Your Privacy Matters To Us.

Who We Are

Your organization has partnered with our team at YMCA WorkWell to collect employee feedback and help your leaders take clear steps towards a healthy workplace that is committed to employee well-being. We are a team of approachable experts with Ph.Ds in organizational psychology and with over a decade of experience in workplace well-being – collecting data, generating insights, and helping organizations translate those insights into action.

Integrity is a core part of who we are at YMCA WorkWell and it is imperative to us that you feel comfortable with the survey process, your privacy, and how your responses will be used. You are why we are here, after all.

Our Approach

 We take privacy seriously.

We firmly believe that the entire Insights process falls apart if you do not trust the process and how your insights will be used. Your privacy is paramount and our first priority in any survey we will ever run. That also means that your data will never be sold to third parties.

 We are always one message away.

You can email our team at workwell@ytr.ymca.ca at any time and that message will be confidentially read by our Insights team. Any requests to correct or delete your responses will be addressed as quickly as possible and will be kept completely confidential from your employer. 

 We follow the latest privacy policies and protocols.

All of our data practices meet federal Tri-Council Policy standards - a joint policy of Canada’s three federal research agencies for the ethical conduct of collecting data about people. If those standards ever change, our practices do too. 

 We handle your data with care.

Data security matters. All of our data is stored in Canada with end-to-end encryption. Our survey tool Alchemer is GDPR, HIPAA, and ISO 27001 compliant, which are fancy words for "very secure".

How We Use Your Data

Let's start from the top: YMCA WorkWell maintains ownership of all raw and aggregate data we collect from survey responses. Our clients (your employer) will never receive raw data in any form, only reports on data that has been fully aggregated and anonymized. This means that your employer will never see any of your scores or your comments attached to any potentially identifying information such as your team, tenure, or position. We do not collect your name or contact information at any point in the survey, on purpose.

We know that anonymity can feel especially concerning in a small team. We deal with this in a couple of ways. First, the reports your organization will receive only ever report on anonymous, group-level trends. What this means is that we will never report on groups with less than five survey responses.

For example, if you work in a Finance team of four people, your responses will be included in the organization’s total scores, but your organization will not receive scores linked directly to your Finance team. Ever. And this threshold is based on the number of responses, not the number of members in your team. So even if you work in a Finance team of eight people, but only four people respond to the survey, your organization will not receive Finance-level results.

Second, and perhaps most importantly, we do not combine group trends. For example, assuming there are five or more responses, we might report on scores of all managers in the organization and all employees in the Human Resources team. However, we do not report specifically on managers on the Human Resources team. Protecting this anonymity is integral to this process and we have made your organization aware of these policies and why they are important.

Your organization may choose to purchase team-level reports that provide insight into a specific department or team. In order to receive a team-level report, our minimum reporting threshold is doubled to ten responses to enhance and maintain employee anonymity.

Information We Collect About You

 Demographics collected via the survey

Our most common method for running a survey is to provide your organization with a single, anonymous survey link that can be shared internally. We may ask you to provide some demographic data via the survey itself.  For example, you may be asked for you role, department, work location, and length of service. You are able to skip any question any time, and if you don't want to provide us with an answer, you don't have to. And as mentioned, we will only report on one of the categories at a time to protect your anonymity, and we will only report on groups of five or more responses.

 Demographics provided by your organization

This is only applicable if your organization has opted for us to invite you to participate in a survey through email. If so, your employer has provided us with your email address along with standard demographics that may include your role, department, work location, and length of service. This allows us to aggregate your response into different reporting groups based on the data. We will only report on one of the categories at a time to protect your anonymity, and we will only report on groups with five or more responses.

If this is the case, the e-mail file is stored separately from the survey responses. In our process to aggregate and anonymize the data, our algorithm automatically merges the two files and immediately strips the e-mail addresses from the merged dataset. This means that not even our team would ever see a dataset including both your responses and your email address attached to it. 

 Your Survey Responses

Naturally, we will also collect the responses that you provide throughout the survey. The survey will collect your responses by asking you to respond to a variety of statements and questions via a mix of sliding scales, multiple choice questions and open text boxes for comments. Again, you are able to skip any question any time, and if you don't want to provide us with an answer, you don't have to.

The People Handling Your Data

We think it helps to put a face and a name to this process. This is our team of PhDs that will be carefully handling your data and creating your reports - and are the only people who ever have access to our raw data. If you ever want to learn more, please message us at workwell@ytr.ymca.ca and we will answer any questions you may have as quickly as possible. Thank you for the trust, we can't support positive change in your organization without it.