Employee Engagement Surveys as anonymous surveys- Best Practice | XM Community
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Hi Experts,
One of our customer has recently tested engagement surveys where we used confidential survey links instead of anonymous surveys and they are concerned with the fact that with confidential surveys responses can be easily identified by managers especially if they have very small teams in dashboards, also the data and analysis tab will show the complete response data by employee name , id etc.
Can you folks help us in understanding what is the usual practice that you follow while distributing employee engagement or pulse surveys, do you prefer to keep it anonymous or confidential and how do you ensure that your dashboards are sensitive enough to not allow managers or admins identify employees by their responses?
Please advise the best practice and best available solutions.

Kind Regards,
Manjista

Hey Manjista ,
A few things to consider:

  1. Communicate the value of honest and open feedback is more important than fear of blowback. Have in place proper feedback loops with assurance of HR the protections for employees. If this is difficult, this is indicative of cultural issues that won't be solved by a survey.

  2. Communicate well with managers who have access to the listening channels their defined and intended purpose outlining what they are expected and allowed to do with the data. Data governance starts before it is even used.

  3. Focus more on quantitative questions in lieu of qualitative questions, which can mean using more scale or binary questions asking about key sentiments or feelings rather than open ended questions. Ex. "My manager supports team collaboration - Scaled Agree-Disagree" can likely discover the same/similar sentiment as "Do you think your team's management is effective?" There is and should be room for open ended questions, but specific quantitative measures can help focus on areas to prioritize attention for improvement or praise instead of interpreting unstructured data.

  4. Have a plan to act on the information in an appropriate time frame. Employees feel supported and heard when things are received and responded to quickly. If they respond but don't have some type of affirmation before their attention has already faded, even their opinions can change by the time results come out. This does mean act immediately to every response, but be deliberate. Similar to communication with managers, have a communication plan outlining expectations and plans before the survey is available.


Hope this helps!

HI  Manjista

 

Our brand was in the same situation. 

What we did :

 

1_the data and analysis tabe is disabled for us for the whole VoE part. 

2-We only pull the results in dashboard, we dont get the raw data and we only filter according to the metadata collected .

3- we added enhanced anonimity , so you cannot filter for gender unless you have more than 5 replies at least per team.

4- we are now exploring the pseudoanonimity , to collect some level of raw data, for power BI dashboards lets say, but still names, emails, unique ID are erased, so no individual could be directly identified. 

 

Hope this helps, 

Livia

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