5 Tips for Collecting Anonymous Employee Feedback

Collecting anonymous employee feedback

Collecting anonymous feedback can reveal your team’s honest opinions.

Anonymous Feedback Is the Best Way to Success

If you’ve opted to collect anonymous feedback, you’ve made the right decision. 74% of employees would be more inclined to give feedback about their organization if the feedback channel was truly anonymous.

However, you’ll want to ensure your survey is productive. If you’re not satisfied with your employees’ responses, you may not be able to follow up with them.

You want to get the most out of your questions by encouraging your employees to provide unbiased, thorough, and honest feedback without leaving anything out.

Not sure how to collect anonymous feedback? We’ve gathered the best tips and tools to help you.

1. Tell Your Employees The Survey Is Anonymous

Assuring your employees of their anonymity will make them give unbiased and sincere answers. You wouldn’t want them holding back relevant information that can help your survey.

Your employees will want to be sure that their identity will not be leaked (whether through their IP addresses, emails, or other details they provide).

Feedback is most valuable when it’s honest and unbiased. Making it clear that their identity will not be (even better, cannot be) revealed will make your team more willing to leave honest feedback.

2. Communicate Why You Need Feedback (Your Goals)

The usual goal of collecting anonymous data is to get your employees’ perspectives on a subject or decision. Explain the reason for the survey to make your team more relaxed around the questions and more open to providing honest answers.

Let your employees know why you need their feedback. And be specific. This will help your employees stay focused on the feedback they provide, keeping it in alignment with your goals for the survey.

A typical scenario would be gauging the satisfaction level of your employees on a recent process improvement, new system, or a recently finished campaign. Ask questions around the event and let your team know that you’ll use the responses to improve future operations.

3. Make the Questions Clear and Comprehensive

Don’t assume that your staff members will understand your questions. You need to be as clear as possible. If the focus of your questions isn’t clear, your team might give you answers that are outside of scope. Those replies might be nice to know but not effective for achieving your goals.

If possible, write the questions just as you would for someone with little or no understanding of the topic. Use simple terms and avoid using lengthy paragraphs. Make your sentences clear, brief, and concise.

Also, ask a friend or member of your staff to read your questions and provide an extra set of eyes. This can help you get another perspective, reducing the chance that your team will be confused or answer incorrectly.

Make the questions clear and comprehensive

4. Don’t Make Your Survey Compulsory

As important as it is that your employees respond to the survey, you shouldn’t make them feel coerced to do it. It’s enough to explain the importance of the survey. This should make them see why they need to provide their opinions.

If you make it compulsory to give feedback – even anonymously – it might make them uninterested. They may rush through the survey or give incorrect answers as a way of retaliating.

Remember: Give your team the option to opt-out of the survey. Knowing they’re not being forced to complete it will empower more people to fill it out honestly.

5. Use an Effective Method for Collecting Anonymous Feedback

Choosing an effective method will provide your employees with an avenue to answer your feedback questions comfortably and without hassle. Plus, it makes data collation easy. In short, you’ll have all your answers in one place and in one format.

Keep in mind that the method you choose to collect anonymous feedback can impact the accuracy of the responses recorded.

An unsuitable method may have respondents simply filling in random answers simply to get the survey over with. On the other hand, using a method that aligns with your team’s preferences makes it seamless to collect anonymous feedback.

The method you choose should depend on the information you need. A survey will bring you different answers than a poll. Exploring these methods and selecting the right fit will help you generate valuable responses from your employees.

There are many tools you can use for collecting anonymous feedback. These methods are effective, tested, and tried. Ultimately, you can rest assured that you’ll get results you can use if you use any of these tools to collect anonymous feedback.

Email

Emails are a great way to collect feedback. This may involve sending questions in form of a questionnaire or as the body of the email. However, it doesn’t provide anonymity to your employees.

Polls

Polls are usually quick and fast but are limited to about six to seven responses at a time. The questions included in a poll are usually closed-ended. You must ensure that each question conveys the message you want it to pass across to the respondents.

Polls

Online Forms

While some online forms are anonymous, others don’t guarantee privacy. Still, it’s often a better option than polls because respondents get to write out their opinions and elaborate.

Physical Suggestion Boxes

Using physical suggestion boxes is an old method of collecting anonymous feedback. It typically involves writing suggestions on paper and slotting them into a physical box.

Although other new methods have almost replaced this tool, some organizations still use it. The boxes can be placed anywhere around your organization. As easy as this method seems, it is manual and quite tedious. So, collecting responses can be difficult.

Software Solutions

There are so many software tools with dashboards that make it easy to collect anonymous feedback. These tools aren’t just easy to customize. They also guarantee privacy.

This is why they’re the most effective for collecting anonymous feedback.

Use an Online Suggestion Box to Collect Anonymous Feedback

Anonymous feedback can get you honest, unfiltered, and constructive answers to your questions. They can help you and your organization become more efficient and successful.

But, if you can’t guarantee anonymity, you also shouldn’t expect honesty.

The easiest way to collect anonymous feedback is with a software solution like Suggestion Ox that guarantees your employees a high level of privacy.

What’s more, it’s easy-to-use, customizable, and 100% private. This way, you can be sure you’ll be getting their honest opinions and fostering trust throughout your organization.

Ready to start collecting anonymous feedback from your employees? Try it free and learn how you can do it seamlessly.

Try it free and experience the benefits of employee feedback