My personal favorite tidbit about a company which gave surveys years ago was that they claimed they were anonymous but when I was late to submit mine one year, the CFO called me and asked me to do my survey since it was late...
It's entirely possible the survey is anonymous, but they can still see who hasn't responded. Depending on the survey software, these aren't exactly mutually-exclusive things?
I'll take a whack at this since I have some relative experience from playing at a functional exec in my last role
we used Lattice in an organization of ~150 people. We had roughly 10 leaders (exec and non-exec), responsible for various functions. The most any one leader had in their reporting tree was ~40 (one of the Eng leaders)
For Lattice, at least from what I was exposed to, the surveys ARE anonymous. They know who has and hasn't submitted a survey because everyone gets a personalized link, but that is not aggregated up into some dashboard where UUIDs are mapped back to respondents. It's something like "Bill in finance has 4 directs, and 2 of those haven't pressed submit on their unique survey." But as you can figure, that does not matter AT ALL. Anyone with a modicum of attention can figure out who wrote what when you have a reporting tree that small. You will see the responses broken out by leader, by function (say, Sales for example), and then division, whole company. The only people who had access to all the results AFAIK were the CEO, the head of IT, and HR.
In short, it's anonymity theater if your leadership has any inkling of how you communicate. I knew exactly who wrote what from my teams, and so did my leadership peers.
> In short, it's anonymity theater if your leadership has any inkling of how you communicate. I knew exactly who wrote what from my teams, and so did my leadership peers.
You might be able to identify your direct reports based on communication style alone, but I don't really find it believable that this is a property that naturally transfers to your leadership, and from them up the chain to executives.
If that is true, then the "anonymity theater" only really extends to direct leadership, and not much further. This means that you, as a leader, would have to be complicit in any attempts to deanonymize any specific respondents.
So to rephrase: your ability to deanonymize your direct reports' responses does not extrapolate to the entire exercise being "anonymity theater", because your ability to deanonymize any given respondent only extends as far as your direct reports and maybe a free others. This becomes increasingly less true the larger the set of total employees surveyed.
> You might be able to identify your direct reports based on communication style alone, but I don't really find it believable that this is a property that naturally transfers to your leadership, and from them up the chain to executives.
And when your leadership says that we should help whoever "isn't a good fit" to exit the company, will you use your knowledge of who wrote what to make the right choice of who to fire?
I mean, why wouldn't I? It would be an important part of my job to find a competent set of individuals who are aligned with the company's overall goals and direction. A competent individual who is misaligned is often more damaging to a team than an incompetent aligned individual. The same is true of the individual's satisfaction with their work (i.e. `s/aligned/satisfied/g` in the above).
So my decision would necessarily require considering all of these factors: competence, satisfaction, and alignment. If their answers to an employee satisfaction survey tell me they're dissatisfied, and I can't or won't do what it takes to make them satisfied, I would be doing us both a disservice by not helping them exit the company.
At the end of the day, a company is a group of people dedicated towards some common goal. Everyone may have a different picture of how to get to that goal, but everyone should be trying to push things in the same general direction. Someone who is obviously pushing in the wrong direction or causing unnecessary friction should either be convinced to align more with the rest, convince others to push in the alternate direction, or asked to leave.
Now obviously companies should be encouraged to follow social norms in some respects, to make it clear that certain ways that they act are not tolerated by the society they exist within. However, this is still an inherently social problem, and requires social solutions.
If you feel like you're the odd one out, and that the majority of people in the company--or maybe just "the leadership"--are wrong, consider that at the end of the day, the reason usually comes down to "other people don't think like you". There are two things you can do about this:
1) change other people's minds. You generally can't do this by actively fighting against them, so you should at least make it clear you align with them in some way that matters to the company, first.
2) you can find a different group of people to work with, people who think more like you.
Consider that if the second option doesn't exist, you always have the option of doing it yourself.
> It's entirely possible the survey is anonymous, but they can still see who hasn't responded.
Sure —- but then you know the exact answers of the last person to respond; it’s just the delta between the results before they responded and after, and you know who they are. So they’re fully de-anonymized. And of course that means you can de-anonymize the second-to-last respondent… and so on.
Cool, so it could be exploited by someone who makes a hard effort to exploit it (polling the answers and comparing them to the non-respondents, I guess?).
How many of these "executives" or "HR people" who contract these kinds of surveys actually have the a) time, b) interest, or c) acuity to perform this kind of exploit? Not many that I could think of.
The bar for exploiting this is high for non-technical people, and I don't think it's rational to conclude that it would be exploited in the majority of cases, much less a significant minority. I think the default usage of surveys like this is approximately: 1) come up with some questions, 2) put these into some survey software, 3) put in the employee email list, 4) blast everyone with a link and a deadline, then 5) check back in on the results when the deadline is near.
Ain't nobody got time to watch every result come in and do some computation to figure out everyone's exact answers. If that's what they were really after, they'd probably just remove the option to respond anonymously. There are far easier ways to achieve the same end than by some circuitous exploit, right?
