The fake pirate flag flown by some weekend boaters is an apt motto for what has become of many employee engagement surveys.
“The beatings will continue,” it says, “until morale improves.”
The disparagement of poorly managed employees continues unabated, despite the fact that the problem has been well publicized (and well mocked) and the pressure to inflate scores is an open secret in the worst offending firms. This malpractice, which threatens the whole concept of employee engagement, should have ended by now.
The latest offender is Sean Graber, CEO of a firm called Virtuali, writing last week on the Harvard Business Review’s site. Of his “9 Employee Engagement Archetypes,” seven are personal insults. Fail to be perfectly chipper on his tests of morale and motivation and he will brand you variously a “brat,” “under-achiever,” “delinquent,” “drifter,” “saboteur,” “cynic,” or “martyr.”
Graber is fertilizing a heavily seeded furrow. Gallup has long claimed those who do not answer correctly to its 12 questions, including the problematic “best friend at work” item, either “show up and kill time with little or no concern” for the company or, if they answer even lower, “are more or less out to damage their company.” BlessingWhite insults the employees who fail its test as “hamsters,” “honeymooners,” or “crash & burners.” Globoforce compares "disengaged" employees to traitors Brutus and Benedict Arnold. Modern Survey tags some employees “prisoners” who “are comfortable bleeding your organization dry while making other employees do the heavy lifting.”
Assume a hard worker joins a company and – as sometimes happens – finds her manager is neglectful, recognition is rare, leaders use fear as a management tool, and the phrase “work-life integration” is used to dodge the issue of work/life balance. Then the annual employee survey comes around and she’s urged to be truthful. Should she tell the truth? Would she if she saw the taxonomies described above? Would you? The logical response is to go all North Korean.
The CEO is inspired. We work for the best company on the planet. The future is bright. It is an honor to work 60 hours a week for this enterprise. Just being here is recognition enough.
This becomes the employee’s official response until she resigns. Better to paste on a smile during the survey than be tagged among the “hamsters . . . hiding out, curled up in their cedar shavings.” Most people do not like being compared to rodents.
“Here’s the thing for HR managers everywhere. We all lie on those surveys,” Kai Ryssdal, host of the public radio show Marketplace, observed a few years ago.
“Exactly,” said Freakonomics coauthor Stephen J. Dubner, “we lie on most surveys, but especially [to the question], ‘How happy are you? And I’m the person who pays you and I need you to tell me how happy you are.’”
Ryssdal and Dubner overstated the problem. A large proportion of employees still answer candidly to employee surveys, particularly at organizations where speaking forthrightly is considered an act of loyalty rather than “delinquency” or “sabotage.” But when it’s clear that candor will cost them, many employees will give made-to-order responses.
The mud-slinging on so-called “disengaged” employees creates three problems. First, it’s a serious misreading of the research. Most employees are responsible and professional, even when stuck in a bad job. Second, it forces underground any real issues the company hoped to identify with the survey. The firms might as well not survey at all. And third, it argues to the executives a perception of employee acrimony that simply does not exist in most firms.
Earlier this year, I spoke confidentially to an employee of a company that had won one of those “best places to work” awards many years in a row for being a large client of . . . er, I mean . . . for getting high scores on a traditional consultancy’s survey. He was itching to get out.
His first experience with the survey went relatively well. “The managers were awesome. Morale was great,” he said. “We had quite a few employees take the survey. There were about 50 people in the room. HR comes in. All the employees come in.” And they review the results. “There was some conversation about, ‘I have an idea who wrote that.’” But it seemed the results were confidential and no one was being targeted for his or her responses.
The next time around, the pressure was on. Managers suddenly seemed to get unusually helpful. “Hey, the survey must be coming out,” the employee realized. Sensing trouble, he juiced his answers a little, but not all the way.
This time there were only 12 to 15 people in the room for the discussion of the results. “I thought the results were confidential, but HR was there and management was in there and it was very clear who wrote what and why,” he said. “Managers were being graded on the results of the survey. They started asking ‘Why did you say that?’”
“Everything felt right when you were taking the survey – ‘Hey, this makes sense.’ But when the results came in, you were defending your answers.” Eventually, the pressure to give suitably positive responses changed from subtle to explicit. When one manager suspected a salesperson of scoring the job too low, he threatened, “Let’s see how you like it now if you lose this account.”
“It was intense,” said the employee. Now he knows to – as one admin poetically put it – “Mark 5 to survive.”
The veteran worker saw a new colleague about to make a potentially job-threatening mistake and warned him before the survey. “It was his first job out of school. He was innocent, not up to date on how things work. I told him, ‘You can’t have an opinion.’ They want all 5s.”
And they got enough of them. The company won the workplace award again in 2015.
If the beatings continue long enough, morale will improve.
Or at least it will on paper.
(Full disclosure: The author ocassionally competes against some of the firms mentioned in this column.)
