How do I determine if employee surveys are “anonymous”?

It isn't. Or at least, write your responses assuming it isn't. Nothing you do on employer-owned devices should be considered anonymous or private.

What's your threat model? Are you trying to get away with sending death threats to the executives through the survey? Because of they're not if you're commiting crimes like that.

Are you worried that telling your boss they suck at their job could lead to repercussions for you? Sit down with a friendly manager and ask to look at the report from last anonymous survey to see what lengths the company goes to in order to anonymize results. Some companies only give lip service to the idea, other companies actually do want truthful feedback. I've seen managers fired over poor feedback. I've also seen bad managers get worse after a feedback cycle.

If the "anonymization" consists of "your team rated you X on "listens to feedback", you're fine. If the feedback is divided into "teammates who have been at the company longer than X months/years", then don't consider it anonymous - it's too easy for a smart, vindictive manager to unblind the anonymization by slicing the data just the right way. If 100% of women on the team think the manager is an asshat, but there's only one woman on the team... that's not anonymous. Survey givers try to prevent that, and won't report on eg gender break downs in that case, but I wouldn't bet my career on that.

And of course, in the short answer section, you can't give personally identifiable examples of where your manager has failed you.

Ultimately though, if you're that afraid of your workplace, you might want to consider finding a job somewhere less... adversarial. You have to deal with the company a majority of the week. It behooves you for it to be somewhere you don't feel like it's a fight most days. (Unless you like that, of course.)

I know someone in management who got the results of an "anonymous" employee survey of her team, and for whatever reason there was geolocation data stored as part of the results. Making it easy to guess who most of the people were (during work from home). Never ascribe to malice what can be explained by stupidity.

See also the recent story about Canada's state broadcaster (CBC) doing some kind of diversity survey that asked about sexuality and whatnot, and then using the results to annotate people's HR files https://nationalpost.com/news/cbc-employees-confidential-per...

Not sure if this is "prove it for fun because obviously they're lying" or serious mode, so I have several answers, none of which are bad advice and all of which are not jokes.

- Assume it's not, because it isn't. Then don't worry about it and just speak your mind.

- It's better to have raged and lost (your job), than to never have raged at all?

- Make friends with someone from HR / whoever deals with the responses. Ask them.

- Write outrageously threatening/dangerous/offensive responses and see if the cops arrive at your desk.

Fill something out in the survey that will force them to reveal their hand.

I would always assume they are not.

I would always assume they are not.

You can't.