Something I’ve Been Meaning to Speak to You About…

[Cartoon courtesy of Grantland Cartoons]

Employee surveys often remind me of one friend asking another if she’s fat. Is the kind (and smart) thing to do ’fessing up that her friend looks like she’s been working as a taste tester for a fast food restaurant for the last six months?  Or is it better to tell her she looks fine and nothing is wrong?  When a company asks you for your “true” and “honest” reflections on working for it, do you think they (or should I use the de-humanizing “it?”) expect you to tell the truth?  More importantly, what do the employees you’re rolling out the survey to think your company wants to hear?

I believe I’ve mentioned before on this blog that I once went overboard with employee survey truth telling, informing one of my previous employers that their pay scale and compensation strategy reminded me of how workers were treated in the “The Grapes of Wrath.”  Did I go too far?  Did I indulge too much in melodrama?

How would your company’s executives receive such a comment?  I wondered after submitting my survey responses, which I was assured would be kept anonymous, how my feedback would resonate, or, indeed, if it would resonate at all. Insulting (and horrifying to book lovers) as it is, I even wondered whether those reading the survey results knew the story of “The Grapes of Wrath.”

The way your company responds, or doesn’t bother responding, to employee surveys, and especially individual comments, says more than the feedback they receive. By “responding” I, of course, don’t mean talking individually to an employee about his/her comments, as doing so would violate the anonymity promise any reliable survey should offer.  I mean, instead, the action executives plan to take when they receive feedback such as my “Grapes of Wrath” reflection. If they can’t take action to correct the perception, if not the actual problem, what have they said to the company’s human resources and management team in regard to the comment? Surely, such sour feelings from an employee deserve some thought, don’t you think?

In case you’re wondering, I did not get fired for my bold observation. As expressive as I was regarding my feelings about the company’s approach to compensation, I was much more reticent about what I thought of my supervisor and boss.  As my supervisor at the time was a sociopath (not sure if I’m using the proper psychological designation; poetic license), who misrepresented me to our boss, and took joy making the lives of those under her miserable, my hesitancy to be honest in this area was unfortunate.  What if I could have told (and maybe even proven) the horror that was my work group’s supervisor?  I imagine the products my old work group delivered, and the state of our work lives, would have improved immeasurably. While I trusted the anonymity clause to protect me from retribution from the company’s executives and salary decision-makers, I couldn’t chance it with my supervisor. She only had five of us working under her, so if the HR department called her in to discuss her status as a sociopath, it wouldn’t take her (and our boss, whom she had tricked into thinking she was a nice person) long to figure out who said she was busy boiling workforce bunnies.

Boiling workforce bunnies aside, companies often overlook the most important and frequent employee survey of all—the exit interview. You can argue exit interviews can’t be taken too much to heart because the sample of respondents is skewed. Few leaving a company had a good experience. How many, after all, are ambitious enough to leave a good deal?  I also wimped out in my exit interview because, as much as I hope I’ll never have to use my former supervisor and/or boss as a reference, I just may have to some day. What if the supervisor I was fleeing found out I told HR she’s likely a sociopath with a compulsive lying problem?  Do you think that would lessen my chances of having her point out my industriousness and competence to future employers? 

In my exit interview, the HR rep was perceptive enough to see I was holding back feelings, and so diplomatically prodded me to agree my supervisor and boss weren’t the best communicators with their staff members. What kind of training does your company give HR personnel in reading the findings of exit interviews and other employee surveys?  Just as importantly, what preparation do you give them in interpreting the results for managers and executives? Along with reading the results to those with the power to make changes, HR and trainers should work with managers and executives to talk out possible improvements based on the feedback. Since those improvements likely will involve learning and development, trainers should be made part of the process.

Do your employees feel at liberty to tell you the company’s executives are loathed, their supervisor is brutal, and their chances of staying longer than the next viable job opening are slim to none?   Will they tell you the truth about how you look from behind?

How honest do you think the feedback is that you receive from employee surveys?  Can your managers and executives handle the truth?

Comments

[slim fast]

it's just sometimes truth really hurts, but if you/they will accept it wholeheartedly, it is for your/their own good also.

[Belstaff Jackets]

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[Blow Up Doll]

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[Canada Goose UK]

I think she just wants to be the Asian Ann Coulter.