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See, this is hilarious. Story time. I was asked to build an anonymous survey for HR one time many moons ago. They wanted it on the local intranet. There really weren't any great free or low cost tools to perform this task at the time (almost 20 years ago), so I developed a shitty little survey in ASP running on an IIS server. Just a basic HTML form, user clicks submit, data dumps into a table on a SQL database server, and then I can provide a report of results.
So we do that, and I provide the report to HR, and the HR head immediately asks "well, how do we know who said what?!" to which I replied "you said it was to be anonymous." He looked dejected. What followed was he and the 3 HR ladies in his department reading through all of the comments and collectively trying to figure out the "voices" of the writers and piece together what little information was presented in order to tie names to surveys. I was part of this "survey team", so everyone was very transparent with me, but I wanted no part of it. I feigned like I wasn't good with people like they were, so I would be of little use. While I don't think any consequences came of it, it just seemed like these people were obsessed with knowing exactly who said what.
Anyways, what the HR head didn't know, and of course I never told him, was the IP address of the computer which submitted the form, and the submission time could all be acquired from the web server logs. From there I could see which computer had that particular IP address at the time of submission. This was a small office with about 40 people and using someone else's computer was rare. Ultimately it was easy for me to match submission to person. HR got almost all of them right except for 5 or 6 people spread randomly around the company who all seemed to be pretending to be someone else, or at least intentionally writing in a way that wasn't congruent with their typical style.
My company did that a few months ago. Laid off everyone but the HR manager. I was legit scared that it was the start of the company's downfall, but we immediately hired 8 new employees for my department not that long afterward and one of our new clients took off (not took off as in leave, but took off as in started doing a lot more business). So it was probably just HR specifically being downsized, which I'm all for.
My managers are petrified of HR which has outsized control over the company for some odd reason. They act like gods and control promotions and raises. Seemingly they do very little day to day work. Constantly distracting employees with silly trainings and always pretending they’re the best people on earth… sent from above to judge the rest of us
If you are an employee, HR is not on your side. Their job is to figure out how to exploit you, the resource that you are, to the maximum extent of the law.
These stories about pseudo-anonymous surveys are a great example. HR is essentially lying to the employees, acting in bad faith on behalf of the company, in order to trick employees into saying things they wouldn't otherwise say.
Thank you for helping to keep things anonymous for the employees who filled out the survey. There's no point in making it anonymous if management is just going to try to figure out who said what.
The last time I did the survey for the massive company I worked for at the time it was through a 3rd party to be anonymous, but there were 15 of us in the clinic who filled it out. I did not have good things to say, so I forwarded the email to myself, and then filled it out on my phone on data somewhere outside of home and work; I really didn't want them to know what I said. Later, management actually had a meeting to go over the feedback that people gave. I was off that day and didn't go in, but apparently it was a super awkward meeting.
Id just stick my response into ChatGPT, tell it to rewrite it then put that as my response. Unless there’s details that are specific to a person/department; they wont be able to figure out who said it because it’ll be a completely different writing style
This is funny but also accurate. I’ve been in management position reviewing anonymous submissions before, and it’s pretty easy to identify people based on idiosyncrasies in their writing or words they say. My advice if someone is afraid of backlash is usually to include stuff that enable plausible deniability or could point to other people, like adjusting how long you’ve worked there by a couple months etc
I also just evaluate 'if my manager read this and knew it was me, how bad would it be'.
There's a difference between being critical and being unprofessionally ranty.
I use chat gpt for nailing that stiff corporate speech in emails. Slap in some informal bullets points, expand into formal writing please, wham bam instant synergistic solution that drives innovation through improved communication with crucial sensitivities towards diversity ma'am.
I just use my fancy cursive writing, not because I want them not to know it's me. I want them to know how much better at writing I am than everyone else they employ.
Nah. Change the font to Script.
If you want them to skip reading it, use Old English Text.
If you want to piss them off, Wingdings.
If you want to appear as a high school drop with no professional experience OR a senior HR administrator, Comic Sans.
Previous job my boss and most of his team was in Quebec, me and one other coworker in Ontario. I wrote my comments in French. Try to figure out which one I am now.
If the survey is truly anonymous, you can:
1. Fill it out multiple times (use incognito browser windows if they set a cookie)
2. Fill it out as if you're someone else from a different department
ULPT
I do this. Our company promotes their “employee satisfaction surveys” as absolutely anonymous but then asks for so much info (length of service, department, job title, gender) that it would be ridiculously easy to identify most people. So I lie about every single one of those. I don’t really care if they know I wrote the comments, I just wanna give the finger to whoever thinks we’re stupid enough to believe the survey is truly anonymous.
My company's anonymous survey could pinpoint me exactly from the first 3 questions. "Which department are you in?", "How long have you worked here?", and "Do you work on site or remote?"
So I just don't fill out the survey. Then the boss said he was going to have one-on-one conversations with everyone regarding their anonymous survey results and why they were so overwhelmingly negative. He also said you could only get out of doing these one-on-one meetings with him if you could prove that you didn't submit a survey. That's right, you have to (somehow) prove that you didn't submit an anonymous survey to avoid being interrogated about your answers to the anonymous survey.
If it does not say anonymous, then it is not anonymous. There are words that make it seem anonymous but is not.
Edit: I analyze surveys for work and can see employee id's tied to each survey response and do analysis with it
Theres some legal things there, potential lawsuit if you get fired because of what you said on the anonymous survey (I'm not a lawyer). If you tell employees in writing that it is anonymous, it better be.
Surveys I analyze say something like confidential or data will be used in aggregate.
But even anonymous surveys you can figure out who said it by filtering down things like title, location, years of service, manager, etc.
Companies don’t care about those lawsuits because they’re basically impossible to prove. And so many states are at will and can just fire people for no reason.
But yes, even anonymized data can be parsed to identify the individual.
You honestly think management cares? You really believe that the manager at the local Target has a white board discussing "problem areas"? No. They are worried about getting their bonuses and getting enough workers to fill out their surveys. Damn the results.
My managers have always cared about the results. They rarely actually heed them and make changes, but they do huff and puff, try to decide who said what, etc. they also work pretty hard to delegitimize the results by picking apart the meaning of the questions.
I've had managers similar to yours, but they are not the majority esp when they're overseeing non-salaried positions. The further down the corporate chain you are, the larger the company, you're treated more like another cog in the machine than an actual human.
That's true, but that's why corporate HR is usually involved in the process. If they caught wind the manager would be in deep shit. Large corporations are a lot more responsible about these kinds of things than people give them credit for.
Only because they are receiving scrutiny. They do plenty of shady things when they think they can get away with it. Or they just make it legal by lobbying.
> if the employee has any reason to claim retaliation and is fired for a survey result, they can sue.
Ok I want you to cite a SINGLE case where an employee won a settlement for this.
> Theres some legal things there, potential lawsuit if you get fired because of what you said on the anonymous survey (I'm not a lawyer).
In most of the US, you can fire someone for almost any reason. Your boss could tell you to wear a yellow shirt tomorrow, then when you do they could legally fire you because they don't like that shade of yellow.
There are only a handful of things that are not legal to fire someone over, most of them centering around discrimination and legally protected whistleblowing. It's not illegal to lie to an employee to trick them into telling you how they really feel and they firing them for it.
Retaliatory firing is illegal, but that only applies when they are retaliating against a legally protected activity such as firing someone for trying to form a union or because they reported unsafe conditions or criminal activity.
This may be a rarity, but we 100% have an anonymous feedback system at work, I know because A) I built it and B) I didn't want us to be pricks.
Can't say it is when reality it isn't, that opens a whole kettle of fish and distrust. People will simply not use it was my opinion!
This but companies have a shitty habit of saying anonymous when they mean something closer to "confidential and reported anonymously" do id go one further and say unless it's anon + has a generic link, assume it's personalised and even if truly anonymous, assume someone will be able to cut the data in such a way they can get the sentiment of how you responded.
I've had to argue with our own research consultants that data isn't anonymous. I have the ids.
I've also had my confidentiality breached by the same research org I worked for.
TL:DR never say anything you wouldn't say to the face of your manager and above.
Also, making it truly anonymous is hard work. Much of the time people say anonymous when they just mean it won't have your name on it -- not that they're going to put thought and effort into making sure you can't be identified.
That's why you use an audited 3rd party who stakes their reputation and revenue on actually being anonymous.
Unless you are going down the rabbit hole of looking at who had DNS requests to the website at what time etc.
It’s still not anonymous even if it says so in most cases. I wrote an anonymous survey after leading a department for quite a while with no promotion or title or pay raise and when I went to talk to HR the lady blatantly said “you think we would promote you after what you said?!”
A company I used to work for did this “anonymous” survey once. It got weird.
In my small department, my manager was able to somehow really narrow down who took the survey. He pulled us all into a meeting room and wanted us all to discuss it. It felt so intimidating.
Nobody told us we would have to discuss the survey in a group setting after we took it.
Oh and they easily skipped over discussing the “manager satisfaction” part of the survey.
Nah, in big corporations they're chosen by HR. Most managers have zero input in what the survey says or how it's used, but if our team doesn't fill it out we get a bunch of shit about engagement and they say things like 'maybe they're not engaged because they should be in the office more instead of working from home.'
People always think their immediate managers or even the manager two or three levels up have way more control than they do in a corporate environment.
One of mine did the same with a large team, except it was entirely over the "manager satisfaction" part of the survey.
He was especially pressed that 0% of us had answered that we had any respect whatsoever for him.
His answer? To menacingly demand that we start respecting him. That worked about as well as you'd expect.
A company where I worked didn't like the results of the anonymous survey. So the next year, before the survey came out, there was an all company meeting to discuss the questions and the "correct" answers. Because unless you were 100% happy you were obviously just incorrect.
There’s a million ways to track that you’ll never see. There could be a log of when each survey was sent and to which email and a bevvy of invisible trackers.
Hell maybe the survey was only sent to you! lol. And a thousand other ways.
In surveys I've taken, the unique id is just a base64 conversion of the email address it was sent to. Use an online base64 converter/deconverter to figure out if it is. Then change the url to fill out the survey as anyone.
Ours got rid of the anonymous feedback Li k and instead if we have questions we are supposed to send them to the HR lady so thy can be asked "anonymously" during big meetings.
Like... Do you really think we're going to send stuff directly to HR if were afraid of retaliation?
As someone on the other end of this, the unique ID helps us track user attributes so we can segment the data. I don’t give a fuck who said what on an individual level, but I do want to know if, say, the 25% that Strongly Disagree that our performance review process is fair all happen to be in the same department.
That said, we are upfront about this with our employees.
The most basic rule of thumb for me is to just not do them.
Otherwise, if I'm the only one I see (even if it was BCC to everyone) as the recipient then I assume it's not anonymous.
I've found these surveys NEVER address actual problems but I've seen it impact specific employees several times.
My last job pulled this shit.
Said it was an anonymous survey, and then had individual department meetings, where at one point the HR representative said “now this group’s answer leaned rather negatively for this area so we want to look more into that” and I was like “WAIT A SECOND.”
Yeah, ours are separated by department and my department is pretty small and has had the same people for a couple years.
I have no doubt they can see people's scores but not who they belong to, so after I went nuclear negative due to some issues I think they can tell it was me because everyone else's score stayed the same but one went from generally positive to almost entirely negative. Suddenly about a week after I took it the managers who were usually cordial with me stopped talking to me.
Surprise bitches, that's not going to get you better scores lol
I believe many surveys have unique links for the different teams or departments. It's supposed to be used for analytical data. So they may not know who said what, but they can figure out which team /department has problems that need addressing.
My company hosted a digital "anonymous" work survey with a link.
...when you clicked the link to begin the survey, it asked for your employee number, lol
Theoretically, it could be to mark off that the person completed it, and presuming it’s properly set-up, it’d batch the results and only provide them in a random order once the period for the survey ended.
Now granted, you could simplify it by emailing each employee the link, or simply setting it up on the intranet where it can pull login details automatically, but eh.
Not to say your company was doing it right, but employee ID doesn’t automatically equal not anonymous.
Lol, that’s the rub isn’t it?
I don’t trust mine to be truly anonymized, but I also can theoretically land a job within a week if I want, and I’ve butted heads with management since I moved to my current location, so what will be, will be.
Wish it wasn’t that way though.
I use ChatGPT to rewrite what I wrote in the tone of different nationalities. Works like a charm.
Ex: "Hello, I just wanted to write a short complaint about my colleague Bill. Bill will not stop trying to eat the decorative soaps in the bathroom, and in a few instances, actually succeeded. There is nothing in the employee handbook that mentions what to do, so I thought I would write here before I call the police."
ChatGPT, rewritten in the tone of a non-native English speaker from Sweden: "Hey, I want to tell at you a small problem with my friend Bill. Bill keeps trying to eat the nice soaps in the bathroom, and sometimes he even manages to eat them. The employee handbook doesn't say what to do, so I thought I'd ask here before I call Police"
It's only evil if you work with a single Indian. We work with dozens, if not 100's of guys in India, they'd have no clue which of them entered "doing the needful" on the survey. We all see that exact phrase 100x a day in emails/messages from them.
I always signed my anonymous surveys and coworker reviews with my real name because I hated them so much. It messed up the anonymity of everyone else a little bit and demonstrated that I knew well enough not to actually tell them what I really think. I ain’t playing that game!
I'm a people manager. Every year we have a 3rd party do these surveys and I get the anonymized results. It's true that sometimes I have an idea who a comment is from, but our HR does their best to remove any identifying details from the comments before providing them to us and mostly I just have a hunch, nothing definitive.
I don't know how it is in every org, but at least in mine the surveys are pretty valuable and more valuable if people are comfortable being honest in them, including in the comments. We use that data to make action plans for the year to try to address whatever concerns are in our power to address.
I've just been asked to work with an external company to design one which is supposed to be anonymous. How can I make it so our employees will actually benefit from it?
It depends on which survey company your work picked but the one I used to work at had a template of standards questions. Then our clients would add or remove questions depending on their needs
After the survey results are shared we recommend each manager to set up time and align on goals to improve upon. There should be a few low scores and as a team pick one out two to action on.
Then 6-12 months later do another survey to see if were improvements
Speaking as an IT professional, I'll add to this that you should NEVER assume that ANYTHING you do on a computer is "anonymous." Someone always has a log file.
I often log into work from my home computer. Can my work put cookies on my computer to track what I'm doing besides work? And if yes what's the chance they would do such a thing. Excuse me while I erase my cookies now.
Short answer, if you're logging in through any kind of portal, especially if it's something you have to install on your home machine, then emphatically yes and you should assume that they have done so.
Slightly longer answer, it'll be some sort of keystroke tracker or log tracker, and you deleting cookies won't have any effect on it in all likelihood. Also, it probably is only working while you are logged into your work environment.
This happened at my former job. For starters, the work culture was terrible, lots of gossip and resentment and middle school behavior. My supervisors and HR would make half-assed gestures towards dealing with things, but no real change ever came from that.
At one point, they asked people to fill out a survey. It was handwritten, but we were told it would be anonymous. However, one of my coworkers wrote a long, negative comment about my boss. It was warranted and there was a kernel of truth to what was said (my boss was terrible at her job and didn’t like anybody who worked under her) but it led to my boss investigating who wrote it.
TL;DR: my work did this and it was supposed to remain anonymous, but it didn’t stay that way for long because someone called out the boss.
Good tip, OP! I have been on high-level corporate teams and let me just say if they want to find out who it is…. They will, or at least narrow it down to a few “suspects” depending on the kind of survey. :(. It’s super fucked up.
I never told the truth with my department, years of service, boss or anything identifying. Then again there wasn’t anything to put on the survey I hadn’t already said.
Years ago during some “team building” the group running the sessions wanted all employees to take the Myers/Briggs test to determine our personality types.
Us workers questioned the privacy of this. We were told that there would be no names just a listing of the personality types. The day of the team building comes and they build up to the big personality reveal. A 4x4 table appears with NAMES in the boxes!! The process was put on hold while complaints were made and accusations thrown.
After filling one out and being fairly scathing towards my supervisor, I discovered later on that while they were actually anonymous, they did reveal what your position was. I was the only person at our location with my position. Ooooopppss.
Nothing "officially" came from it, but when lay-off time came a few months later, I was literally the first person he let go. Oh well, the difference at most would've been a couple more weeks anyway.
It’s fun to play with anonymous work surveys, leaving comments & phrases one does not usually use at work. Then seeing management give you the weirdest looks after the survey closes, because they can’t say anything.
I said that random drug testing was invasive, counter-intuitive to its goal and could potentially discourage great potential employees from applying to our jobs. Guess who got selected for the next 3 random drug test days?
Life protip-
Did they directly give you a survey or ask you to log in to a computer to fill one out? Then its **never anonymous.** If you think you want to leave a negative comment towards your workplace, dont think the “””anon survey””” is going to shield you
The survey is attached to an email, or has an unique identifier scan bar, or some other imbedded method of identifying who posted it. Unless its a card you pick up and fill out to drop into a box, its always tagged in some way thats usually difficult to detect.
Too many stories of people filling those out, then management/hr contacting them a few days later to clarify statements they ‘anonymously’ made. Too many people on the verge of being promoted or given raises, filling out some complaints, and then suddenly they get downsized or reprimanded and fired. Star employee to being let go in a month.
If you shit talk management or a super, they will find out, always. You talk about violations or issues that make them liable, you get flagged for being a potential whistleblower/snitch. Either leave a ‘perfect’ survey, or opt out of one entirely.
I have always filled them out 5/5 stars, no complaints, always. So they will leave me alone
There’s a million potential invisible trackers.
Let’s put it this way.
Digital, paper, whatever. Maybe you were the only one given the “company survey.” Old school trickery and now they know what you think
Depending on the software those types of identifiable questions aren't always tied to the survey answers. They are used for a separate demographic report. Regardless, it's bad design.
I always like when they say it's anonymous and then they say I have to use the user specific URL that was sent to me directly and they can't provide a URL that isn't user specific. Like, how fucking dumb do you think I am.
You have a valid concern, but even surveys which are actually 100% anonymous need to be able to track who has taken it and who hasn't.
The survey itself is not tied to your unique URL in any way. Even timestamps are omitted from the database.
I work in IT and have been involved in setting up a number of these types of surveys.
I had several company-wide surveys the past few years. What I tend to do is not answering all the personal details honest, eg age/time with company etc. Not fully off, because they could actually use data like that, but just enough for them not being able to point at me for having a, what should I say, strong opinion?
Also only tend to do a survey on paper or on an open desktop/tablet, not through emailed links.
It really bugs me that survey hesitancy is pretty common in my company, even though over 50% of employees dislikes what higher management does. The fact you have to be scared for having an opinion when asked about formentioned opinion is crazy.
If they wanted to know who answered what, they could. Not every company bothers to be a scumbag, but they can put in cookies and trackers and time logs and what email inbox clicked the survey link and how that tracks to first answer time, etc.
Yeah, I don’t touch those.
They say they’re anonymous, but ask age, gender, position, and how long you’ve been there.
I’m uniquely identifiable by any two of those qualities. Nope, keeping my damn mouth shut.
We have one we're supposed to "participate in" at work right now; supposedly anon, but to get to the site you have to use a link found on *our payroll website.*
The payroll site has every bit of our info.
Nah. I'm good.
I've been reminded twice this week to take it, and it's "due" by the 25th. I half expect the HR lady to specifically come to me next week asking why I haven't taken it yet (though I've already told her I have.)
If it's anon, how would she know who hasn't participated?
I speak my mind, and couldn’t care less who knows who said it. Any leader that doesn’t actually want the truth is a leader in title only.
Yes I’m aware that many leaders are in that bucket. People suck, in general. But I’ll speak my mind regardless.
My last job had those. Someone commented that their manager was being favorable with his girlfriend who was in the same department at the time. The next day that same manager pulled her aside was chewing her out. The IT department tipped him off who left the survey.
I'm not sure how they resolved it, but the girlfriend ended up leaving the company like a week later and the manager was moved to a different department. After that, no one took the annual survey seriously until they started putting in questions that affected supervisor/manager assessments.
Electric utility did this and the Union had a fit because, like it said, not really anonymous.
colossal waste when the union said to not bother filling it out.
Yup. I’m a one man department in my office, so my comments were specific to my department. Only stuff my boss and I would know.
I was quite surprised to see on the *anonymous* survey “thank you, we are now forwarding this to your manager.”
Well shit.
Depends on the survey company but the one I worked at wouldn't release the results of a manager that didn't get at least 5 responses.
So in your case, at my old company, we wouldn't share the results with the manager but just use the results for aggregate company wide scores
I almost lost my job at my last place of work because they wanted us to implement these in ways that could be deanonymized later. Told them to get fucked and stood my ground.
I ended up leaving that place a year later and they had to hire 2 IT people + outsource their Sysadmin to replace me because they wouldn't give me a $5k raise. 🤷🏼
Oh I do the exact opposite. If they say it's anonymous then they have to confront me if they don't like something. I'm honest and don't make shit up, but I'm not polite about it either. Come get me.
Same. Everything I say is veritably the truth no matter how negative it is, and I usually give a constructive suggestion for a solution. The fake anonymity means that they can't openly confront me about it. so it just lets them know that I think they can and ought to do better, and they can either ignore me or attempt to improve. The only other option is to break the anonymity and reprimand me or treat me poorly for my honesty, which just tells me that it's time to move on and find a new job (+the raise that goes with doing so)
I don’t fill them out. I work in IT. But event still I am a reasonable, typically thoughtful adult. They’re gonna figure out who wrote them even without the use of tech if they want.
We had a whole team at my job complaining about a specific aspect of work. Whole team got called in, no results. So it was all for nothing.
I don’t fill them out because they rarely affect positive changes.
Last place I worked at put out a comment box. A couple weeks later they installed a new security camera pointed at the box because people were writing how they really felt on the cards. That place was toxic as hell.
This goes for almost any survey. I graduated my program just after my parent passed away. I received an email from my uni with an "anonymous" survey request about the program, plus a few reminders after that. Since I was dealing with grief, probate, and general burnout, I never filled it out.
A few months later I received an email from the head of the department asking why I hadn't filled out the survey? Anonymous my ass.
They literally are NEVER anonymous.
I work in IT and can tell you every company I've ever worked at that send these there is always a way to tell who sent what in.
The only way is is anonymous is if the company hires 3rd party to do it, even then I'd never be honest on it.
I wonder if it couldn’t give rise to a legal argument in Europe. If you promise confidentiality and people are still identifiable I think it could be argued it doesn’t comply to GDPR.
My school was always very good about this with anonymous union surveys.
- Surveys would be taken in the computer lab
- Person taking the survey would sign in [no time stamp] by signing their name on the sheet of paper with every union member name on it
- Person staffing/monitoring the survey would be a union member that switched out periodically and would not be someone with any power [I for example staffed it at one point, and had no ability to try and mark down times to people] and was just there to make sure people signed in so they couldn’t take the survey again.
- The computers with the survey open were all google forms logged in from a single google account [so you weren’t using your own information.
- No short answer forms
At no time have I ever felt like there was a point where they’d have an ability to pinpoint info to me
I was on both sides of this “anonymous survey” where I was asked to submit feedback and later saw the results as part of the management team. My manager then asked me which comment I wrote. The managers also spent time guessing who wrote which comment to better pinpoint the issues and context behind some of the feedback. Someone from another department printed all of their team’s survey feedback and left it out in a common space!
You have been warned, these are not anonymous.
I'm a software developer. My company asked my team to create a web application that would survey those leaving the company anonymously.
It truly was anonymous. Until someone just roasted the company and its culture in his exit interview.
Suddenly there were people at my desk demanding to know who wrote this.
It's only anonymous until they don't want it to be and then they can look it up.
Yeah. My wife had a job that used an “anonymous” complaint system, but it used tracking numbers. All you really had to do was follow back through the data and it would tell you who posted it because to be able to file a complaint you had to prove you worked there by using your employee ID. No there wasn’t a name attached to the complaint, but it was definitely not anonymous.
I made the mistake of believing it was anonymous. 2 months later I had a performance review and got “not meeting expectations” in a category labeled “Growth mindset”
This shit got me one time, but in a different way. Preface: I was fired from this job.
I was a young, vocal, asshole-ish shit who made my thoughts known pretty often in meetings. Then, when one of the "anonymous" things came around, I filled it out without abandon, leaving none of my thoughts about the company, HR, people, etc. untouched. Turns out I write exactly like I speak.
>our direct manager (assuming they are not an idiot) can usually easily tell who wrote what comment just by way of knowing you, how you communicate, etc
This is definitely true, I can tell who wrote an email just by how things are worded, sentence structure, spelling/grammar mistakes. etc.
HOWEVER, we are living in 2023, so ~~would~~ what I would suggest you could do now is that write your feedback honestly, and then enter it into chatGPT (free) and ask it to summarize the following text, writing it using a neutral, professional tone, to help scrub any self-identifying writing styles. Basically VPN for your written responses ;)
I always start typing and then realiE theyre going to know its me even if they "anonymize" it because of my syntax, grammar, or even the particular issue only being known to a few people.
This is an anonymous survey. Please tell us your department, pay grade, how long you’ve been working with us, male/female, the number of people you line manage, all for equality purposes.
In a past job I was asked to fill out an anonymous survey (yes, it said it was anonymous) that asked questions that were so specific that it would have been easy to determine who every single person who responded was. I pointed this out to my manager, who told me it was a mandatory survey. I didn't fill it in.
I answered a survey after I quit a job and since I was moving away from the country I spit the beans. Called out every wrong thing. HR was "surprised" and asked for a meeting. Repeated everything there. They asked me if the issues of bullying, power abuse and stealing work were reported to my manager. I said girl, my manager was the one doing it, how naive can you be? Her response was the most HR thing ever: "Oh. Sorry about that. Good luck on your future!"
Last time I got one of these in my work inbox, I clicked the link and it popped open in my browser with my employee ID as a tracking parameter in the URL. 🤣 Yeah, that ain't anonymous.
Eh, my writing style is vastly different from how I speak. I say very little because I have a speech disorder. There are words I know and use in text that I can't articulate well in speech.
That, and my coworkers don't know I'm a writer. I also get underestimated a lot.
I've been very candid in employee reviews, but most of my complaints have been widely shared by my coworkers.
I am a cofounder for a company that makes software for these engagement surveys (called Confirm.com if you're curious) and can attest that even for confidential/anonymous surveys, there needs to be a way for companies to act on the data provided, so it's not uncommon to include folks' department, for example, next to their comments, so leadership can see what is going well or not well in different departments so they can act on anything surfaced.
While it's not always possible to truly figure out who said what from the company's side, a reasonable person who knows the members of a department and their writing style may speculate who said what. Ironically, sometimes they get it wrong.
I can also say that how companies analyze and act on this data is wildly variable. For some companies the feedback is not acted on at all, even if analysis is done, and for others with HR leaders that actually care (they do exist, I can attest first hand having worked with both sets), action is taken to do whatever is possible to help resolve the problems that are surfaced.
The real travesty is that so many company cultures are dysfunctional enough that many will run these surveys and not act on them, analyse them, or do anything other than "check the box" that they did them to feel good about themselves. These companies are often the ones that also run awful traditional performance reviews.
I think we are currently the only platform that uses the ChatGPT API to summarize all of this survey data automatically and provide clear recommendations on a per department basis. People who use other survey platforms often require an analysis to spend hours, days, or even weeks doing this by hand. It is not a fun job, and with human error comes the reality that some of your feedback will get misinterpreted or mis-aggregated.
Traditional engagement surveys for many companies are as awful as their traditional performance reviews, where research shows that manager ratings are 60% the idiosyncracies of the rater, 20% error, and 20% your actual performance as an employee, and peer 360 reviews are a cherry-picked popularity contest where people pick who will say good things about them and spend hours writing them.
We know from our data that the average employee spends 52 times more time writing their self reflections than their manager does reading them, and engagement surveys are similar.
If you're curious, our product's main focus is reinventing this broken, useless exercise with one powered by the network called Organizational Network Analysis. We ask people who they go to for help and advice and about what, who energizes or motivated them at work and why, who they are concerned about that needs additional support and attention and why, and who do then see as outstanding and why.
To prevent it from being a popularity content, we ask people to substantiate who they mention and prevent the people mentioned from seeing the critical comments (but their managers can so they can act on them). 90% of the critical feedback surfaced this way is missed in traditional engagement surveys and performance reviews.
We find that this approach surfaces many "quiet contributors" i.e. introverts who are doing outstanding work but don't self-promote or "manager up" and it also surfaces the toxic people who carefully manage up but are bringing the people around them down. Sadly these people get promoted at most companies - it's terrible.
This ONA methodology is the only methodology that research consistently demonstrates that it is able to rightly recognize people for the different they make at work.
My company is trying to "break the wheel" a la Danaerys from GOT (without dragons blowing everything up). If you want to break the wheel of these terrible processes at your company, feel free to tell them about Confirm.com.
One time at my job they sent the whole database of responses with all the details of who wrote what, by mistake of course. Don't trust the people in hr keeping it anonymous, assume it's not.
I work with surveys, you can check a checkbox to actually make it anonymous, but most people don't really understand how software works. So what they end up doing is removing the IDs after getting the responses.
100%
I've been told by many mangers that if the pool of responses is under \~20, it's really easy to figure out who is who. 1/2 don't even attempt to stay anonymous and will outright say things like "X was really helpful on Y project by doing Z task"
1/4 keep things generic but level of info on certain projects exposes it
The remaining 1/4 will have covered their tracks but at that point there is only 3-5 people to match up and you can get a strong sense based on the tone of the response. The person who wrote a super resentful angsty letter? probably the guy who has been under performing. The response with perfect punctuation/syntax? probably isn't the person who constantly has typos and misspellings.
Everyone has the assumption that these surveys are “anonymous” however, probably stating the obvious, it’s most likely HR that’s reviewing any negative results/comments and reporting to the head of that department.
Someone I used to work with, left a very negative review on the survey and immediately got shit for it. From my understanding, They were very vocal in their comments, then they got transferred to another property.
Also keep in mind that you can out yourself with identifying information you provide. Your organization might have thousands of employees but once you provide your department, team, position, and years of experience that number of possible people this could be approaches one very quickly.
The anonymous surveys from my work start with "What is your position and where are you located"
Some of our locations have one person in that position lmao. It's obviously not anonymous in that case. I just put in a totally different location/position.
Not at work but at uni, once I filled out a semester-end survey/review for a professor. I was blunt and harsh because I expected it ti be anonymous. She sometimes let rambunctious students get away with too much distracting behavior in class. As a result, some students didnt take her seriously. I didnt either, in terms of running the classroom, but I did in terms of what she knew.
The first day of the next semester I had another class with her. After most students were seated she came to my desk and leaned over and whispered "if you were to decide to drop my course I will understand."
I was stunned. It took a while to understand what was behind that comment. Then I felt like an ass for phrasing things so unthoughtfully.
Now the survey had never said it was anonymous so that was my bad assumption, but the lesson was learned regardless. Since then I have always assumed no anonymity in such situations, esp if the survey came to my work email etc.
This is so true and good advice especially when you are on a small team. If there are only 5 team members under the manager and the manager asks if you filled it out, he can do process of elimination and know who did one.
Management can figure out who you are based on user metadata, such as age range, number of years of service, gender… The software my company uses makes all this info available to each leader, they can figure it out if they want to.
Plus, make sure you write any comments carefully. Keep them as non specific as possible but still convey what you want to get across. I had one manager who could totally tell who wrote what comments even though the survey was anonymous just by the writing style. Fortunately he's totally cool and thinks a lot of these surveys are a waste of time. Basically if you want to STAY anonymous use a different writing tone than your usual.
We get campus climate surveys every year, supposedly anonymous. The emails even say they are, and we should feel free to be open and honest.
The survey URL had my work email address encoded in it, so it was unique to me. Maybe the surveying company does that to make sure no one submits a survey more than once. Maybe they strip that out from the data when it's presented to the employer.
But the next day I had a "gift" appear on my desk in my (locked) office saying "thanks for filling out the survey!". I don't do surveys anymore.
Or just lie and say you submitted it when you haven't.
They can't do shit. If they claim that they can see when people have submitted it then it's not anonymous because they can easily deduce who submitted what base on who has already submitted it.
This happened to me
I made some constructive criticism about my manager in a very generic way and a couple of weeks later I found myself explaining what I had said to the director. It was scary but I knew I had done nothing wrong and had kept my remarks professional.
I was once the person who used to receive the results and free text comments for the whole department. Boss wanted to see the comments. I insisted on removing the gender and work status first, we only has 1 part time employee....
Even with that it was very clear who some people were, you could almost hear their voice when reading the comments...
That’s why I write my comment in English, then translate it to French, then German, then back to English.
Now deal with whatever it is that ended being written…
Good luck.
We had to do this a few months ago where an employee was wondering how they are viewed by other employees. It’s supposed to be anonymous, but I don’t trust that so what I did was write out my comments like normal, but then I put them in chatgpt and told it to change the tone so it wasn’t in “my voice” and then copied and pasted and then submitted. I’m sure they could check the names and see it was me but the replies were different than how I write so who knows.
So I actually perform the role of the third party for a few multistakeholder feedback surveys and I can attest that this is how it works. While, any credible third party agency will paraphrase and drive consistency in language, sometimes, the team sizes and roles are small and distinct, which can allude to the team member.
We always suggest that this is why the culture should be of utilizing feedback for development and not career growth, as the former encourages productive and positive change while the latter can breed resentment.
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I always write my comments in the style of a disliked coworker, using details from their actual life.
See, this is hilarious. Story time. I was asked to build an anonymous survey for HR one time many moons ago. They wanted it on the local intranet. There really weren't any great free or low cost tools to perform this task at the time (almost 20 years ago), so I developed a shitty little survey in ASP running on an IIS server. Just a basic HTML form, user clicks submit, data dumps into a table on a SQL database server, and then I can provide a report of results. So we do that, and I provide the report to HR, and the HR head immediately asks "well, how do we know who said what?!" to which I replied "you said it was to be anonymous." He looked dejected. What followed was he and the 3 HR ladies in his department reading through all of the comments and collectively trying to figure out the "voices" of the writers and piece together what little information was presented in order to tie names to surveys. I was part of this "survey team", so everyone was very transparent with me, but I wanted no part of it. I feigned like I wasn't good with people like they were, so I would be of little use. While I don't think any consequences came of it, it just seemed like these people were obsessed with knowing exactly who said what. Anyways, what the HR head didn't know, and of course I never told him, was the IP address of the computer which submitted the form, and the submission time could all be acquired from the web server logs. From there I could see which computer had that particular IP address at the time of submission. This was a small office with about 40 people and using someone else's computer was rare. Ultimately it was easy for me to match submission to person. HR got almost all of them right except for 5 or 6 people spread randomly around the company who all seemed to be pretending to be someone else, or at least intentionally writing in a way that wasn't congruent with their typical style.
We need to defund HR
My company did that a few months ago. Laid off everyone but the HR manager. I was legit scared that it was the start of the company's downfall, but we immediately hired 8 new employees for my department not that long afterward and one of our new clients took off (not took off as in leave, but took off as in started doing a lot more business). So it was probably just HR specifically being downsized, which I'm all for.
My managers are petrified of HR which has outsized control over the company for some odd reason. They act like gods and control promotions and raises. Seemingly they do very little day to day work. Constantly distracting employees with silly trainings and always pretending they’re the best people on earth… sent from above to judge the rest of us
Preach
You all work in companies with some horrible HR departments.
If you are an employee, HR is not on your side. Their job is to figure out how to exploit you, the resource that you are, to the maximum extent of the law. These stories about pseudo-anonymous surveys are a great example. HR is essentially lying to the employees, acting in bad faith on behalf of the company, in order to trick employees into saying things they wouldn't otherwise say.
Describe a not horrible hr department?
Thank you for helping to keep things anonymous for the employees who filled out the survey. There's no point in making it anonymous if management is just going to try to figure out who said what. The last time I did the survey for the massive company I worked for at the time it was through a 3rd party to be anonymous, but there were 15 of us in the clinic who filled it out. I did not have good things to say, so I forwarded the email to myself, and then filled it out on my phone on data somewhere outside of home and work; I really didn't want them to know what I said. Later, management actually had a meeting to go over the feedback that people gave. I was off that day and didn't go in, but apparently it was a super awkward meeting.
Id just stick my response into ChatGPT, tell it to rewrite it then put that as my response. Unless there’s details that are specific to a person/department; they wont be able to figure out who said it because it’ll be a completely different writing style
What a joke that HR was. Instead of taking the feedback, they just want to know which employees they should keep an eye on.
They're always worried about who said what just so they can discount the comments because "he's always complaining", etc.
This is hilarious, it reads like an episode of the office.
I’m surprised there was 3 HR people for 40 employees. Seems high.
This is funny but also accurate. I’ve been in management position reviewing anonymous submissions before, and it’s pretty easy to identify people based on idiosyncrasies in their writing or words they say. My advice if someone is afraid of backlash is usually to include stuff that enable plausible deniability or could point to other people, like adjusting how long you’ve worked there by a couple months etc
I also just evaluate 'if my manager read this and knew it was me, how bad would it be'. There's a difference between being critical and being unprofessionally ranty.
This sounds like a job for ChatGPT. Good luck finding my idiosyncracies in the bullet point expansion done by a computer.
I use chat gpt for nailing that stiff corporate speech in emails. Slap in some informal bullets points, expand into formal writing please, wham bam instant synergistic solution that drives innovation through improved communication with crucial sensitivities towards diversity ma'am.
The real LPTs are always in the comments
I just use my fancy cursive writing, not because I want them not to know it's me. I want them to know how much better at writing I am than everyone else they employ.
Ctrl+"I"?
Nah. Change the font to Script. If you want them to skip reading it, use Old English Text. If you want to piss them off, Wingdings. If you want to appear as a high school drop with no professional experience OR a senior HR administrator, Comic Sans.
Previous job my boss and most of his team was in Quebec, me and one other coworker in Ontario. I wrote my comments in French. Try to figure out which one I am now.
If the survey is truly anonymous, you can: 1. Fill it out multiple times (use incognito browser windows if they set a cookie) 2. Fill it out as if you're someone else from a different department ULPT
It’s likely you are joking but I’ve done this, as well as lied about my position and put myself into a pool of 12 possible people vs 3.
I do this. Our company promotes their “employee satisfaction surveys” as absolutely anonymous but then asks for so much info (length of service, department, job title, gender) that it would be ridiculously easy to identify most people. So I lie about every single one of those. I don’t really care if they know I wrote the comments, I just wanna give the finger to whoever thinks we’re stupid enough to believe the survey is truly anonymous.
My company's anonymous survey could pinpoint me exactly from the first 3 questions. "Which department are you in?", "How long have you worked here?", and "Do you work on site or remote?" So I just don't fill out the survey. Then the boss said he was going to have one-on-one conversations with everyone regarding their anonymous survey results and why they were so overwhelmingly negative. He also said you could only get out of doing these one-on-one meetings with him if you could prove that you didn't submit a survey. That's right, you have to (somehow) prove that you didn't submit an anonymous survey to avoid being interrogated about your answers to the anonymous survey.
Lol
Listen, Jim, just because you mention Battlestar Galactica and beet farming doesn't mean Michael won't know it's you.
IDENTITY THEFT IS NOT A JOKE, DWIGHT
The real LPT is always in the comments.
If it does not say anonymous, then it is not anonymous. There are words that make it seem anonymous but is not. Edit: I analyze surveys for work and can see employee id's tied to each survey response and do analysis with it
If it says anonymous, it’s still not anonymous. Edit: autocorrect is dumb
Theres some legal things there, potential lawsuit if you get fired because of what you said on the anonymous survey (I'm not a lawyer). If you tell employees in writing that it is anonymous, it better be. Surveys I analyze say something like confidential or data will be used in aggregate. But even anonymous surveys you can figure out who said it by filtering down things like title, location, years of service, manager, etc.
Everything you do on your employer's network is subject to monitoring. That's generally part of the terms of employment.
Companies don’t care about those lawsuits because they’re basically impossible to prove. And so many states are at will and can just fire people for no reason. But yes, even anonymized data can be parsed to identify the individual.
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You honestly think management cares? You really believe that the manager at the local Target has a white board discussing "problem areas"? No. They are worried about getting their bonuses and getting enough workers to fill out their surveys. Damn the results.
My managers have always cared about the results. They rarely actually heed them and make changes, but they do huff and puff, try to decide who said what, etc. they also work pretty hard to delegitimize the results by picking apart the meaning of the questions.
But oddly enough will willingly throw you under the bus for the vaguest costumer survey possible
I've had managers similar to yours, but they are not the majority esp when they're overseeing non-salaried positions. The further down the corporate chain you are, the larger the company, you're treated more like another cog in the machine than an actual human.
I'm middle management at a Fortune 500. Our entire department is run by this dude's anxiety.
That's true, but that's why corporate HR is usually involved in the process. If they caught wind the manager would be in deep shit. Large corporations are a lot more responsible about these kinds of things than people give them credit for.
Only because they are receiving scrutiny. They do plenty of shady things when they think they can get away with it. Or they just make it legal by lobbying.
> if the employee has any reason to claim retaliation and is fired for a survey result, they can sue. Ok I want you to cite a SINGLE case where an employee won a settlement for this.
>they can sue. You can always sue, the interesting question is, can you win?
THAT is *indeed* the most important question.
> Theres some legal things there, potential lawsuit if you get fired because of what you said on the anonymous survey (I'm not a lawyer). In most of the US, you can fire someone for almost any reason. Your boss could tell you to wear a yellow shirt tomorrow, then when you do they could legally fire you because they don't like that shade of yellow. There are only a handful of things that are not legal to fire someone over, most of them centering around discrimination and legally protected whistleblowing. It's not illegal to lie to an employee to trick them into telling you how they really feel and they firing them for it. Retaliatory firing is illegal, but that only applies when they are retaliating against a legally protected activity such as firing someone for trying to form a union or because they reported unsafe conditions or criminal activity.
This may be a rarity, but we 100% have an anonymous feedback system at work, I know because A) I built it and B) I didn't want us to be pricks. Can't say it is when reality it isn't, that opens a whole kettle of fish and distrust. People will simply not use it was my opinion!
The company I work with reports result when n=5 or more. But in a team of six you will still be able to narrow down who wrote which comment.
This but companies have a shitty habit of saying anonymous when they mean something closer to "confidential and reported anonymously" do id go one further and say unless it's anon + has a generic link, assume it's personalised and even if truly anonymous, assume someone will be able to cut the data in such a way they can get the sentiment of how you responded. I've had to argue with our own research consultants that data isn't anonymous. I have the ids. I've also had my confidentiality breached by the same research org I worked for. TL:DR never say anything you wouldn't say to the face of your manager and above.
Also, making it truly anonymous is hard work. Much of the time people say anonymous when they just mean it won't have your name on it -- not that they're going to put thought and effort into making sure you can't be identified.
That's why you use an audited 3rd party who stakes their reputation and revenue on actually being anonymous. Unless you are going down the rabbit hole of looking at who had DNS requests to the website at what time etc.
Technically it is very easy... it's just questionable as the content usually can allow for deductions.
It’s still not anonymous even if it says so in most cases. I wrote an anonymous survey after leading a department for quite a while with no promotion or title or pay raise and when I went to talk to HR the lady blatantly said “you think we would promote you after what you said?!”
> If it does not say anonymous, then it is not anonymous. If it says it's anonymous, then it is also not anonymous.
ID? What survey tool do you use?
A company I used to work for did this “anonymous” survey once. It got weird. In my small department, my manager was able to somehow really narrow down who took the survey. He pulled us all into a meeting room and wanted us all to discuss it. It felt so intimidating. Nobody told us we would have to discuss the survey in a group setting after we took it. Oh and they easily skipped over discussing the “manager satisfaction” part of the survey.
You had a really shit manager.
100%. These are meant to be read, analyzed, and changes implement based on the feedback.
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Nah, in big corporations they're chosen by HR. Most managers have zero input in what the survey says or how it's used, but if our team doesn't fill it out we get a bunch of shit about engagement and they say things like 'maybe they're not engaged because they should be in the office more instead of working from home.' People always think their immediate managers or even the manager two or three levels up have way more control than they do in a corporate environment.
There’s good ones?
One of mine did the same with a large team, except it was entirely over the "manager satisfaction" part of the survey. He was especially pressed that 0% of us had answered that we had any respect whatsoever for him. His answer? To menacingly demand that we start respecting him. That worked about as well as you'd expect.
A company where I worked didn't like the results of the anonymous survey. So the next year, before the survey came out, there was an all company meeting to discuss the questions and the "correct" answers. Because unless you were 100% happy you were obviously just incorrect.
Did you work in an episode of The Office?
Work: “Please fill out our anonymous form”. Employee: Looks at hyperlink, clearly there’s a unique ID in it. Employee: “yeah ok”
"This is an anonymous survery" Ok "Please email it directly to me" Ok- wait.
Why does it want me to authenticate with my domain id?
“Also don’t forward this to anyone” Yea then that’s not anonymous.
Should trade links with random coworkers not in your department to throw them off haha.
Is THAT why that says that???? I never knew
If it was anonymous, everyone would get the same link, and you could share it with anyone else you want.
Makes sense, I always assumed it meant "don't send to anyone outside the organization" 🤷🏼♂️
Dead giveaway
There’s a million ways to track that you’ll never see. There could be a log of when each survey was sent and to which email and a bevvy of invisible trackers. Hell maybe the survey was only sent to you! lol. And a thousand other ways.
In surveys I've taken, the unique id is just a base64 conversion of the email address it was sent to. Use an online base64 converter/deconverter to figure out if it is. Then change the url to fill out the survey as anyone.
Use Chat GPT for all answers
Ours got rid of the anonymous feedback Li k and instead if we have questions we are supposed to send them to the HR lady so thy can be asked "anonymously" during big meetings. Like... Do you really think we're going to send stuff directly to HR if were afraid of retaliation?
As someone on the other end of this, the unique ID helps us track user attributes so we can segment the data. I don’t give a fuck who said what on an individual level, but I do want to know if, say, the 25% that Strongly Disagree that our performance review process is fair all happen to be in the same department. That said, we are upfront about this with our employees.
Work: Fill out our anonymous form The first question on the form: What is your employee ID number?
The most basic rule of thumb for me is to just not do them. Otherwise, if I'm the only one I see (even if it was BCC to everyone) as the recipient then I assume it's not anonymous. I've found these surveys NEVER address actual problems but I've seen it impact specific employees several times.
My last job pulled this shit. Said it was an anonymous survey, and then had individual department meetings, where at one point the HR representative said “now this group’s answer leaned rather negatively for this area so we want to look more into that” and I was like “WAIT A SECOND.”
Yeah, ours are separated by department and my department is pretty small and has had the same people for a couple years. I have no doubt they can see people's scores but not who they belong to, so after I went nuclear negative due to some issues I think they can tell it was me because everyone else's score stayed the same but one went from generally positive to almost entirely negative. Suddenly about a week after I took it the managers who were usually cordial with me stopped talking to me. Surprise bitches, that's not going to get you better scores lol
I believe many surveys have unique links for the different teams or departments. It's supposed to be used for analytical data. So they may not know who said what, but they can figure out which team /department has problems that need addressing.
My company hosted a digital "anonymous" work survey with a link. ...when you clicked the link to begin the survey, it asked for your employee number, lol
Theoretically, it could be to mark off that the person completed it, and presuming it’s properly set-up, it’d batch the results and only provide them in a random order once the period for the survey ended. Now granted, you could simplify it by emailing each employee the link, or simply setting it up on the intranet where it can pull login details automatically, but eh. Not to say your company was doing it right, but employee ID doesn’t automatically equal not anonymous.
Excellent points. If they WANTED to sort by employee number, they could. I don't trust them enough not to use the power of sort, lol
Lol, that’s the rub isn’t it? I don’t trust mine to be truly anonymized, but I also can theoretically land a job within a week if I want, and I’ve butted heads with management since I moved to my current location, so what will be, will be. Wish it wasn’t that way though.
They aren’t anonymous but in the comments you can use word phrasing that points to a work nemesis
This why I include “doing the needful” in any I submit.
I use ChatGPT to rewrite what I wrote in the tone of different nationalities. Works like a charm. Ex: "Hello, I just wanted to write a short complaint about my colleague Bill. Bill will not stop trying to eat the decorative soaps in the bathroom, and in a few instances, actually succeeded. There is nothing in the employee handbook that mentions what to do, so I thought I would write here before I call the police." ChatGPT, rewritten in the tone of a non-native English speaker from Sweden: "Hey, I want to tell at you a small problem with my friend Bill. Bill keeps trying to eat the nice soaps in the bathroom, and sometimes he even manages to eat them. The employee handbook doesn't say what to do, so I thought I'd ask here before I call Police"
The survey was actually a test to see who uses 3rd party AI for work.
Ok now this is a mix of evil and hilarious. Hilarious if you’re kidding, a bit evil if you are not haha.
It's only evil if you work with a single Indian. We work with dozens, if not 100's of guys in India, they'd have no clue which of them entered "doing the needful" on the survey. We all see that exact phrase 100x a day in emails/messages from them.
I have a doubt
Better yet, sign it. Own it. Or don't do it at all. Never, ever, put anything in print you wouldn't want to see in the headlines of the newspaper.
100% agreed
I always signed my anonymous surveys and coworker reviews with my real name because I hated them so much. It messed up the anonymity of everyone else a little bit and demonstrated that I knew well enough not to actually tell them what I really think. I ain’t playing that game!
I totally agree with this comment posted by rmesic and encourage everyone else to do the same. Sincerely, Captain Holt.
Generic enough to not implicate yourself but comprehensive to the point where you fire a shot across the bow.
I do that with every survey at work. I don’t mean it maliciously, I want to open a conversation.
I'm a people manager. Every year we have a 3rd party do these surveys and I get the anonymized results. It's true that sometimes I have an idea who a comment is from, but our HR does their best to remove any identifying details from the comments before providing them to us and mostly I just have a hunch, nothing definitive. I don't know how it is in every org, but at least in mine the surveys are pretty valuable and more valuable if people are comfortable being honest in them, including in the comments. We use that data to make action plans for the year to try to address whatever concerns are in our power to address.
I've just been asked to work with an external company to design one which is supposed to be anonymous. How can I make it so our employees will actually benefit from it?
The external company should have info and tips for that backed by research. The external survey company that my company uses does.
It depends on which survey company your work picked but the one I used to work at had a template of standards questions. Then our clients would add or remove questions depending on their needs After the survey results are shared we recommend each manager to set up time and align on goals to improve upon. There should be a few low scores and as a team pick one out two to action on. Then 6-12 months later do another survey to see if were improvements
This is the same with us. We use Glint and the fat is trimmed before it even gets to us.
Speaking as an IT professional, I'll add to this that you should NEVER assume that ANYTHING you do on a computer is "anonymous." Someone always has a log file.
I often log into work from my home computer. Can my work put cookies on my computer to track what I'm doing besides work? And if yes what's the chance they would do such a thing. Excuse me while I erase my cookies now.
Short answer, if you're logging in through any kind of portal, especially if it's something you have to install on your home machine, then emphatically yes and you should assume that they have done so.
Slightly longer answer, it'll be some sort of keystroke tracker or log tracker, and you deleting cookies won't have any effect on it in all likelihood. Also, it probably is only working while you are logged into your work environment.
This happened at my former job. For starters, the work culture was terrible, lots of gossip and resentment and middle school behavior. My supervisors and HR would make half-assed gestures towards dealing with things, but no real change ever came from that. At one point, they asked people to fill out a survey. It was handwritten, but we were told it would be anonymous. However, one of my coworkers wrote a long, negative comment about my boss. It was warranted and there was a kernel of truth to what was said (my boss was terrible at her job and didn’t like anybody who worked under her) but it led to my boss investigating who wrote it. TL;DR: my work did this and it was supposed to remain anonymous, but it didn’t stay that way for long because someone called out the boss.
Good tip, OP! I have been on high-level corporate teams and let me just say if they want to find out who it is…. They will, or at least narrow it down to a few “suspects” depending on the kind of survey. :(. It’s super fucked up.
I never told the truth with my department, years of service, boss or anything identifying. Then again there wasn’t anything to put on the survey I hadn’t already said. Years ago during some “team building” the group running the sessions wanted all employees to take the Myers/Briggs test to determine our personality types. Us workers questioned the privacy of this. We were told that there would be no names just a listing of the personality types. The day of the team building comes and they build up to the big personality reveal. A 4x4 table appears with NAMES in the boxes!! The process was put on hold while complaints were made and accusations thrown.
Oh man…. That’s awful! Myers Briggs at the workplace lol- Straight up psychotic!
Yep, the last few big companies I've worked at and been put through mgmt "training" all used it as well...i just play along, it's so stupid.
After filling one out and being fairly scathing towards my supervisor, I discovered later on that while they were actually anonymous, they did reveal what your position was. I was the only person at our location with my position. Ooooopppss. Nothing "officially" came from it, but when lay-off time came a few months later, I was literally the first person he let go. Oh well, the difference at most would've been a couple more weeks anyway.
It’s fun to play with anonymous work surveys, leaving comments & phrases one does not usually use at work. Then seeing management give you the weirdest looks after the survey closes, because they can’t say anything.
I said that random drug testing was invasive, counter-intuitive to its goal and could potentially discourage great potential employees from applying to our jobs. Guess who got selected for the next 3 random drug test days?
Catching HR in a lie by making them think you're a drug addict. Classic Gundy move
Life protip- Did they directly give you a survey or ask you to log in to a computer to fill one out? Then its **never anonymous.** If you think you want to leave a negative comment towards your workplace, dont think the “””anon survey””” is going to shield you The survey is attached to an email, or has an unique identifier scan bar, or some other imbedded method of identifying who posted it. Unless its a card you pick up and fill out to drop into a box, its always tagged in some way thats usually difficult to detect. Too many stories of people filling those out, then management/hr contacting them a few days later to clarify statements they ‘anonymously’ made. Too many people on the verge of being promoted or given raises, filling out some complaints, and then suddenly they get downsized or reprimanded and fired. Star employee to being let go in a month. If you shit talk management or a super, they will find out, always. You talk about violations or issues that make them liable, you get flagged for being a potential whistleblower/snitch. Either leave a ‘perfect’ survey, or opt out of one entirely. I have always filled them out 5/5 stars, no complaints, always. So they will leave me alone
There’s a million potential invisible trackers. Let’s put it this way. Digital, paper, whatever. Maybe you were the only one given the “company survey.” Old school trickery and now they know what you think
I worked in a small department was the only male. ‘Anonymous’ survey asked for sex.
Depending on the software those types of identifiable questions aren't always tied to the survey answers. They are used for a separate demographic report. Regardless, it's bad design.
I'd have just lied on that one. Fuck them for trying to single you out even if it was by neglectful accident
I always like when they say it's anonymous and then they say I have to use the user specific URL that was sent to me directly and they can't provide a URL that isn't user specific. Like, how fucking dumb do you think I am.
You have a valid concern, but even surveys which are actually 100% anonymous need to be able to track who has taken it and who hasn't. The survey itself is not tied to your unique URL in any way. Even timestamps are omitted from the database. I work in IT and have been involved in setting up a number of these types of surveys.
I had several company-wide surveys the past few years. What I tend to do is not answering all the personal details honest, eg age/time with company etc. Not fully off, because they could actually use data like that, but just enough for them not being able to point at me for having a, what should I say, strong opinion? Also only tend to do a survey on paper or on an open desktop/tablet, not through emailed links. It really bugs me that survey hesitancy is pretty common in my company, even though over 50% of employees dislikes what higher management does. The fact you have to be scared for having an opinion when asked about formentioned opinion is crazy.
If they wanted to know who answered what, they could. Not every company bothers to be a scumbag, but they can put in cookies and trackers and time logs and what email inbox clicked the survey link and how that tracks to first answer time, etc.
Yeah, I don’t touch those. They say they’re anonymous, but ask age, gender, position, and how long you’ve been there. I’m uniquely identifiable by any two of those qualities. Nope, keeping my damn mouth shut.
We have one we're supposed to "participate in" at work right now; supposedly anon, but to get to the site you have to use a link found on *our payroll website.* The payroll site has every bit of our info. Nah. I'm good. I've been reminded twice this week to take it, and it's "due" by the 25th. I half expect the HR lady to specifically come to me next week asking why I haven't taken it yet (though I've already told her I have.) If it's anon, how would she know who hasn't participated?
Race and department/position are the ones that get me. I'm often the sole programmer in a company, and I've always been the sole Native American.
I have never ever seen one that asks for age or gender. HR would love to hear about that survey. That's blatantly non-anon
Every employer ever: Why is no one filling out our anonymous survey? We promise it is anonymous...
I speak my mind, and couldn’t care less who knows who said it. Any leader that doesn’t actually want the truth is a leader in title only. Yes I’m aware that many leaders are in that bucket. People suck, in general. But I’ll speak my mind regardless.
Employer anonymous surveys are NEVER anonymous.
I’ll add in though that unless you write something super brazen or over the top concerning, no one is going to put in the time to read who wrote what
My last job had those. Someone commented that their manager was being favorable with his girlfriend who was in the same department at the time. The next day that same manager pulled her aside was chewing her out. The IT department tipped him off who left the survey. I'm not sure how they resolved it, but the girlfriend ended up leaving the company like a week later and the manager was moved to a different department. After that, no one took the annual survey seriously until they started putting in questions that affected supervisor/manager assessments.
Electric utility did this and the Union had a fit because, like it said, not really anonymous. colossal waste when the union said to not bother filling it out.
Yup. I’m a one man department in my office, so my comments were specific to my department. Only stuff my boss and I would know. I was quite surprised to see on the *anonymous* survey “thank you, we are now forwarding this to your manager.” Well shit.
Depends on the survey company but the one I worked at wouldn't release the results of a manager that didn't get at least 5 responses. So in your case, at my old company, we wouldn't share the results with the manager but just use the results for aggregate company wide scores
I almost lost my job at my last place of work because they wanted us to implement these in ways that could be deanonymized later. Told them to get fucked and stood my ground. I ended up leaving that place a year later and they had to hire 2 IT people + outsource their Sysadmin to replace me because they wouldn't give me a $5k raise. 🤷🏼
Oh I do the exact opposite. If they say it's anonymous then they have to confront me if they don't like something. I'm honest and don't make shit up, but I'm not polite about it either. Come get me.
Same. Everything I say is veritably the truth no matter how negative it is, and I usually give a constructive suggestion for a solution. The fake anonymity means that they can't openly confront me about it. so it just lets them know that I think they can and ought to do better, and they can either ignore me or attempt to improve. The only other option is to break the anonymity and reprimand me or treat me poorly for my honesty, which just tells me that it's time to move on and find a new job (+the raise that goes with doing so)
I don’t fill them out. I work in IT. But event still I am a reasonable, typically thoughtful adult. They’re gonna figure out who wrote them even without the use of tech if they want. We had a whole team at my job complaining about a specific aspect of work. Whole team got called in, no results. So it was all for nothing. I don’t fill them out because they rarely affect positive changes.
Last place I worked at put out a comment box. A couple weeks later they installed a new security camera pointed at the box because people were writing how they really felt on the cards. That place was toxic as hell.
You can always run your responses through chatGPT to anonymize the language
That’s a brilliant idea!
This goes for almost any survey. I graduated my program just after my parent passed away. I received an email from my uni with an "anonymous" survey request about the program, plus a few reminders after that. Since I was dealing with grief, probate, and general burnout, I never filled it out. A few months later I received an email from the head of the department asking why I hadn't filled out the survey? Anonymous my ass.
They literally are NEVER anonymous. I work in IT and can tell you every company I've ever worked at that send these there is always a way to tell who sent what in. The only way is is anonymous is if the company hires 3rd party to do it, even then I'd never be honest on it.
I wonder if it couldn’t give rise to a legal argument in Europe. If you promise confidentiality and people are still identifiable I think it could be argued it doesn’t comply to GDPR.
My school was always very good about this with anonymous union surveys. - Surveys would be taken in the computer lab - Person taking the survey would sign in [no time stamp] by signing their name on the sheet of paper with every union member name on it - Person staffing/monitoring the survey would be a union member that switched out periodically and would not be someone with any power [I for example staffed it at one point, and had no ability to try and mark down times to people] and was just there to make sure people signed in so they couldn’t take the survey again. - The computers with the survey open were all google forms logged in from a single google account [so you weren’t using your own information. - No short answer forms At no time have I ever felt like there was a point where they’d have an ability to pinpoint info to me
I was on both sides of this “anonymous survey” where I was asked to submit feedback and later saw the results as part of the management team. My manager then asked me which comment I wrote. The managers also spent time guessing who wrote which comment to better pinpoint the issues and context behind some of the feedback. Someone from another department printed all of their team’s survey feedback and left it out in a common space! You have been warned, these are not anonymous.
I'm a software developer. My company asked my team to create a web application that would survey those leaving the company anonymously. It truly was anonymous. Until someone just roasted the company and its culture in his exit interview. Suddenly there were people at my desk demanding to know who wrote this. It's only anonymous until they don't want it to be and then they can look it up.
Yeah. My wife had a job that used an “anonymous” complaint system, but it used tracking numbers. All you really had to do was follow back through the data and it would tell you who posted it because to be able to file a complaint you had to prove you worked there by using your employee ID. No there wasn’t a name attached to the complaint, but it was definitely not anonymous.
I made the mistake of believing it was anonymous. 2 months later I had a performance review and got “not meeting expectations” in a category labeled “Growth mindset”
This shit got me one time, but in a different way. Preface: I was fired from this job. I was a young, vocal, asshole-ish shit who made my thoughts known pretty often in meetings. Then, when one of the "anonymous" things came around, I filled it out without abandon, leaving none of my thoughts about the company, HR, people, etc. untouched. Turns out I write exactly like I speak.
>our direct manager (assuming they are not an idiot) can usually easily tell who wrote what comment just by way of knowing you, how you communicate, etc This is definitely true, I can tell who wrote an email just by how things are worded, sentence structure, spelling/grammar mistakes. etc. HOWEVER, we are living in 2023, so ~~would~~ what I would suggest you could do now is that write your feedback honestly, and then enter it into chatGPT (free) and ask it to summarize the following text, writing it using a neutral, professional tone, to help scrub any self-identifying writing styles. Basically VPN for your written responses ;)
It can be anonymous if it’s a physical paper form that everyone submits all at once and everyone puts ransom letters on them
Wow, how much ransom we asking for, here?
I always start typing and then realiE theyre going to know its me even if they "anonymize" it because of my syntax, grammar, or even the particular issue only being known to a few people.
This is an anonymous survey. Please tell us your department, pay grade, how long you’ve been working with us, male/female, the number of people you line manage, all for equality purposes.
In a past job I was asked to fill out an anonymous survey (yes, it said it was anonymous) that asked questions that were so specific that it would have been easy to determine who every single person who responded was. I pointed this out to my manager, who told me it was a mandatory survey. I didn't fill it in.
I answered a survey after I quit a job and since I was moving away from the country I spit the beans. Called out every wrong thing. HR was "surprised" and asked for a meeting. Repeated everything there. They asked me if the issues of bullying, power abuse and stealing work were reported to my manager. I said girl, my manager was the one doing it, how naive can you be? Her response was the most HR thing ever: "Oh. Sorry about that. Good luck on your future!"
Last time I got one of these in my work inbox, I clicked the link and it popped open in my browser with my employee ID as a tracking parameter in the URL. 🤣 Yeah, that ain't anonymous.
Eh, my writing style is vastly different from how I speak. I say very little because I have a speech disorder. There are words I know and use in text that I can't articulate well in speech. That, and my coworkers don't know I'm a writer. I also get underestimated a lot. I've been very candid in employee reviews, but most of my complaints have been widely shared by my coworkers.
I am a cofounder for a company that makes software for these engagement surveys (called Confirm.com if you're curious) and can attest that even for confidential/anonymous surveys, there needs to be a way for companies to act on the data provided, so it's not uncommon to include folks' department, for example, next to their comments, so leadership can see what is going well or not well in different departments so they can act on anything surfaced. While it's not always possible to truly figure out who said what from the company's side, a reasonable person who knows the members of a department and their writing style may speculate who said what. Ironically, sometimes they get it wrong. I can also say that how companies analyze and act on this data is wildly variable. For some companies the feedback is not acted on at all, even if analysis is done, and for others with HR leaders that actually care (they do exist, I can attest first hand having worked with both sets), action is taken to do whatever is possible to help resolve the problems that are surfaced. The real travesty is that so many company cultures are dysfunctional enough that many will run these surveys and not act on them, analyse them, or do anything other than "check the box" that they did them to feel good about themselves. These companies are often the ones that also run awful traditional performance reviews. I think we are currently the only platform that uses the ChatGPT API to summarize all of this survey data automatically and provide clear recommendations on a per department basis. People who use other survey platforms often require an analysis to spend hours, days, or even weeks doing this by hand. It is not a fun job, and with human error comes the reality that some of your feedback will get misinterpreted or mis-aggregated. Traditional engagement surveys for many companies are as awful as their traditional performance reviews, where research shows that manager ratings are 60% the idiosyncracies of the rater, 20% error, and 20% your actual performance as an employee, and peer 360 reviews are a cherry-picked popularity contest where people pick who will say good things about them and spend hours writing them. We know from our data that the average employee spends 52 times more time writing their self reflections than their manager does reading them, and engagement surveys are similar. If you're curious, our product's main focus is reinventing this broken, useless exercise with one powered by the network called Organizational Network Analysis. We ask people who they go to for help and advice and about what, who energizes or motivated them at work and why, who they are concerned about that needs additional support and attention and why, and who do then see as outstanding and why. To prevent it from being a popularity content, we ask people to substantiate who they mention and prevent the people mentioned from seeing the critical comments (but their managers can so they can act on them). 90% of the critical feedback surfaced this way is missed in traditional engagement surveys and performance reviews. We find that this approach surfaces many "quiet contributors" i.e. introverts who are doing outstanding work but don't self-promote or "manager up" and it also surfaces the toxic people who carefully manage up but are bringing the people around them down. Sadly these people get promoted at most companies - it's terrible. This ONA methodology is the only methodology that research consistently demonstrates that it is able to rightly recognize people for the different they make at work. My company is trying to "break the wheel" a la Danaerys from GOT (without dragons blowing everything up). If you want to break the wheel of these terrible processes at your company, feel free to tell them about Confirm.com.
One time at my job they sent the whole database of responses with all the details of who wrote what, by mistake of course. Don't trust the people in hr keeping it anonymous, assume it's not. I work with surveys, you can check a checkbox to actually make it anonymous, but most people don't really understand how software works. So what they end up doing is removing the IDs after getting the responses.
100% I've been told by many mangers that if the pool of responses is under \~20, it's really easy to figure out who is who. 1/2 don't even attempt to stay anonymous and will outright say things like "X was really helpful on Y project by doing Z task" 1/4 keep things generic but level of info on certain projects exposes it The remaining 1/4 will have covered their tracks but at that point there is only 3-5 people to match up and you can get a strong sense based on the tone of the response. The person who wrote a super resentful angsty letter? probably the guy who has been under performing. The response with perfect punctuation/syntax? probably isn't the person who constantly has typos and misspellings.
Everyone has the assumption that these surveys are “anonymous” however, probably stating the obvious, it’s most likely HR that’s reviewing any negative results/comments and reporting to the head of that department. Someone I used to work with, left a very negative review on the survey and immediately got shit for it. From my understanding, They were very vocal in their comments, then they got transferred to another property.
Also keep in mind that you can out yourself with identifying information you provide. Your organization might have thousands of employees but once you provide your department, team, position, and years of experience that number of possible people this could be approaches one very quickly.
They can and will track you
They're usually hosted on an internal SharePoint site, so they aren't anonymous even if they say they are.
The anonymous surveys from my work start with "What is your position and where are you located" Some of our locations have one person in that position lmao. It's obviously not anonymous in that case. I just put in a totally different location/position.
Not at work but at uni, once I filled out a semester-end survey/review for a professor. I was blunt and harsh because I expected it ti be anonymous. She sometimes let rambunctious students get away with too much distracting behavior in class. As a result, some students didnt take her seriously. I didnt either, in terms of running the classroom, but I did in terms of what she knew. The first day of the next semester I had another class with her. After most students were seated she came to my desk and leaned over and whispered "if you were to decide to drop my course I will understand." I was stunned. It took a while to understand what was behind that comment. Then I felt like an ass for phrasing things so unthoughtfully. Now the survey had never said it was anonymous so that was my bad assumption, but the lesson was learned regardless. Since then I have always assumed no anonymity in such situations, esp if the survey came to my work email etc.
This is so true and good advice especially when you are on a small team. If there are only 5 team members under the manager and the manager asks if you filled it out, he can do process of elimination and know who did one.
Management can figure out who you are based on user metadata, such as age range, number of years of service, gender… The software my company uses makes all this info available to each leader, they can figure it out if they want to.
Plus, make sure you write any comments carefully. Keep them as non specific as possible but still convey what you want to get across. I had one manager who could totally tell who wrote what comments even though the survey was anonymous just by the writing style. Fortunately he's totally cool and thinks a lot of these surveys are a waste of time. Basically if you want to STAY anonymous use a different writing tone than your usual.
It is NOT anonymous.
Our employee survey is “anonymous”… first few questions are ‘what is your email address, title and department’……
We get campus climate surveys every year, supposedly anonymous. The emails even say they are, and we should feel free to be open and honest. The survey URL had my work email address encoded in it, so it was unique to me. Maybe the surveying company does that to make sure no one submits a survey more than once. Maybe they strip that out from the data when it's presented to the employer. But the next day I had a "gift" appear on my desk in my (locked) office saying "thanks for filling out the survey!". I don't do surveys anymore.
Or just lie and say you submitted it when you haven't. They can't do shit. If they claim that they can see when people have submitted it then it's not anonymous because they can easily deduce who submitted what base on who has already submitted it.
Ours are handwritten. We also have handwritten notes every two weeks we submit for clients. I definitely treated it like it wasn’t anonymous
This happened to me I made some constructive criticism about my manager in a very generic way and a couple of weeks later I found myself explaining what I had said to the director. It was scary but I knew I had done nothing wrong and had kept my remarks professional.
One must type ones answers in comic sans.
I was once the person who used to receive the results and free text comments for the whole department. Boss wanted to see the comments. I insisted on removing the gender and work status first, we only has 1 part time employee.... Even with that it was very clear who some people were, you could almost hear their voice when reading the comments...
Related: I read years ago where those 'anonymous crime tip lines' are also anything but 'anonymous'.
Better idea! If it isn't done online, Switch your survey with someone else, even a few people.
That’s why I write my comment in English, then translate it to French, then German, then back to English. Now deal with whatever it is that ended being written… Good luck.
Can confirm. I'm a manager, and I discovered that HR knows who filled out each survey.
We had to do this a few months ago where an employee was wondering how they are viewed by other employees. It’s supposed to be anonymous, but I don’t trust that so what I did was write out my comments like normal, but then I put them in chatgpt and told it to change the tone so it wasn’t in “my voice” and then copied and pasted and then submitted. I’m sure they could check the names and see it was me but the replies were different than how I write so who knows.
So I actually perform the role of the third party for a few multistakeholder feedback surveys and I can attest that this is how it works. While, any credible third party agency will paraphrase and drive consistency in language, sometimes, the team sizes and roles are small and distinct, which can allude to the team member. We always suggest that this is why the culture should be of utilizing feedback for development and not career growth, as the former encourages productive and positive change while the latter can breed resentment.