tl;dr
Anonymity in employee surveys is essential for honest feedback. Many employees hesitate to share openly due to fear of identification or consequences, which can lead to incomplete data and missed opportunities for improvement. Luppa prioritizes anonymity by ensuring no personal identifiers (like names or emails) are stored, keeping survey responses truly confidential. For added privacy, results aren’t viewable for groups smaller than three, and companies are advised to analyze data from larger groups. This approach builds trust, encourages openness, and allows companies to make informed improvements in engagement and workplace culture.
Introduction
Anonymity in employee surveys is crucial for obtaining honest feedback, yet getting employees to share their true thoughts can still be challenging. Many hold back their true thoughts because they fear being singled out or facing negative consequences. This can lead to incomplete or misleading information, making it tough for companies to tackle real problems. Anonymity helps remove this fear, allowing employees to share openly without worrying about being identified. When employees feel safe, they’re more likely to be honest, which leads to better insights. Tools like Luppa ensure this by making anonymity a priority, which builds trust and encourages honest communication—leading to better decisions and action plans.
Luppa anonymity
Luppa is a third-party tool designed to be anonymous from the ground up to provide accurate results of employee satisfaction and engagement. We understand the importance of privacy and put special focus on this. To achieve this, the main tool we use is data anonymity. When somebody answers the questions, we don’t store that person's name, email, or any other personal identifier. Instead, we store survey results in another database table with filter data (gender, team, office, etc.). Therefore, there is no way of connecting results with name or email. Here is an example of a database row:
- Gender: Male
- Office: London
- Age: 25-30
- Question ID: 53
- Grade: 4
Additionally, the employer cannot view results for groups with fewer than 3 responses, ensuring there is no technical possibility of accessing any individual results, as the tool blocks result filtering and protects anonymity in the case of a small response sample within a team. Now, employees have the option to set their own minimum number of responses required to view group results. While the minimum cannot be set lower than 3, employees can choose 4, 5, 6, or any number they prefer. This choice can be made based on the structure and size of their teams, adding an additional layer of privacy control.
Company anonymity
Apart from Luppa strategies, which are sufficient to ensure respondents' anonymity, the business organization, as the survey's conductor, has additional systems in place to protect employees' anonymity.
While conducting Deep Dive, Pulse or a Custom survey, a third-party tool is used to avoid having access to data. In other words, they never have direct access to their employees' responses by name, email address, or any other way except as grouped visual reports that are filtered, for example, by country, office, or department, but never by each employee individually.
In the case of smaller teams with only a few employees, companies are encouraged to organize those into larger groups with not less than five, but ideally at least ten employees for the purpose of data analysis. This is an additional step every organization can make to ensure the employees' anonymity.
Individual’s anonymity
You can feel free and safe to give your answers while filling out the Deep Dive, Pulse and Custom surveys because your name or email address will never be disclosed. With such freedom, you can actively participate in the creation of a better place to work and enable your employer to create the required action plans because only through honest feedback can the specific areas needing improvement be identified. Such insights are essential for creating concrete action plans that will improve employee satisfaction, engagement and the overall workplace culture.
Continue reading our blogs to learn more about employee engagement and concrete tools that will help you with employee retention.
