Upcoming change in Results Visibility Setting of Teamspective Engagement Surveys

Summary

📆 Effective January 13, 2025:

Teamspective’s Engagement and Pulse Survey results will be made visible based on the number of actual responses within a group, not the group size. This gives an even higher level of protection of anonymity and ensures that the results represent the team’s sentiment.

No Action Needed:

Your visibility setting will be automatically updated and default to “3 or fewer responses”. This means that 4 or more users will have to respond to a survey to show a group’s results. Feel free to adjust this setting if it doesn’t suit your organization’s preferences.

Understanding team dynamics and employee engagement is essential for building and sustaining healthy organisations, and companies worldwide rely on employee surveys to gather these insights. Protecting anonymity and privacy in data collection reinforces psychological safety, encouraging employees to always share their honest viewpoints.

At Teamspective, we’re making an improvement to how engagement survey results are displayed to ensure a more balanced approach to data visibility—one that considers both privacy and representation.

What’s Changing?

📆 This change will take effect on Jan 13th 2025.

Previously in Teamspective, engagement and pulse survey results were made visible based on a certain group size, ensuring that individual responses could not be identified in groups smaller than a defined threshold.

This approach made sure that even small teams (e.g., 4 people with 2 responses) could still access their data. However, in larger teams with only a few responses, the results could be misleading, making it harder to validate their representation of the group's sentiment.

With this product update, Teamspective’s Engagement and Pulse survey results will be hidden based on the number of responses within a group, not group size. This gives an even higher level of protection of anonymity and ensures that the results represent the team’s sentiment.

Why This Matters

This change enhances:

Data Privacy – Extra protection when the amount of responses is small in groups, which ensures individuals feel safe and secure sharing their thoughts.
Data Integrity – Reliable results that accurately reflect the team’s collective sentiment, ensuring that insights are meaningful and actionable. While many companies prioritize privacy in feedback data, few remember to address the critical issue of representation. Without adequate representation, visibility can lead to skewed insights and false narratives, misguiding decision-making and undermining trust.

How It Works

The update will replace the current survey setting for result visibility per group. The new setting will look like this:

The new default selection will be to hide results in groups that have 3 or fewer individuals responding to the survey.
Your anonymity setting will update automatically to the default setting, and you can adjust it in your Teamspective Workspace according to your preference.
After the update, survey results are redacted based on the response count threshold.
Anonymity applies to all user and admin roles, meaning no one—whether the workspace admin, CEO, or others—can view results below the threshold.

Example:

In a recent engagement survey, Enterprise sales Europe only had 3 responses. Because of the new visibility setting, their results were not displayed to protect anonymity and ensure representation.

However, their responses are counted in the parent groups' results. In this case, Enterprise sales Europe would not be able to see their own results, but can access the results of Enterprise sales and Sales to help guide their decision-making. These groups had enough responses in the survey and thus the results are visible.

The Bigger Picture

This update aligns with our mission to normalize excellent leadership by fostering trust in feedback systems. When employees know their privacy is protected and their responses represent broader team dynamics, they are more likely to share candid insights—leading to stronger, data-driven improvements for teams. We encourage all team leaders to regularly check their results and discuss with their teams. This helps develop the team, and also motivates employees to answer the surveys when they can see that actions are taken.

Closing Thoughts

At Teamspective, we believe engagement surveys should provide leaders with actionable insights without compromising individual privacy or representation. This update is a step forward in balancing transparency and trust while helping increase the quality of leadership with relevant insights.