Employee surveys are never anonymous, even if you say they are. If I get a link containing an ID, it can be traced to me.
If I had a bowl of tickets with these links, and was offered to select one (lottery style), only then would I trust in anonymity. Of course, the survey would have to be reachable from outside of the corporate network for all this to work.
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> If I had a bowl of tickets with these links, and was offered to select one (lottery style), only then would I trust in anonymity.
Actually a really great idea perhaps.
In the HR space there is definitely a place for pseudonomous feedback/issue raising. Not anonymous where a disgruntled employee can raise 10 separate issues and appear as 10 disgruntled employees.
Not sure how your idea would work in practice but letting the employee choose a "ticket" sounds like a nice concept.
"in the HR space" is where anonymity must exist, otherwise the feedback can never be safe. A "Human Resources" department is hostile to humans (it exists to better exploit you, as an agent of your employer), so you must act as if you have an adversarial relationship with it.
I imagine it working like this:
1. A set of questions is created on which the employer would love to get answers to from employees.
2. If a company has 100 employees, 100 unique tickets are printed out on a piece of paper (it could contain a qr code which leads to the survey)
3. All paper tickets are placed in a bowl at the reception and employees are able to take a ticket each
4. Employee goes home, uses their phone to scan the QR code and fills out the survey, ensuring total anonymity. Each ticket has a unique ID, ensuring only one response per ticket. The empployer can not possibly know which ticket was taken from the bowl by which employee.
5. The results are in, and employers get 100% anonymous but 100% honest responses.
What would prevent one person taking a handful of tickets home and answering the survey a dozen separate times, skewing the results dramatically?
That's why the bowl needs to be at the reception, where someone can observe how many tickets a person takes and makes sure they only take one.
We use OfficeVibe, and I have full employee access. There is absolutely no feature anywhere that shows me who submitted a comment. I could just about hack one together by putting each person into a one-person team, but the user would be able to see that themselves. Sure, we can imagine a conspiracy where my CEO has a special button, but I strongly doubt it.
That said, it's still frequently obvious due to people's writing styles, the nature of their complaints, timing.
If I get a link with a unique code to my work email, I (as a developer) know that it can be traced back to me, so I will not be totaly frank with my answers. Even if the link is not unique, it can be tracked to me as DNS is managed by the corp and they can know at what time which computer accessed the site.
This was the failure of the first version of the build years ago. We had positive and negative links sent via SMS in that one, which took you to a page where you could add a comment - anyone with some level of dev knowledge worried about hitting the links and certainly about commenting on the page.
The decision for us to house the whole interaction within SMS was also a response to links in SMS getting much sketchier to click. Emoji responses are more expensive to run, but they're smoother to work with and more useful for team feedback.
If I were that paranoid about my employer I’d leave anyway.
I get what you're saying for sure, but I think there's a level below that where you need to deliver some bad news into middle management about what's happening and it can be "career limiting" to say it, so people avoid the issue. Hopefully they gain a level of safety to deliver that message through us.
I will take a look at OfficeVibe for sure. How frequently do they send it out?
While many managers won't do it, usually it's an innocuous thing like being able to move employees between teams and see where data moves that give things away. Not saying that's what's happening in OfficeVibe at all, but it's a common fault.
Writing styles and people exposing themselves is definitely an issue. One commenter here had a great idea on rephrasing through ChatGPT or similar to mitigate that issue.