HR accidentally sends entire company the results of employees' engagement survey, leading all employees to read through the unfiltered feedback: ‘There were very pointed remarks about management’

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Bar Mor Hazut • Senior Editor
Jun 10, 2026 10:30 AM EDT

On which occasions is it okay to leave a genuinely honest review?

You might think that if someone asks you for your feedback on something, they expect you to be honest with the review you give back. And in most cases, that is the truth. When you leave a Google or Yelp review on a business, or share your ratings for a product you used, you want to be as honest and true as possible. Not just so that others will learn from your experience, but so that those who can improve from the review can actually do so.

However, one scenario in which your honest review can be used against you is in your workplace, and stories like the one below might make you think twice before you honestly tell your employer what you think about their business.

There are plenty of opportunities for an employee to tell their employers what they think they could do to improve. Whether it is during a personal meeting, a yearly review, or through one of those engagement surveys HR likes to send out, while promising the results are completely anonymous. And for a moment there, it might be tempting to use one of these opportunities to give your workplace some helpful criticism that might help them improve.

Before you do that, just know that these things can and will be used against you.

Whether that's the case for the employees below remains to be seen. All they know is that they filled out the anonymous survey as honestly as possible, then discovered that HR accidentally sent a company-wide email with everyone's unfilted replies to the same survey. It wasn't long before everyone in the company got to read what each one of them had to say about management and leadership, something that was supposed to stay completely private… It didn't take much to figure out which employee said what about whom, and it wasn't exactly pretty.

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