Anonymity in Employee Feedback: Can I Safely Share Concerns About Office Politics?

Our organization conducts Employee Engagement Surveys to gather feedback from employees. The surveys are conducted by a third-party vendor named Quantum Workplace. The exact words written in a corresponding email to us are "Quantum is a leader in employee engagement, and they enable us to provide a forum for employees to confidentially provide their feedback."

Anonymity in Employee Feedback

Does this mean the feedback from employees will be recorded anonymously? If they are anonymous, I want to write about office politics, incompetent managers, and several malpractices in the office.

Best Practices for Writing Anonymous Feedback

Also, what are the best ways to write these so that the company will not be able to identify the person who wrote this specific feedback? (Given the limited number of employees, someone might be able to trace out the person who wrote the feedback based on the points written in it.)

You will not know if it is anonymous or not until you receive the survey. We cannot provide a definitive answer to this.

I would be very surprised if it were completely anonymous. Sometimes, while they don't ask for a name, they generally want some sort of clarifying information such as a designation and which department you work in. If you work in a department of only four people, then it could be a problem.

The problem with these things is that most people only write what management wants to hear, not how they really feel. There are many reasons for this, of course, but as I have constantly told many people over a very long period of time, management cannot fix problems they do not know about.

Be that as it may, I fail to see why any organization runs these surveys if they are not prepared to face the truth and then do something about it. In the end, it is just another time-wasting, feel-good bit of management theatre to keep the masses under control.