Avoiding Qualitative Employee Data

While quantitative research has proven to be the most reliable, qualitative research is not without its value. Qualitative research can give you insight that you may not get with the numbers, and can provide you with valuable information that you can use to make decisions. It also gives employees a voice box to share more specific thoughts and concerns.

For example, if a large group of employees notices that a certain working condition is dangerous, a text box may give them the opportunity to share that issue with your company directly – something that may have been missed if research was conducted on numbers alone. Yet for employee satisfaction surveys – especially surveys for small and medium sized companies – qualitative research may also pose a problem: Losing anonymity.

Depending on the size of your company and the staff that will view the research, it is possible that an employee satisfaction answer to a qualitative question accidentally gives away the employee that was likely to have filled out the answer. For example, if an employee is asked if they have anything they’d like to share, and the employee writes: “Yes, I have caught Mr. Smith playing Tetris instead of cold calling on more than one occasion, perhaps games should be deleted from computers.” It is possible that Mr.

Smith knows the employee that has spotted him playing Tetris, and now he knows who filled out that particular survey, causing their answers to no longer be anonymous. That can lead to unintended consequences for an employee that thought their answer would be anonymous.

It’s clear that qualitative answers can be valuable, but it also may be a problem if the answers can accidentally be associated with employees. While there is no guaranteed solution, some ideas to minimize the likelihood of this occurring include: Put answers to open ended questions in a different dataset before reviewing them to ensure that even if you can figure out which employee wrote the answer, you cannot see what other scores they may have filled out. Have a third, unbiased party review the qualitative answers, to ensure that no one within the company has an opportunity to look at them.

Limit the number of people that have access to qualitative data as much as possible. The fewer people that see the data, the less likely someone that knows the employee will view it. Put a disclaimer not to name names, specific events, or even departments in the feedback boxes to reduce the chance the employee says something that can be attributed to them.

None of these are necessarily foolproof, and they may not be possible with your company. When that is the case, make sure that anyone that looks at the data understands that it was supposed to be anonymous, and they must try their best to remain neutral against any employee’s answers.