Corporate Feedback BS

Anyone else getting their annual feedback request? If you are not familiar, the corporatey thing to do is ask all employees for their open and honest feedback about how things are going and how the company is being run. Trust us they say, we really listen and adjust things based on your feedback and we value your input. Hugs, kisses, good feelings, heart emoji. 

But the truth is that anything you say can and will be held against you. If you point out their flaws, and how you cant get things done because of the ass-hattery of the place and lack of leadership and constant focus on the next article from some guru, they will counterattack and tell you that its all your fault and that you need a better attitude and stop making excuses and focusing on the can't and get on board with a can-do attitude, blah blah blah. They do not want to hear it, and they will use it against you. 

SO you tow the corporate line, everything is great, I love it here, you people are the best, smile emoji, thumbs up emoji. Then you try the next job and hope it is better. 

Every year. 
What kills me are the engagement parts of those surveys: Do you wake up in the morning raring to go and produce for the shareholders?!? Do you love your job? Do you put in maximum effort every day? ARE YOU GROWING YOUR SKILLS WITH YOUR OWN TIME AND MONEY?!?

I work for a paycheck. I do quality work commensurate with what they pay me, and live my life outside of the office. If they want unbridled enthusiasm and loyalty, they should probably get a dog.

I've been blatantly honest in these before and seen actual change. 2 weeks prior to the results being published, my manager suddenly had no one working for him. Huh. That was a good result. Another one I ripped the bereavement policy to shreds, and the next version of the Employee Handbook had the bereavement leave for the deaths of children or parents is now 10 days, increased from 3.

1988RedT2 said:

Welcome to work.

fixed

One of the many benefits of not caring too much about your job is the ability to be honest on those things.

It's also not a new issue, if there's anything new about it, it's companies going out of their way to solicit your feedback on an annual basis. But any time your employer asks for feedback or you feel the need to provide it, the risks are the same.

I'm close enough to retirement that I don't give a crap about saying anything other than what I am actually thinking. 
 

If somebody gets butt hurt, I ain't massaging it for them. 
 

It's kinda a nice place to be! 

i've learned two things through this process over the years, maybe 3:

1. always write your goal so you can exceed it.  does timing require delivering something on Jun 30?  write goal as "by COB Jun 30" and deliver on Jun 29.  Or, do you have a budget constraint?  Then put the max budget in the goal, and come in a dollar less. Boom, exceeded expectation.

2. always rate yourself as high as you can possibly justify, let your boss potentially initiate conflict by proposing a lower assessment. 

3. update your resume.  3a. answer the "evaluate how the company is doing..." honestly.

Like the internet, make that stuff anonymous for the honest answers.

Threads like these make me appreciate working outside the typical corporate structure for most of my working life.   I got a glimpse of it in my first job working for a very large defense contractor. It was kind of sobering to look at what some of the long term guys put up with to advance in any way.  In another experience, the contractor I worked for prior to my current employer had been bought out by a conglomerate (arguably the largest mechanical / HVAC organization in the country) about a year before I left.  Six months in I could see the handwriting on the wall and that along with some other things motivated me to reach out to some of my contacts in the business.  Not that working in privately owned companies isn't without its challenges but at least in my experience it seems easier to figure out where you stand in the organization and make decisions accordingly.  

I have been on both sides of these surveys. I work for mega corp, we don't do this survey annually, we do it every 3 months. I can guarantee at mega corp there is no official tracking of who you are. The only way management knows is if you write a book and you have a particular writing quirk or you say I have worked here for X years in this department or some other easy way to find you.

That being said I haven't seen management try to identify the person. The people that don't get listened to are the blow hards and the chronic shiny happy people. If you have a legitimate concern and write it in the survey it will get considered. If a bunch of people have that concern it will really get considered. Does every concern lead to change? No, this is the real world and your concern may or may not be the overriding one that sets the company direction. 

If you have so little trust in the leadership of your company that you feel compelled to lie in these things or refuse them because you don't give a E36 M3 then you are always free to do that, or take your happy self down the road to another joint that is more in tune with your needs. As a manager these things are really tough because they need them. The manager needs them answered and if they want to go anywhere in the company they better be favorable. So when you sit and have to read the feedback from them and your peers are reading your feedback too it is great if some of your employees remember all the things you do that help them out or make it worth coming back the next day. Other wise you are put on the hamster wheel of extra work to make people happy which rarely results in happier people. 

All that said I understand the frustration but if you like your boss, or your bosses boss and you want to not make their life suck think about how these are used before filling them out. 

PS- They are making more judgments about you on break everyday than they make in these surveys.

The well for these was poisoned for me when at one of the places I worked, we all got divvied into focus groups to address the issues raised while still having to get our normal jobs done.  
 

Then there was the loss in morale from no follow through-- though in many cases, the groups were more or less given "address world peace/hunger" assignments. 

SV reX said:

I'm close enough to retirement that I don't give a crap about saying anything other than what I am actually thinking. 
 

If somebody gets butt hurt, I ain't massaging it for them. 
 

It's kinda a nice place to be! 

in the few years leading up to her retirement, everyone would ask my mother "When do you plan to retire?"

Her response was always something like "about a day after the next fight corporate decides to pick with me."

She held true to that - something like what the OP mentioned immediately preceded my mother turning in her 1-day notice.

SV reX said:

I'm close enough to retirement that I don't give a crap about saying anything other than what I am actually thinking. 
 

If somebody gets butt hurt, I ain't massaging it for them. 
 

It's kinda a nice place to be! 

I remember being like that. 
 

Retirement is a lot more satisfying. 

In reply to NY Nick :

Agree with everything here, also as a manager at a mega corp. 

My company was pretty keen on asking feedback questions directly relating to the manager who the employee reports to. Most of the problems were caused my middle mangers, not bottom feeders. They stopped asking about 4 years ago and nobody misses it. Corporate culture still stinks but at least no I'm not tasked with coming up with a solution that only middle managers can actually push through. Happy little peon with 4692 days left.

Mine does it every year and it is always rigged in the corporation's favor. 
 

BS claims in percentages. 

Happiness level in working there, level of pay, management handling of things and employee morale is always fake numbers. I don't even bother with it anymore. They will make everyone submit one for a candy bar to get 100% in submission. Again, it is mostly BS and fluff. 

j_tso said:

Like the internet, make that stuff anonymous for the honest answers.

Ours is allegedly anonymous. It has to be accessed through your email, and if you try to fill out a second one you get a message that you've already completed it, but it's completely anonymous.  Incidentally in a recent meeting we were told that 72% of us are happy or very happy with our bosses so we have that going for us. 

If your unhappy and don't fill it out honestly (or at all), then your going to get biased results  

In reply to No Time :

It was always interesting when management claimed they were addressing survey results that were poor.  
 

But as I type this, the 70's disco party is going to start soon. Retirement FTW. 

In reply to alfadriver :

The previous 2 companies I worked at did annual engagement surveys and there were visible changes to address issues over the 10 years I spent at those companies. Of course there were also some that were supposed to be addressed, but didn't seem to improve.

My current one does a more open departmental survey/discussion quarterly which has some visible impact. 

I think the anonymity aspect can help with openness, but only if employees believe it. If the employees don't believe it's truly anonymous and won't lead to retaliation, then there are issue that go beyond an annual survey. 

I'm handing out 4-5% raises to my employees.  
 

I get a 1.5% raise. 
 

In reply to Fueled by Caffeine :

You get raises?

Around 15 years or so ago, my former employee, a big drug chain, had its first engagement survey.  The regional VP hosted the next managers' meeting after corp got the results.  Paper copies of the results were handed out to all of us.  Engagement levels were abysmal (as they should have been).  At the end of the meeting, the paper copies were collected from us & we we told not to discuss the survey results with anyone.