Satisfaction Employee Satisfaction Custom Research Small Bus. Business Research Lab Tip Confidentiality One of the most important rules of market research is to protect the confidentiality of respondents. When people have taken the time to respond to a survey, their answers must be held in the strictest confidence. The only exception to this would be if you included a blank space on the questionnaire for the respondent's name and contact information, with a note indicating that the respondent should only include his name if he desires someone at the client organization to contact him. Questionnaires should not be coded in any way which will enable the identity of the respondents to be uncovered.
Confidentiality is important in any survey, but is particularly important in an employee survey.
Employees must be protected against the possibility that their supervisors will be able to discover how individual employees have responded. This means that the data from the questionnaire must be entered by a neutral third party. Comments should be edited to remove any occurrences where employees have signed or otherwise indicated their identity in the survey. After the data has been entered and the comments have been transcribed, the original questionnaires should be destroyed to prevent unscrupulous employees from recognizing the handwriting contained in the questionnaires. The primary reason for maintaining confidentiality is an ethical one.