If someone doesn’t believe that their answers in an employee survey are truly anonymous, your chances of getting to the ‘truth’ are significantly reduced.

There are a number of differences between surveys conducted with employees compared to other audiences like customers.  The main one is that employees have a boss who influences their day-to-day experience at work, whereas customers don’t.  A customer’s experience is all about your product or service, whereas an employee’s experience is as much about the people they work with, and their boss, as the company itself. 

This is an important thing to remember when designing an employee survey, because whilst customer survey’s rarely need to be ‘anonymous’, employee surveys are often described as anonymous to encourage truthful and honest feedback.   In our experience, a team member would rather give ‘good’ answers than face the wrath of their boss for giving ‘honest’ feedback.  Who wants to make their life any harder at work!

However, many employee surveys are not genuinely anonymous.  Whilst a summary report of the answers is usually an aggregate of all the responses, the survey software itself, in the database, offers survey administrators a detailed report of exactly who said what for each question.  And when this is available, there is always the possibility that a survey Administrator will be asked to reveal who said what in specific cases.  If employees feel like this is happening, the chances of them answering truthfully to describe situations where truth is important become much lower.  Or if a survey company is being used, the survey company can often see exactly who said what, and team members can feel that if pressed, they will reveal who said what.

This is why at Tandem, we have created a genuinely anonymous mode for employee surveys.   When anonymous mode is selected, even Administrators cannot see how each individual answered each question.  If someone doubts this, an Administrator can invite a person to take a look at the software itself.  It simply can’t happen.  With complete confidence that surveys are genuinely anonymous, you are likely to get access to what is really happening within your organisation with Tandem.

If you have any questions about anonymous employee surveys, please feel free to contact us.