> Founders can use tools like Culture Amp to do anonymous surveys.
I wouldn't respond to one of those truthfully - I give four or five stars on everything, and never write any complaints in the free-form text fields. If possible, I just avoid doing them - especially if it's a small company, but at larger companies they tend to be per-team, so it works out the same.
It's a good idea to have that policy and be careful.
I submitted a comment in a similar office survey service and despite my submission being anonymous, shortly after submitting it, a superior had a meeting with me to address what the anonymous complaint was about, having determined the comment was from me.
In this case I was very glad they figured it out because it ended up being a low risk way of bringing up my concern, but had I not had such a great employer, the result could have been me getting fired or something similar.
The comment was only one short sentence and there were 50-100 people employed at the company, so if you want to be honest on platforms like this, I would limit what you say and obfuscate as much as you can. It doesn't take much to identify you.
There's a difference between "This survey is anonymous"/"Hey, Bob ranked his satisfaction with his manager as 1/5", and "This survey is anonymous"/"Here's a list of complaints from your team"/"Oh, this one is a complaint about how X impacts Y - I know Bob's the only one who's expressed interest in that in the past, I bet it's from him".
If my employer told me a survey was anonymous, I would expect anonymity on the Rank/Rate/True-False type questions, but assume that any freeform comments would be identifiable to someone as being from me based on style, content or something else.
It depends on the survey mechanism: If you are only selecting scores from 1-5, aren't saying a word, and the minimum unit of aggregation is 10 people, and it's all handled by a third party, you can be truthful. But any time you enter text, nothing is really anonymous.
There can still be issues of group identification: If a manager gets far worse scores than their peers, nothing guarantees that higher management will actually do something about the manager, vs believing that they just have a team with bad attitudes, and tell the manager to fire the person that they think si the biggest troublemaker, but if that's the case, chances are you wanted to get out of Dodge anyway.
I wouldn't respond to one of those truthfully - I give four or five stars on everything, and never write any complaints in the free-form text fields. If possible, I just avoid doing them - especially if it's a small company, but at larger companies they tend to be per-team, so it works out the same.