We’re usually pretty light-hearted here at Wotter, but this blog has to take a more serious note. 

You see, we want to make a real change with what we’re doing. Using anonymous surveys, we want to gather meaningful insights from people about their workplace, and use them to make companies more engaging. 

To do this, we need your trust. If you can’t trust us and give us honest answers to our questions, then nothing we do or suggest has any meaning. So we want to take a moment to explain to our users exactly how our system works.

Anonymous Surveys – Using Wotter

Alongside your answers to questions, when you sign in we ask you for some personal information, including your name, age, department, how long you have been at the company and other details. We’re aware that collecting these might make you question your anonymity.

The reason we do this is that we allow HR and Management to drill down into the data to create segments. They can use these segments to identify problems among smaller groups, in a particular department or group of employees. For example, there might be a loyalty problem in female employees who have served at the company for more than two years and who are under 30 years old, who knows!? Clearly, if we didn’t ask you for these details, we would have no chance in finding out.

For those interested, when we analyse the data, the very first thing we do is remove your email address, first name and last name. We leave in a scrambled user-ID (which is a randomly generated 26 character alphanumeric code) which is used to ensure that we’re not showing less than five users’ data together. Neither this user-ID or any of your other data is shown in any fashion and is only allowing the filters to work. These are truly Anonymous surveys.

If anyone tries to create a segment with less than 5 people in it, the search simply won’t return any data, and it’ll need to be broadened. If the search is okay, answers are displayed as a median, rather than a mean. This takes every answer within the set and shows the middle value, which means it’s impossible to reverse engineer the average and work out a particular answer. (It also has some advantages by giving a much better overview of the situation than a mean, as it doesn’t get pulled around by outliers, but we’ll leave that for another article).

When it comes to showing notes, only the question asked, and the notes left are shown. In this instance, we don’t allow a filter to show less than 10 people’s answers, in order to make it harder to identify an individual, but at the moment, notes are not moderated, so we need you to be careful to make sure that the notes you leave are not compromising your own or someone else’s anonymity.

We do have the ability to monitor notes, and we will reach out to those who might need some assistance, but largely this is down to you. It is always worth remembering that notes are entirely optional, however we feel that it is important that employees can have their say whenever they need to.

Please do get in contact if you’d like more information on how our anonymous surveys work.

Encryption is everything

All data that we take, as per GDPR requirements, is encrypted before it is stored. Without the correct authentication (which in our case is managed by Google, one of the most secure authentication and encryption platforms in the world) all data will simply look like gobbledygook.

We believe that this is a vitally important step to ensure that those with nefarious intentions cannot access your data, and that you can be absolutely sure who is, and equally importantly who isn’t, looking at your data.

Potentially Identifying Circumstances

Due to the nature of our anonymous surveys, there could be times where management becomes seriously concerned about an individual’s wellbeing. In these instances, we’ll have to evaluate and step in as necessary from our end. This will only be used as a last resort, and in exceptional circumstances.

However, we do feel that we have a duty of care to those that are confiding with us. If at any time we feel this is necessary, we will be on hand and prepared to explain exactly what we have had to do and why.

It’s All About You

McFly lyrics aside. The point we’re trying to make in this blog is that our platform revolves around you. Everything we’re doing is to give you a secure platform to voice your opinions, and make a positive impact to where you work. 

We hope this helps alleviate any Anonymity concerns that you might have. However, if there’s something we haven’t covered, or that you want to ask, drop us a line at hello@wotter.group.

Or feel free to take a look around our Features to see how our anonymous surveys work on a deeper level! See you in the app.