Engagement survey responses in 15Five are confidential — not anonymous. Responses are linked to employee accounts internally, but results are only displayed as aggregated group data that meets the minimum reporting threshold. No individual responses are ever surfaced to managers or leaders.
Important — Lifecycle Surveys are different. The confidentiality rules on this page apply only to engagement surveys. Lifecycle Surveys (including exit, onboarding, and other triggered surveys) do not use confidentiality thresholds. Individual responses to Lifecycle Surveys are visible to Account Admins and to managers with the "Manager visibility into team results" setting enabled. There is no minimum respondent requirement for Lifecycle Survey results to display. See Analyze Lifecycle Survey Results for details.
Direct Answer
15Five enforces confidentiality by aggregating responses and withholding results for any group that does not meet the minimum respondent threshold. Individual response data is never displayed.
Key Rules
- Participation is not disclosed. 15Five does not reveal which employees participated or declined. Admins can view group-level response rates during an active campaign, but not individual participation status.
- No individual responses are identified. No one in the organization can see how a specific person responded to any survey statement. Results are available only in aggregate, for groups that meet the minimum respondent threshold.
- Written feedback (open-text responses) is confidential. Written responses are presented in aggregate and can be filtered only by groups in the campaign's Feedback filter group type (for example, Department), which admins choose in the campaign settings. Admins can change the Feedback filter until the campaign ends. Hierarchy groups can't be used as the Feedback filter. Written responses for a group are displayed only if that group meets the minimum respondent threshold. Written responses also appear only if the campaign's total number of respondents meets the threshold. This applies even when the campaign has only open-text questions. For example, with a threshold of 5, a campaign with 3 respondents shows no written responses. If the whole campaign has fewer respondents than the threshold, no written responses are shown, even in a campaign with only open-text questions.
- Contact information is not shared or sold. Personal contact information is protected with industry-standard encryption and is not used beyond the platform.
- Hidden groups show group size, not responses. When results show groups as hidden due to confidentiality, the number next to each group is how many people are in that group, not how many responded. A group stays hidden until enough of its members respond to meet the threshold.
- Responses below the threshold are not discarded. If a respondent belongs to a group that does not meet the threshold, their responses are still included in the organization's overall Engagement Score and in results for any other groups they belong to that do meet the threshold.
- The default minimum threshold is 5 respondents. Engagement Admins and Organization Admins can lower this to 3 or 4 in Engagement feature settings. Lowering the threshold increases the risk of respondents being identified in small groups.
Common Misunderstanding
Confidential is not the same as anonymous. Responses are associated with employee accounts within 15Five for grouping and segmentation purposes. They are never exposed to managers, leaders, or other employees — but they are not unattributed within the system.