Your privacy is of the utmost importance to us.
Over the years, we have spoken to many of our fellow public sector employees to listen and learn about how to improve and protect your personal data.
This includes how we report on what we collect in the survey to you and your organisation.
Through this process, we’ve also heard from many of you about privacy concerns you still have.
We want you to feel confident when doing the survey. So we’ve put together a list of facts and myths to clear up any confusion.
You can download a copy:
We only send your free text comments to the head of your organisation or someone they delegate to. Even then, it would be very difficult to identify you.
That’s because we group all the comments into one big file that is separated from all other survey responses.
We never provide the comments with any other survey data, so there is no way to cross-reference free-text comments with any other data.
But we can’t do it all - you can help us maintain your anonymity when you fill out the survey:
We ask you demographic questions to understand more about what the public sector workforce looks like at each organisation – not to identify you as an individual.
It’s nearly impossible for us to know who you are because we:
So, even if you're completely honest on the demographic questions, we will protect your privacy and your identity remains hidden.
You can select ‘Prefer not to say’ if you’re not comfortable providing demographic information. How you fill out the survey is completely up to you. It’s your data and your right to tell your organisation what you want.
But there are benefits to you in providing this information.
We regularly report back to the Victorian Secretaries Board and employers about the experiences of different groups within the VPS and public sector workforce.
This includes highlighting where some groups have poorer experiences of the workforce and that work is required to make the workplace more inclusive.
This also helps government develop workforce inclusion actions for people like you that work in the public sector such as Getting to work, Barring Djinang or Pride is our future.
The data also:
We do a few things to stop individual responses from being traced to you.
We send everyone in your organisation the same survey link. This link doesn’t have any personal information or data attached to it that makes it unique to your survey.
We also don’t collect your name, date of birth or employee ID. So there’s nothing to identify you against your responses.
On top of this, we never provide responses in a ‘raw’ format where each individual response is listed line by line.
Your organisation only gets aggregated data – or put another way, they only get the data grouped together in their reports.
Lastly, to make it near impossible to link data back to you, we:
If you work in a small team or organisation, we’ve designed our privacy rules with you in mind.
To stop you being identified, we refuse to give your organisation:
To find out more about how we protect your anonymity and privacy, read our People matter survey data collection statement.