Is anyone else tired of “employee engagement”?
I am so sick of employee engagement surveys and the resulting exercise in futility around soliciting changes that never get made. It’s honestly one of the more evil and deceitful processes that capitalism and academia have ever teamed up to create.
I always get super triggered at the "Do you have a best friend at work?" question that my old organization used to roll out during engagement planning. No, you motherfuckers, I already have a best friend. They don't happen to work here.
So I answer no every single time. And then in the interview afterward they go on about how "well, it's not LITERALLY if your best friend works here. The survey just asks the question like that because blah blah blah...". Trying to over examine what it means to "have a best friend at work". To interpret that question in some other way to maybe get me to answer yes next year.
I don't care what the intent behind the question is, they will never convince me to not answer "no", unless my best friend happens to join our team. I feel like they're trying to gaslight me into feeling more connected to the team or some bullshit. Drives me up the fucking wall.
You're doing the right thing. They're just trying to juice their own numbers by pressuring you to say something effusive.
I went HAM on my most recent one. They’re anonymous but I’m sure my direct manager can tell my writing style. But the place I work for has been in refusing to do any hiring including backfills so now I’m a team of 1 doing what 7 people used to do and I let them know I’m not pleased.
They're anonymous ...
No they are not.
Just FYI, they’re not really anonymous. These surveys get reported back to each individual manager with the responses, ratings given, and counts of staff completed; so it is very easy for managers to discern who wrote what.
I figure they aren’t. I didn’t curse or name anyone by name, I just made it pretty clear that the understaffing is job performance at a pretty severe level and that the workload has everyone miserable
Ah yes, the old “lazy, entitled” employee doing the work that was formerly performed by an entire team. I know them well.
I just got invited to a staff BBQ at the manager's house. It's at 5PM. On Friday. I just spent 50 hours this week with you guys! Wasn't that enough?
True employee engagement is Unionization.
Effective, sure. But, if a company is truly engaging, listening, adapting to the employees needs and feedback, unions would be a lot less needed or effective. When companies are exploiting workers, lowering wages and benefits, causing more problems and not listening to employees, unions can really make a huge difference. If the people are looking to unionize, the company is failing and the workers aren't being listened to and they want change to happen.
Unions can do a lot of good. I'm very pro-union. But, people don't go looking to unionize if things are going great and the company is really listening and adapting to employee concerns.
True employee engagement is Unionization.
How does adding extra electrons help with employee engagement? /s
For three years now, I've put in real low scores and real critical comments on these things, and literally everyone I know at work says they've done the same (we are all so stressed) but then next quarter comes along and the execs share the survey results and wouldn't you know it, engagement is great, the best it's ever been, no problems here!
Amazing how that happens.
But it makes me feel so empowered and involved in change. Maybe we can find the budget to have a pizza party for the team who made the company millions. Probably not though. Money is tight right now.
Unfortunately, the pizza budget line item was deleted and there’s nothing we can do about it.
Don't worry. I bet the boss will perform miracles to get some money for a pizza party and make sure we know it was a miracle.
Every year, we have to fill out a blank "what changes would you make" section, and every year, me and rhe maintenance crew (100+ people strong) put in "4 day work week". Thats all we want. It provides a better work life balance, and we are efficient enough to get it done. But year after year, crickets.
All the office schmos get working from home, "relaxation rooms" at the office, ergonimic furniture, blah blah blah, while us maintenance slobs (who had to keep working in the field through the pandemic) get sweet dick all.
Its frustrating because its not like I want to take away those benefits from the office workers, but it seems things get cushier and cushier for them while our jobs stay the same amount of shitty.
All this make-believe "we listen to our employees" crap came to be around the mid 90s when MBAs started getting common in company management.
It's also when employees started being described as "human resources" and making your whole career in just the one company stopped being a thing (at least in Europe).
I was actually starting my career in Tech when this stuff started taking of in the Industry :/
We have surveys at my job 2-4 times a year, where we answer how we feel the company is doing in various aspects on a scale of 1-5.
Last year, they went over the results, focused on the lowest scores, and had our supervisors talk to their teams to have us make "action plans," to address the issues. In retrospect, I think it was my region's way to get us to score them higher on the surveys by giving us negative busy work if we scored them too low. But it backfired; we all said, nah, these are your issues, you action plan to fix them.
The whole thing is just ridiculous. Nothing important ever changes from this feedback.
I put "pay us more money" in every comment box I can. It hasn't worked yet, weirdly... It's just a tool so upper management can jerk themselves off to anything good they can find, justifying their continued repression of the workers. They can point to one comment going "I love it here!" and then say any bad comment must be a bad employee.
Apart from the inaction, these surveys are not really anonymous and each response gets reported back down individual managers with the response, ratings given, and count of their direct staff that have completed it.
Unfortunately, in my years as lead, I’ve seen this used more for managers to get a pat on the head or for managers to push people out, rather than implement any actual change.
I just tell them my opinions on business matters aren't free.