Our clients often want to know the best practices for conducting a successful employee engagement and satisfaction survey project. One critical aspect of a survey’s success respondent anonymity. Protecting people’s identities be difficult – the stakes are high in the minds of your staff. We ensure a highly secure and confidential survey specifically designed to protect each respondent’s anonymity.

Why having anonymous surveys is critical

It’s quite common that there are concerns for employers and employees regarding survey anonymity. Employees worry that if they provide honest but negative feedback, they’ll suffer retribution from their managers. They can also be hesitant to provide honest and candid feedback if they feel their feedback can be tied directly to them.

Employers fear that their investment can be wasted if the responses are false or a watered-down version of true perceptions. Addressing these concerns before starting a survey will help achieve the highest response rates and most accurate data possible.

How to protect employee identities in surveys

Anonymity is one of the most important aspects of a customized employee survey. Building anonymity directly into the survey process you will see better response rates, increased trust and credibility, and more accurate data.

Here’s how we design our survey process to protect the identities of each survey respondent:

• For any given demographic, such as department, age, or location, require a minimum number of respondents to report on that area.
• Before each open-ended question, include clear language that informs the user not to include self-identifying information. This helps to guide employees to answer honestly, but without including self-identifying information.
• If your employees have questions about confidentiality, encourage them to contact your survey provider directly to address their concerns.
• Use confidentiality language in all of your communications to let staff know that you will protect their identities at all costs.
• Offer videos explaining confidentiality (in both English and Spanish). We designed two videos for our clients to share with staff before their survey project (see below!).