My employer has yearly employee surveys that are completely anonymous, you just have to login with your employee ID to fill it out.
I have coworkers who, even after I explain it to them, still think it’s actually anonymous and blast everyone and everything. And then they can’t figure out why they never get picked for promotion, or project work. I work with some serious fucking idiots.
Or get put on a PIP
Corporate surveys are not anonymous, despite their claims otherwise. For that matter, corporate ethics hotlines they want you to call to report complaints are not anonymous either. Mainly they’re about containment. They want you to call the hotline, which basically goes to the HR department, so problems can be managed internally (i.e., not at all). Companies really don’t want you calling an outside agency with some authority to hold them accountable.
I did have a company do a legitimate anon survey. The scores where 55 to 85, they switched to a “completely” anon survey scores where 90+.
The emails said only use your link, dont ise other people’s links.
As we learn from history time and time again, the lie doesn’t need to be bulletproof - it just needs to go over the heads of the stupid.
Friend at a BigCo said they all stopped answering these surveys honestly after a manager inadvertently shared the ‘Manager Interface’ on Zoom.
There was nothing ‘anonymous’ about them.
My company was forcing a 90% compliance for a yearly survey. Luckily they have a “decline to take survey” option that would count as completion. I don’t waste my time asking deaf ears to improve things at work while some upper management jerk gets to brag about their stats. Win-win.
“Click this link to log in to SurveyMonkey”
🤥I was once “randomly selected” to do such an “anonymous” survey in the final months I was a cop before they fired me.
On the first page, at the top, there was a field for Name. I obviously skipped that bit because it was anonymous.
Then we went around the table and discussed our answers, with our name tags fully in view.
At the end, the consultants reminded me to fill out my name at the top. I said I didn’t because it was anonymous. They gave me a blank stare during the awkward silence.
A couple of my peers remarked as they filed out of the room that I may as well fill it in because nobody else left it blank and they’d just find out who I was by process of elimination anyway.
😮💨
I don’t trust any of these.
In 2026 when every job crew is all but 3 people. Boy I wonder who it is.
Net Promoter Score needs to die in a fire.
Sounds like you’re a net detractor.
And rightfully so, I’m sure.
Yeah, I don’t believe in “anonym” things like this… also it never stopped me from speaking the truth…
Honestly unsure about how it works in the land of the free™️, but I never once doubted the anonymity of such surveys. Of course it’s going to be behind a login portal, otherwise people could submit them multiple times without repercussions and skew results.
Hell in my current company the framework itself doesn’t answer result queries where the numbers of responses would be less than 6 (your team is less than that? Nope, you can only see results for your department the level above, not filtered to your 4-person team)
This happened one year, not directly but comments in the survey came up on the team call in a generic sense.
Now I just tick 7/10 for everything and leave no comments.
But… yeah. They’re reading the comments. That’s the point. If you tell them who you are, then they’ll know who you are.
The real trap is when it keeps it anonymous within your department, but still reports your department… and your department is three people (or similar). Sometimes their pool of “anonymous” people for a section is in the single digits.
You gotta throw in a few glazing comments so you don’t look like you’re phoning it in. You’re interested in the company, but only the good parts.
Throw in a few mild process improvements that your manager already wants, as low controversy as possible.
Look at this happy and involved worker! They don’t rock they boat and they participate!
Yeah, I always assume everything that has to do with work is being monitored and stored: anonymous surveys, Slack, email, email, web searches, terminal commands, terminal output, etc.
terminal
Gonna test this today and see what happens. Wish me luck, lol
Terminal? If you are just interacting with a TUI like an airport worker then probably yes. If you have an unprivileged user account, maybe. If you are the admin, well, you are the admin, so probably not.
Pro tip, if logs are collected as shell history but not whole SSH/telnet sessions, change your shell to one that doesn’t support history (like dash). You may copy a statically built one into the environment for this. If SSH commands are disabled and ignored (like
sshcat vpsdash -l) andchshdoesn’t work, you can still addcommand="dash -l"to the end of your .ssh/authorized_keys line.
“We’ve noticed that only 37% of you have responded to the survey, we need more engagement!”
“If the survey is anonymous, how can you know what the participation statistics are?”
🦗🦗
You don’t need to know which employees participated to calculate a percentage based on number of submissions / total number of employees, but yeah, never assume any feedback to company surveys is anonymous.
What they always do is send out personalized links, and they can see who responded by checking which links clicked through and completed the survey.
So it’s just flatly not anonymous.
Email the group, “Some of us took the survey links we were sent and swapped them with each other, will that be a problem?”
Make management try and explain why you need to use your specific personal link for the anonymous survey.
Your answers may still be anonymous, even if they can tell wether or not you answered.
It could easily be anonymous. but it could just as easily be not-anonymous.
That is true. I do believe they need to be able to tell wether or not an specific employee has participated though, to make sure an employee doesn’t answer twice, or even 20 times. If a survey is 100% anonymous, with nothing tying anyone to anything, any employee could simply invalidate the results by spamming the survey. You’d need to be able to somehow tell wether or not an employee has answered more than once.
The correct and ethical way to do it is obviously randomised links, that can’t be traced back to the individual person, with no registration of who the links were sent to. Not that any company has ever done anything the correct or ethical way though. I’m just saying, there needs to be some way to make sure the results are actually an accurate repressentation.
Anonymous in that there’s a thin veneer of professionalism wherin they pretend they don’t know who submitted each survey response and talk around it as if you don’t both know that you both know what’s really going on
