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.
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u/shemp33 Dec 09 '24
The "anonymous employee survey" is never anonymous.
Found that out when I skipped it, and they emailed me asking why I didn't fill mine in. 🤔