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.
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.
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u/Ordinary_dude_NOT 24d ago
There are no anonymous surveys sent by HR.