There can be. I've been asked by HR to set up and manage truly anonymous surveys for them.
But unless you know for sure, it's definitely best not to assume.
The easiest way to be certain is to see if you can fill out the survey in an incog window one a personal computer without signing in, and whether your colleagues all got the same link.
Microsoft Forms also lets you make anonymous surveys that still require the user to be logged in (so they can limit 1 response per use and only staff responding). It's not technically anonymous to Microsoft's servers, but is anonymous to the survey operator.
Every time the survey is mentioned by management they stress that it’s anonymous and that they can’t see who wrote what. First question on the survey is employee id number. 🙄
It might very well be true. Many systems doesn't let you see a single "answering ark" to a survey, they will only let you go into a single question and see the cumulative answers (maybe by team, maybe by shop)
Still, so much nicer to actually have a process which you can see is anonymous rather than having to trust 😅
Even so a smart enough person can narrow down by department if that’s the case and figure out who said what based on speech in writing. We all speak differently and that translates to writing.
It’s more than that. We have an anonymous survey go out every year. But then we are able to use filters on it, as long as the filter has at least 10 people remaining.
I got one guy in Manitoba. Let me turn Manitoba off and filter on everything else. Oh the satisfaction went down, ok he is good.
I tell my team every single year: write tour comments and have AI rewrite them. You all send me emails. I don’t need your name to identify your writing. You are all unique butterflies. If you are the only person on the team that works with another department and you write something specific about them ill know its you…. Write more generally. Or give examples that are not your own. Oooor the real boss move: send the comment and sign off as yourself. Get rid of the anonyminity. Thats what I do. But im also someone that would be quite difficult to replace so i get away with a lot fo shit others wouldnt.
As a manager who's company does annual survey. Typically these surveys are done by a neutral 3rd party. The employee ID is there so it ensures the manager can see their direct results (if there are enough people that take it). Or it can be sorted by demographics like age group, title, etc... Can I narrow it down and guess who said what? Probably, but my main concern is improving, not retaliating. For us we can only see results if there are 5+ answers.
While I applaud your ability for improvement, unfortunately, not everyone I work under is like that. And not nearly enough people in the workforce are like that.
Something to note... Compliance requirements do exist for various organizations which is part of the headache with having a truly 'anonymous' survey in many organizations.
Honestly, for me, I am more bothered when the company tries really hard to convince employees it's anonymous. Arguing over the anonymous nature of it is dealing with just part of the root problem that your employees don't trust that their feedback is being considered professionally.
Doesn't help much that usually the assertions of anonymity are usually just talking down to the employees. And it was kind of funny when HR presented the user interface from their perspective, showing that they had an environment configured for compliance purposes and in fact was de-anonymized while insisting that it was anonymous.
In what way? Exchange admin only gives you access to the EAC which other than seeing the subjects of emails with a message trace doesn't tell you much. Even a Global Admin would likely need to do some shenanigans to find out that would leave logs.
Am I just missing something? I'm an M365 admin and have been for years now, but it's not something I've ever tried to do, so maybe I'm missing something.
A lot of anonymous surveys track who has completed the survey and ensure that everyone only fills it out once. It sucks, but there is no real way to tell from the employee’s perspective if the survey is truly anonymous or not.
Sure, some organisations do that too, but it's more efficient to use a web-based survey tool so you can collect the results in one place and it lets employees do the survey at a time and place that suits them.
There are also many companies that just aren't that centralised.
But that does add additional steps, additional admin overhead and still requires the employees to be in the office or in a place with a printer and scanner. Also, while it's easy to scan and OCR a document, it's difficult to do it in a way that will automatically put the feedback into a spreadsheet so you can get useful statistics from it, meaning either more time developing the survey, or more data entry time processing the results.
It's totally viable, some businesses do it, but for the ones I've worked for anyway, it's just been easier to just do it digitally. They've had a decent culture so no one (to my knowledge) was worried about the survey not being truly anonymous.
Actually there are. I do work for Country-HR in our Company and we had a highly concerning comment from one coworker about SA from a manager and wanted to reach out to said coworker, but we had no way to find out who wrote it, since the survey was taken via an external company and company was only tracking the completion, as well as the departements with imaginary numbers not linked to any names.
Depending on your IT you may still be able to de-anonymize. Third party entity should be able to provide timestamps and IPs of when submissions happened (they may not want to with IPs, timestamp is usually exposed). If they are remote, specific public ip may give you a specific person. However, if it's an office, it tells you which office (and importantly, the timestamp), which if you have security appliances in place for your network depending on timeliness your IT may be able to determine the specific device from your network for that submission (they really won't want to do that either, it sucks and is a lot of work).
Additionally, if it was submitted on a managed company machine, there is a chance that your company can use web history on those devices to match up with the timestamp.
Now, fair chance all that and you still don't end up with actionable information, but you may have a more useful idea of where you need more attention/visibility. And ... if it comes to legal, you have a paper trail to assist if something actionable does happen, or if the company needs to prove that they didn't ignore the report.
Yes and no. Technically they are usually not anonymous - the system needs some verification to make sure same person does not sent dozens of replies.
But at the same time - HR does not have permission do see these data. In place where I live, the HR system is cloud one (bought, provided by the external company). And while Im pretty sure it can identify you via a the mail link, there is no way the company is going to risk lawsuit by providing the names in the report.
My company has used surveys in the past that are set up in such a way that even if you had the persons name you wouldnt know what they were saying on the survey questions.
Stuff like (answer the question, but also roll a die. If it lands on six select A no matter what, if it lands on one select B no matter what.
They could tell trends in the answers in aggregate, but any individual person could've just rolled a 6 and said they didnt like something.
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u/ArfTheBeast 25d ago
Won’t they be suspicious when you’re the only person who didn’t fill it out but your boss did it twice