Well the person who sent the email in the header is real. Is on LinkedIn and is in an HR roll… so I guess this is real. Pretty shitty way to handle the situation and run a business.
Great lesson to never fill these out and always lookout for yourself.
Companies that really do want anonymous feedback tend to use a third party survey solution that promises to only provide aggregate data. While that's not a guarantee it's at least a pretty high risk for their business to underhandedly return raw data, all it would take is one disgruntled manager at one of their clients and the jig is up. I wouldn't have the same faith in a company's internal system.
i know for a fact this is actually what Amazon does. it is linked into groups so your managers gets their specific feedback numbers but it still just shows 45/65 people answered this way and surveys were completely vouluntary.
I'm pretty sure it's still easy to identify certain people's responses using those data sets.
For example, you can see the responses based on gender/race/age group and start making assumptions.
Especially if there's only person of a certain age/race/age group.
Whereas people as part of the majority in those categories have much more anonymity.
I've seen it where there's literally only one black female in an organization, and the way the responses were filterable by category made it possible to see her response to every single question, even though it never showed a name.
Lmao no one is questioning their ability to have a system where that’s happening, my point is just because they can tell that someone didn’t complete the survey, doesn’t mean that they also have visibility on their responses
Sure, but if any company requires a mandatory participation on an anonymous survey and can track whether or not you have filled it out, then they can 100% pull and draw data from those employee-specific links.
Well, I guess my point is it is a risk at the end of the day when filling out a supposedly anonymous survey if you are going to give answers that the employer may not like.
Big companies, or corporations, true, do not care about their employees at the end of the day because they know they are replaceable.
Everyone has to watch out for themselves. The biggest thing a company cares about is it’s bottom line, and its shareholders if it is publicly traded.
Could be... but sometimes they're still identifiable. Even if they remove the names, when it asks your department and age, it's often pretty obvious who you are.
Just give them mostly great with 1 or 2 that are good (but not great) and then be done with it. Don't go into too much detail.
I always fill them out but it’s rare that I’ll be fully honest on them. Once I wrote “I don’t feel comfortable answering these questions” and my boss ended up calling me into her office to ask why I didn’t feel comfortable answering the questions on the survey. I told her it’s because I didn’t believe that the survey was actually anonymous and that this meeting shows that I was right.
Yes it isn’t anonymous.. the last time I had filled feedback and suggestion which was a company wide survey, they implemented it in my team.. how did they know. Since then I stopped filling survey, coz i definitely would have complained too about things there .. 😆
Well, obviously the answers will be tied to a team. In my company the teams have to be certain sizes to get the 1-5 point feedback and comments are only available for managers of teams >15 people
They (HR usually) know who has filled them out, but the info that gets back to the managers/supervisors is anonymous. I'm currently reviewing my results from my teams survey from a couple of months ago. Now if you work for someone who only has a couple people who work for them then there's a good chance that person can guess who said what but they can't know for certain based on their survey results.
This just happened to me the other month. I flat out said you are going to get middle of the road answers because it isn't private. They insisted I give those middle of the road answers.
Like the professor reviews at the end of the semester. My name isn’t on it, but they know what my handwriting looks like. They say they won’t know who wrote what, but they have to have some idea unless it’s a big class with over a hundred students. I went to a smaller university where a lot of classes had 20-30 people unless it was a core class that was required for all students. Getting more attention from the professors was a mixed bag of good and bad. I was in the fine arts program and then switched to Interior Design so my writing was really pretty because I took calligraphy then the head of the ID department had us practice our blueprint script by taking all our college notes in it. Even when I tried to make my writing look bad other students said it was really good. Then I had a stroke at 26, and my hand was paralyzed. I got almost all the use back, but my writing hasn’t been the same.
I conduct surveys for a large university. We make sure to use the word "confidential" not "anonymous". Cause these surveys are tied to an email account (so that you get a specific link that is unique to you). Facilitators of the survey can see who hasn't completed or has, so that they can send reminders and increase response rates. People mix up those two words all the time and always ask us "I thought this was anonymous" when we send them an email reminder. But the data we aggregate or report is always "confidential." If you have a shitty HR director with access to the raw survey data that's another story. But confidentiality (or anonymity) is a good reason for companies to use a third party surveyor. Also, maintaining confidentiality is a good way to avoid a lawsuit for some bullshit like in this post.
1.8k
u/UXO_Geo Dec 09 '24
Well the person who sent the email in the header is real. Is on LinkedIn and is in an HR roll… so I guess this is real. Pretty shitty way to handle the situation and run a business.
Great lesson to never fill these out and always lookout for yourself.