The Pain of Employee Satisfaction

My company administers an “employee satisfaction survey” every other year. It’s a respectable idea. Ask your employees a lot of questions, get some feedback and make some changes. Right?

Sort of.

This week alone I’ve endured several hours of survey results which will be followed by several more hours of in-depth discussion about why morale on our team is 10% favorable. For those of you playing along at home – 10% favorable is not a good news message.

I am personally of the opinion that if morale is below a certain threshold for any department, some type of warning signal should be sounded in the president’s office. A flair should be shot off. I mean, really. This is a group of reasonably intelligent, dedicated IT professionals clinging to the last shreds of professional sanity. Someone toss out a lifeline for Pete sakes.

Instead we are being asked to form “committees” to “identify possible solutions” for improving said morale. Now call me crazy, but morale isn’t something that can be fixed from the bottom up. Pretty sure it’s a top down issue. And frankly, I’m pretty exhausted dancing around all the politically correct terms for saying the reason our team is miserable is because our department manager is an insensitive gas bag that has no business managing people in a corporate setting. I mean let’s be honest. Actually being “honest” would be a career limiting move.

So instead we call sit around, are unfailingly polite and politically correct whilst sharing our feelings. Sharing is overrated. I’m tired of sharing. I no longer wish to share. I simply want the giant hook to appear stage left and yank this guy of the managerial stage. Ba-da-boom.

I was brave and asked the question, what the “current management team thought about the results”. There are some pretty low numbers. There was some skirting around the issue that the gas bag in question was of the opinion the respondents are just a bunch of whiners.

Yeah. That’s a morale killer. Feign interest in obtaining your employees feedback and then when you get it, discount it because it wasn't the equivalent of puppies and rainbows.

I’m sure there will be more on this topic as well much to my dismay.