Vernacular Change: “Anonymous” to “Confidential”
Updated
What is this change?
In order to build employee trust and more accurately describe our product, all instances of “anonymity” or “anonymous” will be removed from customer-facing communications to be replaced with “confidential” and “confidentiality.”
Key customer benefits
- “Confidentiality” builds a greater sense of trust with employees
- “Confidential” is semantically more correct.
- Our surveys are not “anonymous” as the respondent’s identity is stored in our database and the identity is used in different ways to create aggregate reporting.
- “Confidential” is more true to what we do as we do not share the identity of respondents unless critical criteria are met.
Why did we build it?
- We needed to more accurately describe our product by using the semantically correct vernacular
What does this unlock for customers?
- This will unlock a deeper sense of trust for employees participating in surveys who will be more open to sharing confidential information
- Employers will know that we can deliver the names of a respondent in sensitive situations, like a security risk.
Definitions:
Anonymity: Providing anonymity of information collected from survey participants means that either the project does not collect identifying information of individual persons (e.g., name, address, email address, etc.), or the project cannot link individual responses with participants’ identities. A survey should not collect identifying information of research participants unless it is essential to the protocol. Anonymity cannot be guaranteed if any personally identifiable (PII) information will be collected.
Confidentiality: Maintaining confidentiality of information collected from survey participants means that only the survey provider (WorkStep) can identify the responses of individual participants. Every effort to prevent anyone outside of the project from connecting individual subjects with their responses must be made.
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