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-At a former employer - a vast engineering multinational - we had a big, annual questionnaire to determine how happy we were to work there. 'On a scale from 1-1
by lb1lf 6y ago
-At a former employer - a vast engineering multinational - we had a big, annual questionnaire to determine how happy we were to work there. 'On a scale from 1-10, how satisfied are you with...'
We were assured the results were only to be used in aggregate and no response would be possible to trace back to the individual who'd made it.
I almost fell off my chair laughing when the report had been compiled - the responses were anonymized. Of sorts. Responses used in aggregate. Of sorts.
The engineer, female, age bracket 40-49 years, $SITE in the office next door wasn't as amused.
As the sample size was one, her every response had been printed in the report.
Oops.
- notabee 6y agoRecently had a similar "anonymization" experience in a workplace survey. There were a lot of short answer questions, and people's names were converted into numbers. The same number for each employee, on every question. Not exactly hard to correlate who's who with a few dozen responses from each person. They also failed completely to clean up any names mentioned in the reponses.
- namrog84 6y agoWhere I work our similar reports only will show average number values in context of at least 6 responses. And open ended text responses in context where at least 25 people responded. So often a direct manager can't see open ended text in their context but their skip level manager could. They shouldn't have ever reported on a sample size of 1. That's a bad system