Thanks! I guess I’m just spoiled by my Mac at home.
I got one of those from a company I freelance for (all their work is independent contractors). I answered honestly, basically playing the loyal but underpaid line. I made sure there was enough info in there so they could figure out who I was. That, coupled with an email about the pay, earned me a 33% pay raise. 
Or add some random bars to the code.
Many years ago, I designed a mailed-out paper survey of a couple dozen town residents about their opinion on a neighborhood issue and I put a period (dot) in a different place in the margin on each form and kept track of the dot location for each addressee so I could determine who said what.
Well, if I was going to catch hell for not filling one out, I’d fill it out alright. Completely honestly, too. Honest. The only problem would be deciding whether to go with completely over-the-top psycopath, or over-the-top sycophant.
Heh. At one job I was the guy who got stuck compiling anonymous surveys. I knew exactly who everyone was – their penmanship, their individual complaints, even the way they phrased a sentence.
I was picked because I was the one person everyone trusted to keep quiet about who said what. And I did keep my mouth shut. But not enough organizations have someone like me 
We get em every couple of months. There is a prize for the depot which has the most respondents. So already they are narrowing it down to a particular location. Mostly they just leave the surveys lying in the messroom or stick them in our pigeonholes but occasionally there is a surveyor there enouraging us to complete the form.
Basically they ask about how well we follow safety procedures, do we break the law, do we break company rules, have we had any safety related incidents…oh and by the way how long have you worked here? A five-year-old could work out who filled in what just by matching up length of service, location and number of incidents. I’ve never filled one in. :rolleyes:
There’s no way I’d be filling in “Anonymous” surveys where I work. My handwriting bears a disturbing (and barely legible) resemblance to a hybrid of Egyptian Heiroglyphs, Arabic, and Cyrillic, so I’d be spotted immediately with any hand-written surveys. As for E-mail surveys? There’s only a dozen of us in the entire administrative region who can spell properly (judging from the E-mails we get, anyway), and of those dozen only four of us aren’t working in Head Office, and of the four of us, I’m the only one who routinely denounces anything that I disagree with as being Communism, so you wouldn’t have to be Sherlock Holmes to work out which “Anonymous” survey was mine.
A good rule to live by is, “Don’t send ANYTHING to HR that you didn’t initiate.” I currently have a desk full of “Policy Manual” updates that I am “required” to sign and send back to HR. Some of them are 10 years old. I’m quite certain that they’ll still be sitting there when I retire.
We were asked to fill in an anonymous survey at our work. But we’re employees contracted to a client site. The client is going through a merger. Everything is up in the air. So…
Yep. We were specifically asked (just our group), NOT to fill in the survey, as we’d make the company look bad by filling in how confused we were about our future, the current job situation, who’s managing (or not managing as the case is) etc.
See… They were planning to use the results of this survey to crow about how great the company is and how we’re all Shiny Happy Workers (SHW).
And sure enough, out come the results and… SHW! Who knew?
The informal survey wasn’t needed at the last job. The halls carried sound nicely from the break room to the office. I used that one November to purvey a message. The one owner would do the exact opposite if somebody told her she had to do it. The employees were discussing if we would get Christmas bonuses which we never got. I said loudly that they couldn’t afford to, and you will never get one I guarantee it. I worked and we got the first bonus ever after about ten years of never. She located her production floor desk at one of the locations where you can hear anything spoken at the far end.
We have had relatively few companywide surveys in our small company here, and mostly thed did no harm, may have done some good.
One instance quite a few years back has stuck in my memory, though.
A certain change of overall procedure generated much disaffection in the workforce.
The owner and team leaders could not help noticing that (we are small enough).
They included a question about the procedure change in a survey.
The question was worded to the effect of “Do you think you got enough information about [the change in procedure] (answer 0 for got no information at all up to 5 for got all the information that I needed)”
Sure enough we all answered 4 or 5 - it was the change itself that sucked, not a lack of information about the change.
The owner and the team leaders concluded that we were all happy with the change after all. :smack: