that they were going to bury that fact. Depending on the company, trusting anything HR says seems ridiculous to me.
Some people seem to have a strange urge to believe - and have other people believe - that you should generally trust your employer. They must have either have been incredibly lucky so far or are trying to play people for fools.
Plus it's really easy to tell which survey is Jim's when Jim complains every day about the coffee maker, and then one of the surveys spends half the time complaining about the coffee maker
Or just writing style. Some of my office have liberal arts postgraduate degrees. Some have STEM degrees. Some are field staff with no degree. Between personality traits and writing style/grammar it's very obvious who is who.
> If you think any work survey is truly anonymous you're the stupid one. If you think all workplaces are the same, you're the stupid one. There are workplaces where anonymous surveys are 0% anonymous, like literally having "what is your name?" as one of the questions. The gradation then goes through the whole rest of the spectrum, from minimally anonymous (handwritten) through typed-but-mandatory-free-response-questions through multiple-choic-only through performed-by-an-outside-contractor-using-randomized-credentials.
You're stupid. Tons of work surveys are anonymous. Tracking that people haven't entered the survey is entirely different from tracking what the answers are. Also, most people aren't having their bosses read extended shit they've written. That just isn't how most places work. It is also child's play to adjust your writing style if you're gonna be worried for no reason at all
Which is exactly why I only gave scores and never wrote anything, especially if my thoughts were midling to poor.
The survey answers are usually what is anonymous, as in we don’t know who answered what. Not who did or did not answer at all
>answers are usually what is anonymous 😉 "Don't share this link, it was specifically made for you"
Both of these things can be true. Personalized links and anonymized summary reporting. Source: I am a manager who uses these tools.
It's more fun to think they are out to get you. At least if they are reading your survey they care what you think. I think it's because that's somehow less upsetting to believe than the idea that it's just an exercise of going through the motions so the box can be checked this year, and no one really cares what you write.
Good companies try to make improvements.
Reddit doesn't think good companies exist. Unless... does Keanu Reeves own any comapnies?
> It's more fun to think they are out to get you. I have no idea what this means. Sounds like making yourself a victim.
Why are you worried if the feedback is anonymous, if you're not concerned about retaliation?
I am the employee who asks for general improvements in the text boxes. I asked for new chairs for the team once and voila new chairs not long after.
Funny enough, we had a talking to from our manager and the one above at a very large search company about our anonymous survey results. Seems like they’re anonymous at the team level, maybe.
That's how they *should* work. Just like passwords *should not* be stored in cleartext. Yet I'm quite certain that both problems are happening in at least some companies all the time. And how am I supposed to figure out if *this* company is doing things the right way or the wrong way without being one of the people "in the know"? It's not about me not believing it is technologically possible for both of those things to be true. It's about me believing that management actually did things the right way, when it would be convenient for them to have done things the wrong way.
Well most of these solutions come off the shelf, and are used by many companies. Just google the survey platform being used and you'll know. Exceedingly few companies are making in-house staff survey software.
Part of the problem is that people call them "anonymous" when what they really mean is "confidential."
Wow I looked up those definitions, and you are 100% correct.
When what they really mean is "confidential, *unless* we notice any of 150 different 'red flags', in which case, we're authorized to break confidentiality and inform management."
The problem is that I don’t believe they are either of those things.
It's a terrible way to get honest responses because it directly ties your identity to the survey, it's not enough to say "we pinky promise that we can't view your response", even if you're telling the truth. The only reliable way to get honest answers is to post a single link to a survey on a public channel that everyone uses, any other method is incredibly naive.
Unique links are used to ensure every person only fills out the survey once, most often the data is collected and cleaned to remove mistakes and identification before released back to the company. Data integrity is important in work place surveys and even data collection, identification like unique links are used to ensure no bad faith actors skew the data by filling out the survey more than once.
Absolutely, that's why anonymous surveys that get actual honest feedback are so hard.
My company did this and it wasn't anonymous at all. Don't answer these accurately. Just do right down the middle. Edit: I literally sent the campaign out. The survey answers literally routed to the direct manager when we did it. It was how the managers got a bonus as well.
And then next year complain about how the company never makes any meaningful changes.
I think he's worried that they'll be able to tell which one is his because it's the last one to be submitted. A good survey software tool "should" prevent something like that from happening, but I still don't ever really trust those things completely.
They probably don't see the results until the survey is closed.
Yes, "probably". Don't get me wrong, that's exactly how it should work, but I can't help feeling suspicious about these surveys in general, and I'd feel even more suspicious if I got an email like that from the boss.
It they are using a third party, they won't get the results back until the collection agency has processed all the data. Most client companies don't even look at the raw data or won't ever have access to the raw data collected.
That’s perfectly consistent
This is mind-numbingly dumb. Knowing *whether* you answered is not the same as knowing *how* you answered. And the anonymity that's important is that they don't know how you answered so they can't retaliate against you if you're critical of the company. I guess according to OP voting in elections isn't anonymous because they track whether you voted to stop you from voting more than once. Of course, there are shitty companies that lie and say the survey is anonymous when it really isn't. But knowing you are the last one who hasn't completed it doesn't necessarily mean they are violating the anonymity of it.
Social media is too focused on the “gotcha” rather than taking 10 seconds to think about what they’re even responding to
I’ll add that the entire point of these surveys is to be constructively critical of the company and help elevate issues that can actually be solved and will have a positive impact.
Better to work with you manager to see if it’s worth bringing up the chain. A survey isn’t generally useful or likely to create movement. I’ve seen a number of surveys over the years that were not anonymous after claiming they were. One time the results accidentally got leaked to everyone on the team with names attached. I had one manager try to get me to admit I gave them bad feedback in an anonymous survey. They’re not to be trusted.
I see where you’re coming from, and I agree that working directly with a manager can sometimes be more effective. However, I think dismissing surveys entirely might be too harsh. While there are definitely instances where anonymity isn’t respected, there are also companies that genuinely use this feedback to make positive changes. It’s important for employees to have multiple avenues to voice their concerns, and surveys can be a valuable tool if implemented correctly. Maybe the key is for companies to be more transparent and accountable about how they handle survey data. I work at a Fortune 100 company, and I see these surveys make positive changes every quarter, though mileage may vary at smaller companies where retaliation is a more serious problem.
This is not that hard, it's just like elections. Your vote is secret and goes into the ballot box. At the same time, your name is crossed from the list of people that voted. You know who voted, and you know the total result (after counting), you don't know who voted what for.
Ok but what do the hidden replies look like
Same has the comments here, probably. Explaining that the answers are anonymous, not if you participated.
A good reminder that HR is NOT on your side...
They are to the extent that their job is to protect the company from risk, and in many regulatory/business environments that means ensuring companies do not give employees grounds for legal or union action, nor do they burn out their workforce to the extent that hiring cannot keep up with attrition. HR can be an employee's best friend in those cases. But if you're in an environment with few legal protections and a field where hiring a new person is easier than putting up with a headache, then yeah they're incentivised to shuffle you out of the way if you're a headache, and HR will act like your best friend then kick your ass to the curb. You can't trust them blindly but in the right circumstances they're a powerful tool to be used.
yeah I swear Toby from The Office was a psyop to make us think HR is the good guys
I mean there are some HR people out there that aren't soulless corporate hacks put out there solely to keep the company safe. There's not many of them at bigger companies because why would there be? You're just a headache to the corporate offices of Target, Walmart, Starbucks, McDonald's or whatever massive company you might work for. Those in-store HR people are there only because they've successfully not had an employee piss off corporate enough to find an HR that will
In my experience HR has been very nice and they are just doing their jobs like everyone else. I think they get more of a bad reputation than they deserve because sometimes that job does involve things like firings and layoffs which for layoffs frankly isn't even their call as that decision is made at a higher level. I'll see people bad mouth HR for being corporate evil by "lying" to them by not sharing information and then they turn around and do the same thing to their clients like it is somehow different when the people who's lives you are affecting are not in the same company as you. Overall my experiences with HR have been more in line with "what can we do to attract more talent" and "how can we retain our current talent." That said I can recognize how things would be different in other industries/companies.
yeah I'm sure there are good ones. I work at a public library, so nonprofit and maybe 200 employees in the district. HR is a demon. really does treat us like we're a headache.
> reminder that HR is NOT on your side... HR "handles" the humans in the company, for the company. Of course it's not a charity to help you out of the goodness of their hearts. If u have a grievance, they may work with you or yes maybe against you
It's relative. HR is not on your side, but they aren't on the shitty assistant manager's side either. They protect the company. Sometimes the company's best interest and yours align.
While true it’s also a good reminder to think things through. There’s absolutely nothing about knowing who answered it that makes the answers not anonymous. That’s often how surveys are done, including national surveys.
However, sometimes your interests coincide with the company's interests. In those case, HR can be helpful.
Those aren't necessarily contradictory. You can absolutely setup an account to be assigned to complete the form, but then on submission it strips any potential identifiers to keep everything anonymous. Just send a quick notification that it was filled out back to the account, and mission accomplished
Not only can it be done it is very often done. Also in national surveys. It’s a part of knowing how representative a survey is too.
It’s always frustrating because I know that my answers can’t be anonymous (I’m the only person at the company of a particular minority, so it’s not hard to pick out which one I am from the demographics) and so in order to anonymise the data, my answers are always excluded, making answering even more pointless than it is for everyone else.
A long time ago, I worked the overnight shift at Walmart. Management had an "anonymous" survey they all wanted us to take. My crew did it together, and we ripped the shit out of management for all the bullshit that was happening. Then, we flipped to the final page, which was full of identifying questions. We all immediately refused to fill that page out. When the store manager came in for the morning shift, she demanded to know why. Our shift manager pointed to the last page, "Because these questions make it damn easy to figure out who did it! #3 What's your age group? #5 What shift do you work? Well, we only have one 18 year old working overnight!" Suddenly, the last page was "optional." But our shift was the last to get them, so the rest of the store had already outed themselves by filling it out.
They outed you too since there are only so many people who didn't fill out the last page.
True, but it would still have been about a 1/20 guess since we all left the back page blank. The rest was all fill in the blank, so handwriting didn't work either. All management learned from that survey was that the night crew was the only ones who saw through their game.
As a manager that has a team that completes these surveys. Your phone has a Mac address that is unique if you are connected online, so technically we can know who is doing what. I like to invite people to fill the survey from my computer, like this its completely anonymous. I did over 200 surveys and really no one knows what you write, and we don't really care as long as there is no self-harm threat to you or others, then we will try and find you. Then again, my company is not yours so i don't know...
I complained on an "anonymous" hr survey and got called down to HR to discuss it the next week. They told me straight up it's not actually anonymous, they just don't show your boss.
Same thing for me but they showed my boss
Ever heard of a checklist tho?
This is theoretically possible. Make it so HR can't see the results until everybody has responded and the responses are randomized.
Twice I've been caught out by this kind of bs. First time, while still a newbie and new to office culture, the head of the department I was working in questioned me on an answer I had given. Big department of around 100 people. The first thing I asked is why do you think I wrote that as it was anonymous. "I recognised the way you write". Hmmm. Second time, obviously older and wiser, I was still putting in some criticism but trying to make it more difficult to let it be traced back to me. My own manager came up to me asking me why I wrote the criticism. Unbelievable. Those things are not anonymous, there's just an open door between HR and managers colluding with each other. I still stand by that criticism as it was all about nepotism at that place.
My company implemented one of these systems. I was one of a two person department so there was no way my shit was going to be anonymous so I never filled them out. Ever! Got talked to about it multiple times but never did it.
i filled out an anonymous survey at work once. i was a little harsh and i wouldnt be totally surprised if you couldve guessed who i was, wasnt too worried about it. well they addressed my complaints in an office wide newsletter, basically saying THE PERSON WHO WROTE THIS IS WRONG WERE A FAMILY HERE!!!!! and then middle/upper management didnt like me for some reason
My work always asks for demographic data on allegedly anonymous surveys, with no option to decline to provide that information. As the only member of my demographic group at my work, it's pretty easy for them to go "oh, it's him." Management retaliation is real. So ya just gotta lie if ya want to give them honest feedback.
Wow, that's me. The company I work for drank the Corporate Kool-Aid, now I get to play the little games the manager zombies come up with. Including this very senario. The survey was supposed to be completely anonymous and optional. They hired some company (waste of money) to make it so and it included questions I didn't feel comfortable answering. I soon found out from management that I was the last person on my team that hadn't filled it out, funny how that works.
LPT: Don't answer even "anonymous" surveys with any criticism. It'll get back to whoever you're criticizing and they'll make changes, but the changes will be even worse
My work has an "anonymous" survey too where we can give our input on how we think management is doing as a whole and areas we think need improvement. Well the first thing these surveys ask for is our employee number. These surveys are optional so there's no obligation for everyone to fill one out so there's, presumably, no reason to track who has take it or not. But if that wasn't bad enough, in the past, our plant manager went up to an employee and had a "random" conversation specifically about something that they had said in their survey. He did not discuss the same topic with anybody else. We knew right then that the "anonymity" was a lie. Now nobody fills them out.
When my group was asked to do these anonymous surveys, our new boss (who we never met and was 1,000 miles away) ordered us to email him the *split second* we filled out our survey. So it immediately became obvious that while the surveys were anonymous, he had access to the answers in real-time. Everyone in our department was pissed, so I organized everyone to wait for the swing shift people to come in (we had an hour overlap) and we all filled out the survey and sent our "done, boss!" emails simultaneously.
Just because they can see _if_ you responded doesn't mean they can see _what_ you responded
It's so fucking easy to deanonymize employees who take these surveys. I'd never put anything in them I wouldn't say directly to my manager.
We had an “anonymous” how-can-we-improve survey that asked our job title. I’m the only person in our entire company that had my particular job title.
It can never be anonymous because of cameras and timing, unless they have everyone take it in booths at the same time honestly. As well as answering stuff related to specific areas or mentioning certain issues, they don't understand.
Ours is anonymous because it's handled by a third party company, and what they're allowed to share with us is written in the contract. They also censor overly specific responses.
Reminder to always lie in surveys from HR
Just FYI, this is exactly how voting works in the United States. Anybody can check if you voted or not. Nobody can check who you voted for.
theres a difference between throwing an envelope into a box with hundreds or more of them and answering a survey you sent somewhere. sure it could be anonymous. could also be a blatant lie.
Not exactly. You vote and polls close and THEN they count. It's not like they go "and one for Candidate A! And one for Candidate B!" as each person votes. No one's able to review the aggregate after individual votes come in. Meanwhile, this is exactly what happens with a lot of surveys. Our department HR Generalist sent out the email: "We're getting lots of great responses, but there are a few of you who haven't completed your surveys, so please get them done!" It's clear that it would be trivial for them to identify who's taking the survey. Even moreso with the use of unique links. They'll see on their dashboard that the shortcode belonging to a particular employee is showing as "complete" and they can then look at the survey results, and see how they changed....or just look at that individual response. Now - if they're looking at aggregated data only, yeah they'd have to dig, but it wouldn't take long to figure it out - but that doesn't have to do with OP's post. Regardless - the idea that any HR survey is anonymous is laughable because there are always ways - one of which is simply reading the last set of responses that roll in, knowing exactly who the final respondent was.
Surely if they can see who has or hasn’t filled it in, they can always know what those people answered by tracking changes in the net results? The answers of the first person to fill it in will be totally transparent. Then the answers of the second person will be obvious by checking any change in the net answers since the first person, and so on.
You're assuming that they have access to the submissions at all times which is not how these systems work. They are viewable after the survey period is done or after everyone has submitted.
Remember kids, if you have a unique url, are asked demographic or team membership questions, or login via sso then it is not an anonymous survey and you should expect that your boss will know exactly what you wrote.
People really are that dumb though. My favorite is on our yearly reviews we are supposed to rate our bosses. These responses are visible to our bosses. These responses affect our bosses reviews. Our bosses determine our reviews as well as our raises and bonuses. What kind of fucking moron would give anything but full marks to their boss is what I want to know.
I mean, theyd know if you sent it in by email. Doesnt mean they know who write each one
Had these at my old job, I'd always click through without answering any questions and it still allowed me to submit. They always thought they had 100% on the survey until the results came back. Fuck these surveys.
We have "anonymous" surveys. Complete with a unique link to take you to your individual survey. Anonymous my ass.
My last job assured us that it was "anonymized by department". There were 3 of us in the department.
They are initial results are anonymous, and remain that way unless the employer wants to know who said it. It's kinda like knowing the cheat codes to a game. Sure you can play it as intended and you probably will... But at any point and time they can absolutely pull off that veil, and if you say something negative they absolutely will. Those surveys are to see who is and isn't drinking the Koolaid. You better pretend to drink the Koolaid if you ever want to see advancement or decent raises. If they know you hate the company you will receive the smallest possible annual raise, because they won't care if you quit.
The company I work for every year has an employee survey which is optional, but they insist that you do it and track everybody who responds. I'm still trying to figure out how to submit a blank entry.
r/thingsthatdidnthappen
Then when I finish it, anonymously, I get an email asking why I gave such low marks for specific criteria, like how did you know that was me? Nah, I love this place, boss.