[hutzlibu]

It also sounds a bit like real life parody to me. How to find out employee morale?

Well, you need to hire some statistical experts, who model everything and than give you an estimate and if they got the callibration right, the result might be even close to reality.

Definitely easier than the other solution. Like talk to your employees once in a while and have a culture where they are not afraid to speak up if something is bothering them.

Ah no, too complicated. Back to math. That works better when dealing with those irrational emotional humans.

[eyegor]

Unfortunately this only works with a small set of workers, in a physical location. If you have 500+ employees, some remote, spanning different countries/cultures, it's not easy to tell how "company morale" is. You can try to send out anonymous surveys and such, but then you run into reporting bias, etc. It's a complicated problem at scale.

[grumpy8]

What about both though? Or something similar but different, what is better between talking to users or looking at data points? What about both?

[rramadass]

True somewhat. That is what bothered me with this book. While the importance of Statistical Models is undeniable, i am not sure whether they are applicable everywhere. Nature has endowed us with certain heuristic decision making models (see the works of Gary Klein on RPDM) and many a time one can decide based on "gut feelings" (see the works of Gerd Gigerenzer).

[acomjean]

I worked at a clueless large company, but even they knew morale was bad, thus me being placed on the morale comititee. Our one meeting we decided it was difficult to improve morale, but after some discussion we did end up with an ice cream social..

[mindcrime]

The morale thing was just an example to help illustrate the principle...

[hutzlibu]

I know. And my point was, that you can take the statistic too far, especially when dealing with humans. And this is happening in my opinion since a while. Even Stalin said: "the death of one man is a tragedy, but the death of millions just statistic." And by his actions, they were just statistic to him.

Humans are more than a number ... but when you are at a desk remote and only have numbers, than you are disconnected and it is much easier to make inhuman decisions as you are dealing with numbers and not humans anymore.

So that being said, yes, having the numbers additional that signal a decline in morale for example, is probably not a bad thing to have. If this does not replace actual human contact, because human moral also drops, when they not feel treated as humans anymore and just as numbers.

[mindcrime]

So that being said, yes, having the numbers additional that signal a decline in morale for example, is probably not a bad thing to have. If this does not replace actual human contact, because human moral also drops, when they not feel treated as humans anymore and just as numbers.

Agreed. And this is true of every tool... it has a place, and when used properly it can be of benefit. But it can also be misused in a way that is harmful or destructive.