There’s a hard truth HR managers need to face – and that’s that employees (more often than not) don’t believe staff surveys are really anonymous.
It’s a massive barrier to gathering valuable feedback, and an even bigger barrier to building trust within your team.
In this article, we’ll show you actionable ways to help prove to your team that your Stribe employee surveys are in fact genuinely anonymous to alleviate any concerns – and show your team that your intentions are sincere when it comes to surveying.
Disclaimer: The recommendations in this article are our own, and only apply to users of Stribe. Unfortunately, there are other employee engagement platforms that don’t make the same commitment to anonymity as we do.
First and foremost, it’s super important to clearly communicate your unwavering commitment to maintaining anonymity throughout the survey process.
This means reassuring your team that their responses will be collected and handled without any risk of their identity being revealed.
You can do this by sharing Stribe’s anonymity statement with your team, so they can be confident that as a third-party survey platform, we prioritise their safety and privacy above all else.
If anyone has questions or concerns about the anonymity of the survey, let them know not to hesitate to reach out directly to whoever is leading the surveys in your HR team.
Use emails, team announcements, and any other form of internal communications to remind your employees (more than once) that their trust is your priority, and you’re here to provide clarity and assurance every step of the way.
The next step is to help your employees understand exactly how their data will be collected – because simply saying surveys are anonymous isn’t enough.
You’re going to need to explain in detail how it all works so everyone is truly comfortable with the process.
Here’s how it works
Once employee data is loaded into Stribe’s system, our technology takes this information, scrambles it up, and gives each person an associated unique code.
When you participate in our employee surveys, your responses are collected without asking for any personal details like your email or name – instead answers are attributed to the unique code which is used to keep track of answers.
Important: At no point in the process is a Stribe admin able to view unique codes or identify who is assigned to which code – this is what makes our technology so secure and anonymous. It is an incredibly intricate and detailed system that we have refined with the best IT specialists.
The code essentially acts like an incognito profile for your survey data, making sure it’s organised into certain demographics like department and location – but without revealing who said what.
So, even though your email and name are collected initially, once our system anonymises the data, that information is completely separated from your answers.
When it comes to looking at the results, the data is grouped and analysed in categories like departments or roles, not by individual names. This way, patterns and areas for improvement can be identified without knowing who said what.
At Stribe we also restrict segmentation of results to a minimum number of five responses to ensure anonymity is maintained even during data processing.
By sharing these kinds of explanations with your team it will help to alleviate their concerns and show your commitment to anonymity.
It might sound simple, but our next tip is to set-up a team meeting, login to Stribe’s system, and show your team the admin side of the Stribe dashboard to show there is nothing to hide or any sinister admin-only features that are going to reveal their identities!
Jokes aside, this is a very easy thing to do that will show your team you’re being super transparent about the whole process and that the purpose of conducting surveys is for the greater good for everyone at the organisation.
Important: Our recommendation is to do this step before you conduct any surveys that might reveal sensitive results that you don’t want to be shared with the wider team.
For example, if you are doing a survey on leadership effectiveness, you probably won’t want everyone to view the results in case there’s confidential comments off-the-back of the survey. So do the demonstration of the admin-side before any kind of sensitive survey results have been loaded in.
If you like, get in touch with our People Science team and we’d be happy to schedule a demonstration for your team to show them all the additional features admins have access to, how they work, and answer all their questions.
Yes, that’s us! Our last tip is to direct your team to us if they have any concerns or questions.
We totally understand where the distrust comes from when it comes to employee surveying, and we’re more than happy to help you alleviate these concerns with your team.
Sometimes all it takes is speaking to a third-party to feel more at ease. And we’re experts in Stribe’s tools and features, so we can reassure your team comfortably that they’re going to be okay, and they can trust the process!
We can be contacted via email, phone or LiveChat.
About the author
Starting out her early career as a journalist, Jade Madeley is an accomplished content writer with 8+ years’ experience across business, personal finance, SaaS, human resources and employee engagement. Working with Stribe, she crafts insightful content that brings complex HR topics to life and drives meaningful action.
