How effective are Employee Engagement Surveys? Anonymous feedback from employees

Our organisation conducts Employee Engagement Surveys to get the feedback from emoyees. The surveys are being conducted by 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"

Does this mean the feedback from employees will be recorded anonymously? If they are anonymous, I want to write about office politics, incompetent manager, several malpractices in the office. Also, what are the best ways to write these so that the company will not be able to find out the person who wrote this particular feedback. (Having limited number of employees, someone might be able to trace out the person who wrote the feedback by the points written in it.)

You will not know if it is anonymous or not till you get the survey. We cannot tell you the answer to this.

I would be very surprised if it was 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 4 people, then it could be a problem.

The problem with these things is the most people only write what management wants to hear, not how they really feel. Many reasons for this of course, but as I have constantly told many, 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 organisation 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.