A story circulating on Reddit has struck a chord with anyone who’s ever completed one of those “your responses are totally confidential” workplace surveys. According to a Reddit post, an employee described how their company's HR department sent the unedited results of an internal engagement survey to the whole mailing list of 84 people, including every open-text comment employees made under the assumption that no one would be able to trace it back to them.
The story hits close to home for many U.S. workers who complete engagement surveys like this one about twice a year. It’s a reminder that the wall between “anonymous” and “everyone can see exactly what you typed” is thinner than most people realize.
The silence spoke volumes
The company ran a standard engagement survey twice a year, asking employees to rate their managers and the culture, and to leave comments in open-text boxes. Staff were told that HR reviewed the raw data and had only given the wider team a “sanitized” version. That's how most workplace surveys are intended to work.
Then someone in HR apparently pressed the wrong button. The whole export, all the responses, went to all 84 inboxes. For about three hours, nobody said anything about it officially. The employee noticed the company Slack, normally buzzing at 10 am on a Tuesday, had gone completely silent and realized it meant everyone was doing the same thing: quietly reading the unfiltered opinions of 84 people about their bosses.
The comments were not shocking in a tabloid sense, the post said. What attracted the eye was the specificity. There were pointed comments about specific management practices, identified procedures that people thought patronizing, and one comment about a senior leader so accurate that even without a name attached, plenty of people in the office probably knew exactly who wrote it.
