You have three main options with these: - Participate, express positive sentiment - Participate, express negative sentiment - Don’t participate The latter two are political non-starters. You get constantly bothered to complete it, until you do. Giving negative feedback reflects poorly on you, even if they say it’s anonymous. (Who wants to promote someone who has some criticism about the company strategy/vision?) You have to complete the survey with 10/10s across the board. Do executives understand this? It isn’t an honest measure of what employees actually think. Politics 101 of the office is never expressing negative sentiment about anything.
You don't gain anything by participating ..unless you are idealistic - maybe then you get some endorphins.
I share criticism in our anonymous survey (and based on the review of the results, other people did too). I didn’t see any negative outcome from filling out the surveys honestly and the company has also started trying to improve or address the items with the lowest scores
Depends on the context of the criticism. If it’s mild, e.g., “we need more coffee in the break room” that’s a pretty neutral statement that management wouldn’t really mind you saying. I think if you begin to move outside the mild, then it’s tricky. E.g., company asks “how can we move faster?” And you answer with “a flatter organization structure” it probably doesn’t have great optics.
Yup, it's a catch 22. People will feel comfortable answering truthfully mostly on the things they'd be comfortable saying openly. I usually have found that people simply don't believe the surveys are anonymous, and the result of that is predictable. I think they might give a company overall trends of what way sentiment is heading, but it would take some actual investigation and trust building to get the uncomfortable conversations to come to light.
Saw this at a tech all hands (live survey during the presentation). Had a bunch of comedians who just trolled and the VP was visibly flustered. He walked off the stage after the presentation with no Q&A 😬 (not at Amazon tho)
Note to self: never present a poll with a free text word cloud and allow employees to put whatever they want.
Constructive criticism to improve culture. I don’t expect company wide surveys to solve problems about operations. Surveys can give leaders/management tools to engage team and listen. Now how survey results are handled oh my.
Nothing is anonymous.
Its actually supposed to remain anonymous and each org would hve to do their best to retain talent. But they should first know whats bothering the employees. As a matter of fact, i have always filled those surveys truthfully.
Every company is a bit different. Intuit seems to be deprioritizing talent retention.