Why five is the right privacy floor
Anonymous surveys make a promise that is easy to break by accident. The answers are not stored with names, but a result for a team of three, filtered to people who joined this year, can point at one person as surely as a name would.
What the floor does
A privacy floor is the smallest group a result is shown for. In Polzy it is five by default. Below it, a score, a heatmap cell or a comment count is replaced by a dash, and the group is left out of exports.
Why five, not three or ten
At three, a manager who knows the team can usually work out who said what, especially in open comments. At ten, most teams in a mid-sized organisation disappear from the results altogether, and people stop answering because nothing they say seems to reach anyone. Five is the smallest number at which the combinations stop being guessable in practice, and the largest at which most teams remain visible.
Where it applies
The floor is not a setting on a report. It is applied in the query that computes every result: dashboards, heatmaps, filters, exports and the API. A filter that would narrow a group below five returns the dash, not the number — including a filter built from your own custom fields.
Administrators can change the floor for a workspace — up to fifty for a large organisation, or down to three for a very small one. Never lower: at two, one respondent can work out what the other said.
What it cannot do
A floor protects results, not the words inside a comment. If someone writes their name in an open answer, the comment still reads as written. That is why Polzy’s anonymous follow-up conversations exist: a manager can ask a question about an answer, and the person can reply without being identified.
Ready to hear from your people instead of guessing?
Free for your first 100 responses a month. Paid plans start with a free trial.