Confidentiality

Absolutely.  One of the benefits of an outside agency like People Insight administering the survey is that all your answers go to them. 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 staff survey according to strict confidentiality policies and takes this very seriously. 

Results are presented back to Imperial in the form of percentage of favourable, neutral, negative responses per question, e.g. 59% of people agreed or strongly agreed to a statement. Results are never linked back to an individual. We use the CID number only as an alternative to a unique email address to track response rates and link organisational data to the response, this is so that results can then be cut by Faculty, Department etc.  As a further measure to protect respondent anonymity People Insight apply a threshold of 10 as a minimum for results to be shared, e.g. if less than 10 responses are submitted for a department no data will be available.

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 Imperial and whether we need to take action on a university-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. 

No. As the survey is being hosted by People Insight on their web server no one at Imperial 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.

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 Imperial. 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.

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

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. 

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.