anonymous company survey through 3rd party

November 14, 2024 2:26 PM

Are employers able to track anonymous 3rd party surveys?

Am wondering when a large company uses a 3rd party to conduct staff surveys are employers able to track who replied? Was unhappy with some of the new rules appointed to staff and replied as such but am now nervous.

posted by irish01 to Computers & Internet (10 answers total)

Sometimes. It's best to assume nothing is ever anonymous.

Where I work we have one internal feedback survey form that is, really and truly, anonymous and goes directly to the CEO. So much so that when an employee used it to ask a question about their health insurance that was vital and time sensitive, we had no way to figure out who it was to reach out to them for help. That survey form is specifically for business feedback!!! Our HR is extremely open and reachable! That person was a moron! We had to go to the managers and say please in your private 1:1s over the next week tell each of your employees to take their benefit question to so and so in HR. Took a month to figure out who it was and get their medically fragile child help. It still bothers me.

We also have a third party ethics reporting service that is not anonymous to the third party but is fully anonymous to us. Entries there are blinded and go to the CEO and our private equity board for review and then more information is divulged by some additional process with the third party who exists fully for this specific purpose.

Another kind of survey are those best in business type surveys. Those are anonymous-ish. The company gets broad aggregate results, but can pay for more in depth data. The data can be sorted like "employees between 28-35 years of age who have tenure of < 2 [formatting ate part of my comment here on preview. Idk how to recreate it in the edit window, but just to say if you make yourself identifiable, you could potentially be identifiable. Where I work, we don't have time to care about this at this level. We look at the department level feedback and take actionable tools to those department heads to make improvements, or not]

Basically everything else is not anonymous at all, but again, does anyone with the power to see the data actually care in a punitive way? Where I work? Literally no. I have too much work to do and you're not that interesting. But shittier places to work? Yeah maybe.
posted by phunniemee at 2:39 PM on November 14, 2024 [1 favorite]

we have org health surveys administered by an external company. When they were begun, we were promised that they were fully anonymous. I have always treated them as if my name was in bright bold, flashing letters on the top of the survey form. This turns out to have been the correct assumption because one of the HR flacks slipped up in a presentation that they reached out directly to someone with a particularly damning comment.
posted by Dr. Twist at 3:35 PM on November 14, 2024 [1 favorite]

I work for a market research company and we occasionally do the type of surveys that you mention. For an employee survey like this, each survey respondent is in a database with, at minimum, an email address which gets tied to a unique ID — we need your email so that we can invite you to participate. When you take the survey, the ID is tied to your responses. We generally try to not pass any PII into the survey but it would be very easy for the email address to be passed into the survey along with the ID, or the files linked up to identify respondents. My company also states in most (all?) survey introductions that data is only reported in aggregate.

That being said, when my company conducts surveys of its employees, I assume my responses are tied to me and respond accordingly.
posted by jabes at 4:08 PM on November 14, 2024 [1 favorite]

I always assume it is not anonymous. So does every other software person I know.
posted by Gilgamesh's Chauffeur at 5:48 PM on November 14, 2024 [1 favorite]

Even if they claim anonymity, you may find out later it's not. I filled out the "anonymous survey" and found out later that they sent the results to everyone's supervisor. I was in a group of three, guess who the unhappy one was?!

If one must fill out a survey, don't write comments, that's where they can definitely ID you from how you write/talk, or possibly also from your work situation or concerns.
posted by jenfullmoon at 2:47 AM on November 15, 2024 [1 favorite]

If one must fill out a survey, don't write comments, that's where they can definitely ID you from how you write/talk, or possibly also from your work situation or concerns.

My boss once said to me "I saw your comments in the survey" and I was like "woah they're anonymous" to which he replied "yes, but nobody else calls senior management decision monkeys"
posted by fullerine at 5:35 AM on November 15, 2024 [4 favorites]

If I have to respond to these, I purposely write as "unlike" myself as possible.
posted by I_Love_Bananas at 8:08 AM on November 15, 2024

The answer is entirely: it depends.

I have run truly anonymous surveys using Microsoft Forms where I know categorically that there is no way for us to tie responses to a specific person because literally anyone in the world with the URL to an anonymous Forms survey can fill it in. No need to enter an email address or log in or anything. I have also run surveys using other software where we could, if we chose, connect the email addresses to the answers. We didn't, but the employees only had our word that we wouldn't.

In both circumstances I was ethical and the company I was working for was ethical. How confident are you that the company you are working would also be ethical if they do have the technical ability to tie answers to specific people? (that's not a leading question, you might be confident and that's fine)
posted by underclocked at 11:48 AM on November 15, 2024

They're so anonyous my boss told me I hadn't filled mine out yet and I still needed to

I couldn't find the email in my inbox so someone sent me one and I couldn't take it, because the url in their email was specific to them

Don't do it if you don't have to, there is zero upside for you
posted by RustyBrooks at 6:20 PM on November 15, 2024

In my workplace, I believe the surveys are administered by a 3rd party, but one of the questions is "how long have you been employed here?" Given that it's a six person department and there are significant differences in length of employment, it would be pretty easy to identify all the survey respondents by length of employment alone.
posted by Larry David Syndrome at 4:09 AM on November 16, 2024