The guarantee of confidentiality is absolutely vital to the success of any staff survey. Without it, we know that there's no way we can expect you to be truly honest about telling us how you feel about working for the College. And if we don't know what's going well - and what could be improved - we can't change things for the better.

We want you to have total confidence that your responses will never be traced back to you as an individual. We've put together the questions and answers below to give you a better idea of what confidentiality means for this survey.

FAQs

Is the survey really confidential?

Absolutely. One of the benefits of an outside agency like People Insight administering the survey is that all your answers go to them, including whether or not you individually have completed it. At no point will anyone at Imperial, including senior leaders and managers, be privy to individual responses.  

This means that you can be completely honest with your responses without them being tracked back to you personally. People Insight administers the Employee Engagement Survey according to strict confidentiality policies and takes this very seriously. 

Then why do I have to give some personal details?

It is important that we can group feedback from staff by different campuses, job levels and areas. This helps us to identify priorities in different parts of the College and whether we need to take action on a College-wide, faculty, division/department or team basis.  Demographic information (e.g. gender, ethnic background) will help us to identify whether there are any equality issues we need to explore further. 

I'm filling out an online survey. Can my response be traced back to my computer?

No. As the survey is being hosted by People Insight on their web server no one at Imperial College London has access to the responses at any point during the survey. People Insight is bound by the Market Research Society's code of conduct for employee research and promises to guarantee the anonymity and confidentiality of all respondents to the survey.

I have received a reminder email. Does this mean you know who has completed the survey?

People Insight will know the email addresses of the people who have and have not completed the online survey but they will not give these names to the College. Once received by People Insight, the email addresses and completed surveys are separated. Although People Insight is able to identify the email addresses of those who have filled in the survey, they can’t match up the addresses with the completed results – so they have no record of who said what. You will remain anonymous throughout the process.

Open questions. Could I be identified?

No. Names and references that could risk identifying an individual will be removed so no one will be identified. 

Who will see my comments?

Your responses will go straight to People Insight, which means Imperial will not be able to see any individual submissions. The results will be analysed in a way that prevents making any person identifiable. You will remain anonymous throughout the process. When you are writing the free text comments, you will get the following warning: Please take care when providing this feedback. 

Please note that any comments that you make will be repeated verbatim in the feedback report from People Insight. Although they will not reveal the name of the person who provided the comments, you should consider whether you could be identified from your comments and, if so, whether you would wish to be. If you are concerned about this either before, or after writing your comments, please contact People Insight directly. 

What is the point - will what I say make a difference?

Sharing your thoughts about your work will help drive real change, and your thoughts are unique – we want to hear from everyone. The survey is one of the best ways we have to voice our opinions honestly and openly with the goal of improving our own work lives and the organisation overall.