The Anonymous Employee Survey Tool Problem Every HR Consultant Has

Every survey tool is built on the same assumption: one company, polling itself. Which is fine, until you are the person running the survey for somebody else.

Then you get two options, and both are bad.

01Option one: one account, all your clients

You buy a workspace, you run every client's survey out of it, you keep the results in folders named after them.

This is the cheap one, and it is the one most firms end up on. It also means every client's employee feedback lives in an account they do not control, alongside their competitors' sometimes, and when the engagement ends you email them a PDF and keep the raw data forever because there is nowhere else for it to go.

Ask a client's general counsel what they think of that arrangement. The good ones ask, eventually.

02Option two: an account per client, in their name

Cleaner on paper. The client buys their own subscription, adds you as a user, and owns their own data.

In practice you are now asking a company to buy software before they have seen a result, for a project that might last six weeks. You are doing procurement instead of consulting. And when they say no, you are back to option one.

03What we built instead

One licence, on your workspace. A separate workspace per client, created by you in about a minute, with no card and no subscription of its own. One login across all of them and a switcher between them.

The client owns their workspace from the first day. Not as a policy we could change, but structurally: you cannot publish a survey in a client workspace until somebody at the client is an owner with their own key. We block it. Because a workspace only the consultant can open is a workspace the client loses when you leave, along with results they paid for.

At the end, they take over the subscription and nothing moves. Same workspace, same surveys, same results. It is a change of invoice.

04The part that actually changes response rates

Here is the thing about running a survey as an outsider: your client's employees have to believe it.

An employee who gets a survey from a consultancy they have never heard of is doing risk assessment, not reflection. Who is this firm. Who is paying them.

Does my manager get to see this. What most tools give you is a logo swap, which makes it worse, because now it looks like the employer is hiding who is collecting the data.

So the response page names both. Your firm, on behalf of the client, above the questions. You cannot turn our footer off either. Nobody has to guess who is involved.

Underneath that, the thing that makes the claim true rather than reassuring: every answer is encrypted in the respondent's browser before it is sent. We store ciphertext. Not "we have a policy against reading answers": we can't read them.

You and the client can, once enough people have answered, but nobody can tell whose answers are whose. Scores come back as totals, and written answers are shown word for word, shuffled and undated. Where the poll allows it, anyone who'd rather not be read can send just the topics they pick instead.

That is a sentence you can put in a kickoff email and defend in a room.

05What it costs

$3,588 a year, five live client workspaces included, $59 a month for each one beyond that. An engagement stops counting the day you hand it over or close it, so you pay for the clients you are actually running.

Compare that to a seat-priced tool multiplied by however many clients you have this quarter.

Start on the free trial and tell us you are a consultancy. See how an engagement runs.

For related guidance, see confidential vs anonymous surveys, how to run an anonymous employee survey, and anonymity thresholds for small groups.

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