This article explains the benefits of confidential surveys and how Personio protects the participants' data.

What is confidentiality in Personio Surveys?

In surveys, ensuring confidentiality means protecting the identity of individual respondents. You can see and analyze responses, but no one can connect a specific answer to a particular employee.

In a confidential survey:

• No one can see the participants' identity, regardless of their access rights.
• Attributes marked as unique ID are not available as filters.
• Results are displayed according to a set confidentiality minimum.

Confidential and anonymous surveys

Personio Surveys provides the option to make surveys confidential, not anonymous:

Anonymous surveys: No link is established between the participant's identity and their responses. While this grants total anonymity, it also prevents filtering results for deeper insights.

Confidential surveys: The system connects responses to each respondent for data analysis purposes:

• This connection is not visible to anyone within the Personio tool. It is maintained in the backend to ensure employee privacy.
• All data analysis is conducted with confidentiality protection in place, grouping responses together when necessary.

These two types of surveys have different pros and cons:

Overall, confidential surveys offer powerful tools to analyze and act on feedback, while maintaining employees' privacy.

Confidentiality minimum

Personio Surveys protects confidentiality thanks to a custom confidentiality minimum. This is the least number of respondents required to show their data separately. For example, if the threshold is set at 5, any group with fewer than 5 respondents does not show separately.

The confidentiality minimum applies when viewing and filtering results:

Hiding answers and comments

Responses only show if they reach the threshold. For example, if the threshold is 5, and a question has 3 respondents, the results do not show.

The same applies to comments. They only show if there are enough to reach the threshold.

Grouping answers and comments

Some departments might not have enough answers to reach the threshold. In this case, Personio groups their answers together.

The same applies to comments. If a department has too few comments, Personio groups them with comments from other departments. This keeps individual contributions private while still including them in the survey.

Example 
The confidentiality minimum is 5. If a survey has the following department responses:
Legal: 1 response
Executive Team: 2 responses
HR: 2 responses
IT: 5 responses
Sales: 8 responses

Only Sales and IT appear separately. Personio combines the other departments into one larger group labeled "Grouped for Confidentiality". This ensures that no specific respondent is identified.

Note that it is impossible to guarantee protection against all filtering combinations. Using different filters may allow to draw conclusions regarding the identities of respondents.

Confidentiality and survey reports

When creating survey reports for a confidential survey, confidentiality settings apply. The report displays answers according to the confidentiality minimum.

Moreover, you can apply the following measures to protect the respondents' identity:

• Turn off all filtering options.
• Provide the report viewers with filtering options for specific attributes only.
• Hide free-text responses, including comments.

Test confidentiality features

To further explore and test confidentiality features, you can use sample surveys:

1. Under Surveys, click Create sample surveys here, at the bottom of the page.
2. At the top of the page, click the Created on filter.
3. You’ll see three surveys with sample results generated from your employee data. You can test them as needed.