Should I be honest in staff survey?

[SamanthaaJones]

My job is very stressful and morale is low. Management are in complete denial. I work in a niche department within a large company and there are only about 30 of us, and the staff satisfaction survey is only for our department. It is supposedly anonymous but once you've put in your location and other stuff etc it will be easy as anything to work out who's said what. For this reason I think a lot of my colleagues won't be honest. We all wory about reprisals. The departmental director is widely disliked and feared because he is a bully who has his favourites. And the survey has to be returned to him

I am inclined to be completely honest (otherwise what is the point?), but hopefully in a constructive way, so rather than giving things a wholesale slagging off I am think of saying that more of x y z would be desirable etc. However it is going to be hard being completely honest without referring to individuals directly or indirectly because it is the behaviour of some individuals that makes the job so hard at times. Including the boss.

I am on holiday this week and it's really pissing me off how much this is getting to me.

Any advice appreciated.

PS I know I should be getting another job but not that easy in my line of work.

Most companies that run staff surveys use an external company so that employees can be honest, without fear of reprisals as all the responses are confidential and only presented back to management in a consolidated form, so no-one can work out who said what. Shame that doesn't seem to be the case. Could you return the survey anonymously, e.g. hardcopy with minimal demographic data completed?

I think your approach of being honest in a constructive way is a good one. If you don't give feedback on how you'd like things to change, you can't expect them to change.

I asked similar Qs for similar reasons when our staff survey was carried out. I am the only girl in my team in my location, so easily identifiable.

I was reassured that the data was analysed by an external organisation and our management only received the breakdown of results. I answered honestly. This was 2 years ago. No comeback!

Ask whoever is running the survey about confidentiality. They should have thought about how to run it without people being 'outed'

You could offer to gather feedback from all of your team of 30 and then give a hard copy response or post it all in one big chunk on the online form. That way no one knows what has been said by whom. You should say how many people have fed back though, so 'the following text is feedback from 17 people in the team'

At our company, all the responses are reviewed, but all information about location and any names are stripped out. (I was a bit miffed about this, as I had added comments about they were free to contact me for further information.) The company overall has 1000s of employees worldwide, so it really is anonymous. A couple of years back, the responses did result in our division setting up a culture initiative, to try and improve things, but I am not convinced it has made much difference. Last year's survey had different questions that focussed more on things like financial rewards than management competence.

I will still be honest when the next survey comes round, but I don't believe it will make any difference any more.