‘Anonymous’ employee survey

[MrsMuddle]

Our company does an annual staff survey through an external company. We are assured repeatedly that it is anonymous and that responses from teams of fewer than five people aren’t counted to ensure anonymity etc etc. You get the picture. We have branches worldwide and are well known in our field. We are a large company.

One of the partners asked if it was me who commented (negatively) on the gender pay gap and then proceeded to mansplain pay parity and pay gap. I was so taken aback, that I said “No, I don’t think that was me”. But it was. And now I’m raging that something we were assured was anonymous isn’t.

I also commented on the institutional sexism and lack of diversity.

My question is, do they KNOW it was me (ie what information does the third party give them) or did they guess correctly? If they know for sure it was me, I am at risk of losing my job. They do not like dissent.

Is that the one that describes people as "detractors" when reporting the results?

Yes it is.

Hah, I recently started in a firm which uses Peakon. The first time I got the invite, which said that it was all anonymous and answers only used for statistics, I filled in a lot of free text answers. Then I started getting replies from my manager! (They can’t see who has commented, but can send a reply which is shown to you through the Peakon website).

It must have been immediately clear to my manager that some of my comments were written by me, because I referred to being new in the team.

I wrote to HR about it, and they changed the message in the invite so that it clearly explains that if at least five people have answered a question, your line manager will be able to see your free text answer (if less than five, the manager above her can see it instead). Can’t believe that nobody had complained about it before.