We take employee anonymity very serious. Employees are anonymises to their employer and any employee, manager, HR admin or executive. No one can see what an individual answered or scored on these questions.

Having a trustworthy system is important if we want honest answers, so we strive to maintain a high level of integrity when it comes to anonymity.

Assuming an anonymity limit of 4 there has to be at least 4 people excluding the manager in a team before the results become visible. If there are only 3 people then the results are hidden by Zoios.

Clients can also set a minimum amount of answers, and assuming that is 2 then Zoios would also hide the results if only one person has answered the survey. This protects people from the timing of answering the survey.

At Zoios, we always encourage our clients to transparently tell people about the anonymity limit they intend to use. This way employees know how anonymous they are when answering the survey.

Comments are extra sensitive. We do not allow cross filtering within comments for that particular reason.

Example: Imagine you see a comment within a specific team and you change the filtering to show only comments from women and the comment was still there - now you know it's a woman in that team who wrote the comments. That is not possible in Zoios to uphold employee anonymity.

You can only segment or filter comments by your organizational chart (e.g. department and team).

There are good arguments for higher and lower thresholds. We believe the minimum to call it anonymous is three people excluding a manager. There are pros and cons and you can read in the next section.

Here is nuanced logic around the classic misconceptions within anonymity.

Misconception: "It's not very anonymous, when I know it's Paul that isn't satisfied with how the team is collaborating." or "I'm certain that the person with problematic stress levels is Sophie, then it isn't really anonymous."

When you combine your real world knowledge and experience with the insights from the survey, you'll always be able to make conclusions that wasn't visible in the data alone. The answers were still anonymous.

Imagine you had a group of 17 people write a score from 0-100 rating their social relationships at work - while you are at home. The fact that you come to work the next day and know that Sophie is the one who wrote 100 because she is extremely happy socially, doesn't change the fact that people got to answer anonymously.

That is incorrect. You can argue that anonymity is black and white and that it either is or it isn't, and in that case all employees are factually anonymous. Their identity is concealed and their individual answers are never revealed.

However, you could argue that anonymity is a continuum. There is a solid argument to be made that you are more anonymous in a group of 20 that in a group of 5, and thus anonymity is a continuum where you can be more or less anonymous depending on the variables.

Here is how we propose you see it.