A question we are often asked here at The Happiness Index is "How do you protect a respondent's anonymity?"

The Happiness Index strives to respect your employee responses confidentiality. All your feedback will be anonymous, which means no-one within your organisation can trace the source of a comment or score back to the survey respondent. 

We have put together a quick guide which you can share with your employees. All you need to do is download the document using the link below:

Download our Anonymity Within The Happiness Index Platform

We protect employee’s anonymity in order to preserve honest feedback and people’s privacy. The rules that we have within our platform to achieve that are:

Golden Rule: We don’t show the results of a group of respondents that are below a certain level. We normally set this number in 5, which means any group of 4 or fewer won’t show the details. This number can be adapted to your preferences.

Reference Number: Your employees names and email addresses are never associated with their responses. That personal information is requested when uploading people to the platform to build their profiles but it will never be matched across into their scores. When visualising responses, our platform uses a Reference Number that will allow you to know whether those responses come from an individual or multiple individuals, but that Reference Number can never be tied back to a concrete person.

Closing the Feedback Loop: We facilitate two-way anonymous conversations with your employees to safely close the feedback loop. Instead of imposing bidirectional feedback by default, we let the employee decide whether they want to be contacted by their managers whilst protecting their anonymity.

Last but not least, we are a fully GDPR compliant company so you are in safe hands.

Where anonymity does not apply

All of our surveys are anonymous by default. However, there are some situations where you can choose to make a survey ‘known’ i.e. not anonymous, and THI provides the flexibility to meet those situations. We would only suggest to do so in very particular circumstances, and making a survey known means you can see the respondent’s name alongside their scores and comments. We keep tight control over this, so please get in touch with your Customer Success Manager to discuss why you want a survey to be known and they can action it for you. 

The situations where you might want a known survey could include:

• A survey where it is targeted at an individual person, such as an Exit Survey or an Onboarding Survey, where their individual data is valuable to create actions from. 
• A survey where it has been clearly communicated that it will not be anonymous.

A respondent will be notified on survey commencement if anonymity applies or not, as they will see this message:

vs.