should I address the feedback from an anonymous survey?

This post was written by Alison Green and published on Ask a Manager.

A reader writes:

My company did an employee survey. It really was anonymous (no names and anything that could be de-anonymizing was scrubbed from the results I can see) but my department is small enough that I have a good idea about who gave each rating, including who gave a tiny bit of negative feedback about me. I absolutely don’t want to be that manager who is like “Who did it?! You’re wrong!” but I did want to talk to that person as they were neutral on how much they felt they could disagree with me. It wasn’t even negative, just not the higher scores everyone else gave.

I’m not really sure I see any way to say “I disagree that you can’t disagree with me” because I fully understand how ridiculous that is. But I’ve always had pretty open, feedback-filled relationships with the members of my team and I just want to make sure everyone knows they really can bring things up to me and I’m always going to listen and consider. I won’t always agree, but we’ll always discuss it.

Is there a way I could bring this up? Or should I just let it go?

I answer this question — and three others — over at Inc. today, where I’m revisiting letters that have been buried in the archives here from years ago (and sometimes updating/expanding my answers to them). You can read it here.

Other questions I’m answering there today include:

• I don’t want coworkers to call my personal cell
• Non-reciprocal networkers
• Start date and losing a bonus at my current job