How to conduct employee surveys anonymously

A successful employee survey must offer confidentiality and anonymity to everyone taking part. Ultimately, the organisation wants to be sure that they are looking at open and honest responses, but some staff will be sensitive and nervous about discussing some issues present in the workplace.

How does an organisation conduct an anonymous employee survey?
The simplest way is to hire an independent, third party survey company (hello!), but seriously, an independent consultant/service has the advantage that it can track/identify individuals for the purpose of administrating the survey (managing emails, invites and reminders, tracking non-responders, preventing duplicate responses, etc.) while putting up a barrier to deny management any ability to answer their question “who said that?”.

Inevitably, when we field an employee survey, one or two people often raise the question

“but how can this survey be anonymous if you have sent me a unique, personalised link to the survey?“

The key point in our answer is that it is anonymous to your employer. The independent survey company does not reveal how any individual answered a question, or even who replied. At Surveylab, we track the non-responders so that we can send a follow-up email a week later to remind staff to take part, and we also track respondents to prevent duplicate submissions.

It is easy to publish a questionnaire that does not require any form of authentication to access – share the same link with all staff and ask them to take the survey – but such a survey is open to abuse from bogus or duplicated responses, and no sense of what parts of the organisation the feedback has come from.

As ever, Dilbert sums up situation perfectly!