Anonymity is a crucial element in engagement surveys, and its importance cannot be overstated. Employee surveys are an excellent way to measure employee satisfaction, identify areas of improvement, and increase employee engagement. However, without the assurance of anonymity, employees may not be honest, give feedback that is not entirely accurate, or decide to not participate altogether! In this article, we will discuss why anonymity is vital in engagement surveys.

When employees know that their responses are anonymous, they are more likely to provide honest feedback. Anonymity assures employees that their responses will not be linked to them, thereby eliminating the fear of retaliation or negative consequences. This allows employees to give their honest opinion, which is critical in identifying areas for improvement.

The main point here is to remove the barriers for responding. Employees are more likely to participate when they don't have to think what they can or cannot comfortably share. This leads to a higher response rate, which means more data and better insights into employee engagement.

Anonymous surveys protect against bias when interpreting results and considering actions. If leaders or other employees would know the identity of a person sharing feedback, it could influence their interpretation of the survey results and guide them to take action which is not based on the actual feedback but on the person sharing it.

Anonymity might invite to speak your mind without any filters whatsoever. This might come across as very negative responses or open comments which are actually closer to a rant than constructive critique. This type of feedback can rarely be put to good use. Almost always more context is needed to get to the bottom of the issue and only then can work on improvement start.

When responding anonymously its good to be mindful about whether you are:

If these types of feedbacks start popping up, it's important to clarify the purpose of the survey and what to keep in mind when responding. Good communication and collaboration practices help maintain a great work community and ensure effectiveness.

Within Teamspective it's not possible to see what a specific individual has responded.

Each user answers through their own profile in Slack, Teams or web browser. Answering via profile is a standard practice in engagement solutions and helps Teamspective for example prevent fraudulent use and faking results with multiple entries, and also helps in providing automated advanced reporting of the results.

When a survey closes, all individual answers are transferred to groups such as the employee's team, department, employment tenure etc. Only open comments remain tied to individuals, to enable discussions and notifications about new comments. After results are transferred to groups, Teamspective app only uses group level data and reveals only group level pulse results to users.

In the survey settings you can change the visibility threshold of results. By default this setting hides results in groups with 3 or fewer responses to a question. This means that a group will need to have at least 4 responses for a question's results to be visible for that group.

Hidden results are marked with a no visibility icon:

Additionally, open comments are always anonymous and the person who has left the comment can continue a discussion anonymously:

Discussing the results, insights and development ideas is a crucial step in the continuous development loop.

Teamspective automatically provides insights along with Action suggestions to help with fixing underlying issues.

You can find great materials below to help with taking action and facilitating group sessions: