really exciting to start listening to this. i've been in several contexts where i've taken such surveys, and they are nonsense, if the goal is to relate meaning, in the sense of having functional operations value, rather than confound, bamboozle, and aggravate the employee. as a former low-level employee at target, i've taken a few of these, and there are like five layers of inaccuracy to the method. two main ones are 1) question structure which implies shallow understanding of what is even useful to ask 2) the huge amount of cynicism which exists (and is actively been generated by the corp) in this particular dynamic of employer to employee-- with all the explicit and subtle propaganda and social engineering in this work context, why would i think there *isn't* some sort of game being played? it's also useful to juxtapose this with the confusingly manipulative yet also absurdly nonsensical personality tests, which target and usps administer.
Mkay, get this: talk to your employees. (Now, obviously this only works if you ave a smaller organization but even in a big organization, spend an hour of your day in the warehouse chatting with the mail guys or whatever
I feel that you don't really engage with the larger context of these companies. Employees have very weak incentives to help the CEO determine objective company wide feelings and so even tiny perceived upsides to editing their survey answers are impactful. If a direct manager asks, which several of mine have, to give higher satisfaction scores regardless of the true feeling, then that might reduce the survey's usefulness. Ultimately there's no way out of the bind. Employees, and middle management, are individually about as smart as the CEO, and they probably have a lot more time on their hands. Once the measure is a target, those who are measured will figure out how to game it. They'll do the same to your tool. Not because it can't work, but because that's how the cards are dealt.
really exciting to start listening to this. i've been in several contexts where i've taken such surveys, and they are nonsense, if the goal is to relate meaning, in the sense of having functional operations value, rather than confound, bamboozle, and aggravate the employee. as a former low-level employee at target, i've taken a few of these, and there are like five layers of inaccuracy to the method. two main ones are 1) question structure which implies shallow understanding of what is even useful to ask 2) the huge amount of cynicism which exists (and is actively been generated by the corp) in this particular dynamic of employer to employee-- with all the explicit and subtle propaganda and social engineering in this work context, why would i think there *isn't* some sort of game being played? it's also useful to juxtapose this with the confusingly manipulative yet also absurdly nonsensical personality tests, which target and usps administer.
Mkay, get this: talk to your employees.
(Now, obviously this only works if you ave a smaller organization but even in a big organization, spend an hour of your day in the warehouse chatting with the mail guys or whatever
I feel that you don't really engage with the larger context of these companies. Employees have very weak incentives to help the CEO determine objective company wide feelings and so even tiny perceived upsides to editing their survey answers are impactful. If a direct manager asks, which several of mine have, to give higher satisfaction scores regardless of the true feeling, then that might reduce the survey's usefulness.
Ultimately there's no way out of the bind. Employees, and middle management, are individually about as smart as the CEO, and they probably have a lot more time on their hands. Once the measure is a target, those who are measured will figure out how to game it. They'll do the same to your tool. Not because it can't work, but because that's how the cards are dealt.