Well, that’s a loaded question for a Monday. But sure, let me grab some coffee and let’s get right into it!
Ok, so before we start, we need to recognize that employee feedback is vital for personal and professional growth. Think about it, your employees spend a lot of time on the job, according to Happiness at Work it’s about 90,000 hours… that’s a lot of hours. Understanding how they are doing and making sure to provide an environment where they can thrive ensures they grow as people and they engage in company goals and objectives.
With that settled, it is now important for you to identify what systems and solutions to use in order to collect employee feedback. There are different methods, such as suggestion boxes, feedback coaches, and surveys. You want to look for a combination of methods that are understood and accepted by your employees since this will get you as much feedback as possible, but most importantly you need a system that ensures honest feedback.
Which brings us to your original question… should employee feedback be anonymous?
We live in an age of sharing, which means people are comfortable with sharing pictures of their pets, opinions on movies and selfies upon selfies. Some people might even call this oversharing but at Enalyzer we don’t judge – you do you! Nevertheless, for some reason which most of us can relate to, being open and honest with your boss still feels risky, which is why anonymity is important.
There are many that disagree and believe that fostering a culture of honesty and openness is the best way to go since you can ask employees to expand on answers, reach solutions together and award employees for constructive feedback. This is all true, but the most popular and effective tool to gather employee feedback is surveys, and realistically speaking, you will not get honest answers (or any at all) if you can’t guarantee anonymity.
Anonymous surveys can help you get started in creating a culture of honesty and they are a powerful tool when used properly. Employees will share their true thoughts and suggestions when they don’t fear retaliation, and by constantly acting upon the feedback you receive they will feel heard. Yes, it’s one of those win-win situations we all love.
Anonymity with Enalyzer
We are big advocates of anonymous employee surveys (if you couldn’t already tell), so we’ve designed a tool that ensures complete anonymity. As with many other tools, you can make your survey anonymous which means personal information on the respondents won’t be gathered or stored, but anonymous surveys are more than that.
Your respondents need to be confident that your survey will be conducted and processed in a manner that guarantees their absolute anonymity and this can be tricky with online surveys. Why is that? Well, sharing a report based on a survey with a low level of responses can compromise your respondents’ anonymity – but we took care of that.
With Enalyzer you can apply an anonymity level to your reports and charts, which will hide data until that level is reached. So, if you set your level to 5, all those your share your charts and reports with will not be able to see the responses until more than 5 respondents have answered the survey.
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