[NAHWheatCracker]

At the last place I worked I assiduously filled out those surveys. Twice a year the executives would do an all hands meeting and talk about the result of the recent survey. They would make a big deal out of all the changes they were making.

After a few cycles, I noticed that the top problems from the surveys always stayed the same. Then I noticed that the changes they were claiming to make were either half-hearted or were gross misinterpretations of survey results to push their own agendas. Of course the survey results stayed the same, nothing was done to address the problems.

After I noticed this, I still filled out the survey, if only because they would track me down and tell me the complete the survey (wait, I thought this was anonymous...). One year I answered 5/5 on every question. The next year I answered 0/5 on every question. The next year I quit.

[stego-tech]

This employer had similar surveys, and the results plummeted after a huge RIF and never really recovered. I was asked to join focus groups for more detailed feedback, and as soon as we gave it, they silently dismantled said groups rather than update us on how the powers that be would be acting on that feedback. All-hands meetings where questions about RTO, attendance policies, and flexible working arrangements were regularly diverted and ignored. That doesn’t even get into the technical concerns I was also fielding as an Engineer, these were areas solely focused on trying to contribute a sense of objective direction to the company like the executives repeatedly bragged about inviting us to do, to “be different” than other businesses.

No business is different than the others, not really. Absent accountability, the executives will always act in their own self-interest; since their compensation is mostly stock, that means they will sacrifice the future of tomorrow for the stock bump of today, every single time.

[Spooky23]

My favorite was an employer that did a massive “transformation” project. They brought in McKinsey to figure it out afterwards. It was probably the only McKinsey encounter I’ve had that seemed productive - the team was both interested and capable.

The most amazing was a pretty detailed and well conducted survey over a two year period. It showed that satisfaction was inversely proportional to both rank and tenure, and the decline started at 6 months. So an executive or senior IC would be immediately dissatisfied. A lower level employee or supervisor would start very happy, but the luster would wear down after about 4 months lol. Long tenured employees grew increasingly dissatisfied until their personal liquidity event.

They fucked up and broke out the data in a way that demonstrated that the division leads were dissatisfied to the point that it was affecting their health. No more public data presentation from that point forward.

[sudoshred]

This sounds like a canonical example of the reason to hire a consulting firm.

[WalterBright]

> the executives will always act in their own self-interest;

Yes, and so does everyone else, including me, including you.

> since their compensation is mostly stock, that means they will sacrifice the future of tomorrow for the stock bump of today, every single time.

When investors discover that a company is eating its seed corn for short term gain, the stock crashes.

[Clubber]

>Yes, and so does everyone else, including me, including you.

Not sure why you are being downvoted. I see lots of people who are acting in their self interest by wanting to remain remote.

>When investors discover that a company is eating its seed corn for short term gain, the stock crashes.

Maybe. Companies have been eating their seed corn with offshoring for quite a while now. M&A and cornering the market is a good antidote for such things. People still use Google and Windows and those products are horrible now.

For people who are being forced to RTO, put in your notice if you can, or at least look for another job. It's going to be a tight market for a few quarters at least.

[WalterBright]

If you're better than the market at predicting sacrificing the long term for the short term, you can make a lot of money by shorting those stocks.

Me, I tried shorting, and got my adze handed to me. I'm not smart enough to be successful at that, and so just stick with long positions.

[avidiax]

The trouble with shorting is that unlike a long position, where you can just buy and hold until your thesis is proven, you have to time your short position perfectly.

[unclebucknasty]

>Not sure why you are being downvoted

Not a downvoter, but I suspect it's because we all know that people have a tendency to act in their own best interest.

But, we also expect leaders to consider the best interests of their charges, as a function of good leadership.

[Clubber]

>But, we also expect leaders to consider the best interests of their charges, as a function of good leadership.

I see. It would be nice, but leadership like that are few and far between, and they probably get it beaten out of them. I don't think that's even taught at MBA school. When I started all this, someone told me, "they show appreciation through your paycheck." Not very satisfying, but there it is. If you're productive, they certainly miss you when you are gone.

[WalterBright]

Good leadership is in the leader's best interest. Having a capable, happy and motivated workforce is also in the leader's best interest.

[codr7]

Obvious in theory, but have you ever met one of those leaders?

[emeril]

My personal favorite tidbit about a company which gave surveys years ago was that they claimed they were anonymous but when I was late to submit mine one year, the CFO called me and asked me to do my survey since it was late...

[try_the_bass]

It's entirely possible the survey is anonymous, but they can still see who hasn't responded. Depending on the survey software, these aren't exactly mutually-exclusive things?

[rrrx3]

I'll take a whack at this since I have some relative experience from playing at a functional exec in my last role

we used Lattice in an organization of ~150 people. We had roughly 10 leaders (exec and non-exec), responsible for various functions. The most any one leader had in their reporting tree was ~40 (one of the Eng leaders)

For Lattice, at least from what I was exposed to, the surveys ARE anonymous. They know who has and hasn't submitted a survey because everyone gets a personalized link, but that is not aggregated up into some dashboard where UUIDs are mapped back to respondents. It's something like "Bill in finance has 4 directs, and 2 of those haven't pressed submit on their unique survey." But as you can figure, that does not matter AT ALL. Anyone with a modicum of attention can figure out who wrote what when you have a reporting tree that small. You will see the responses broken out by leader, by function (say, Sales for example), and then division, whole company. The only people who had access to all the results AFAIK were the CEO, the head of IT, and HR.

In short, it's anonymity theater if your leadership has any inkling of how you communicate. I knew exactly who wrote what from my teams, and so did my leadership peers.

[try_the_bass]

> In short, it's anonymity theater if your leadership has any inkling of how you communicate. I knew exactly who wrote what from my teams, and so did my leadership peers.

You might be able to identify your direct reports based on communication style alone, but I don't really find it believable that this is a property that naturally transfers to your leadership, and from them up the chain to executives.

If that is true, then the "anonymity theater" only really extends to direct leadership, and not much further. This means that you, as a leader, would have to be complicit in any attempts to deanonymize any specific respondents.

So to rephrase: your ability to deanonymize your direct reports' responses does not extrapolate to the entire exercise being "anonymity theater", because your ability to deanonymize any given respondent only extends as far as your direct reports and maybe a free others. This becomes increasingly less true the larger the set of total employees surveyed.

[avidiax]

> You might be able to identify your direct reports based on communication style alone, but I don't really find it believable that this is a property that naturally transfers to your leadership, and from them up the chain to executives.

And when your leadership says that we should help whoever "isn't a good fit" to exit the company, will you use your knowledge of who wrote what to make the right choice of who to fire?

[try_the_bass]

I mean, why wouldn't I? It would be an important part of my job to find a competent set of individuals who are aligned with the company's overall goals and direction. A competent individual who is misaligned is often more damaging to a team than an incompetent aligned individual. The same is true of the individual's satisfaction with their work (i.e. `s/aligned/satisfied/g` in the above).

So my decision would necessarily require considering all of these factors: competence, satisfaction, and alignment. If their answers to an employee satisfaction survey tell me they're dissatisfied, and I can't or won't do what it takes to make them satisfied, I would be doing us both a disservice by not helping them exit the company.

At the end of the day, a company is a group of people dedicated towards some common goal. Everyone may have a different picture of how to get to that goal, but everyone should be trying to push things in the same general direction. Someone who is obviously pushing in the wrong direction or causing unnecessary friction should either be convinced to align more with the rest, convince others to push in the alternate direction, or asked to leave.

Now obviously companies should be encouraged to follow social norms in some respects, to make it clear that certain ways that they act are not tolerated by the society they exist within. However, this is still an inherently social problem, and requires social solutions.

If you feel like you're the odd one out, and that the majority of people in the company--or maybe just "the leadership"--are wrong, consider that at the end of the day, the reason usually comes down to "other people don't think like you". There are two things you can do about this:

1) change other people's minds. You generally can't do this by actively fighting against them, so you should at least make it clear you align with them in some way that matters to the company, first. 2) you can find a different group of people to work with, people who think more like you.

Consider that if the second option doesn't exist, you always have the option of doing it yourself.

[addaon]

> It's entirely possible the survey is anonymous, but they can still see who hasn't responded.

Sure —- but then you know the exact answers of the last person to respond; it’s just the delta between the results before they responded and after, and you know who they are. So they’re fully de-anonymized. And of course that means you can de-anonymize the second-to-last respondent… and so on.

[try_the_bass]

Cool, so it could be exploited by someone who makes a hard effort to exploit it (polling the answers and comparing them to the non-respondents, I guess?).

How many of these "executives" or "HR people" who contract these kinds of surveys actually have the a) time, b) interest, or c) acuity to perform this kind of exploit? Not many that I could think of.

The bar for exploiting this is high for non-technical people, and I don't think it's rational to conclude that it would be exploited in the majority of cases, much less a significant minority. I think the default usage of surveys like this is approximately: 1) come up with some questions, 2) put these into some survey software, 3) put in the employee email list, 4) blast everyone with a link and a deadline, then 5) check back in on the results when the deadline is near.

Ain't nobody got time to watch every result come in and do some computation to figure out everyone's exact answers. If that's what they were really after, they'd probably just remove the option to respond anonymously. There are far easier ways to achieve the same end than by some circuitous exploit, right?

[HeavyStorm]

Vote in my country is mandatory. If I don't vote, I lose lots of rights and need to pay a fine(very cheap, token value).

Are elections rigged?

[Clubber]

He didn't say they were rigged, he just said they were not anonymous as was claimed.

Also, voting records in the US indicate whether you voted or not, but not who you voted for; that part is anonymous. Perhaps his company was similar.

[codr7]

Does it make any difference in practice who wins?

Or is it the same money pulling the strings of whoever takes the seat?

The illusion of choice is a very effective method for controlling people.

[madcaptenor]

My employer has just started not releasing the results of the survey.

[scott_w]

To be clear: the results are anonymised. The only thing that the people chasing you have direct access to is whether you filled in the survey or not.