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In the same vein, I'm part of a reporting chain that uses "Officevibe". Mini little surveys to measure our happiness. Now managers have goals for various metr

In the same vein, I'm part of a reporting chain that uses "Officevibe". Mini little surveys to measure our happiness. Now managers have goals for various metrics. Of course, that has turned the entire thing into the most annoying game you can imagine. Add in the "beatings will continue until morale improves" meetings on the reports, and I'm now convinced one of the best questions I can ask of a new employer is "how do you track employee morale?".

danudey 6y ago
I saw a great idea for a Slack integration a few years back. Instead of having these quarterly "how is working here?" surveys that no one likes, you could input a bunch of questions and it would "randomly" (probably not randomly, but arbitrarily) message them to members of your organizations, and anonymise the results. That meant that instead of having some huge process every quarter where everyone just kind of skips through the whole thing, if they even read it at all, you could get a semi-live feel for how things are going day to day or week to week, and even get relatively-realtime indications about what effect company events were having on employees. You can easily get into cynical territory, where you know that an impromptu office ice cream and macaron party will bump up morale by 30%, while laying off an entire team will generally drop it by 20%, so obviously you should lay people off on the Thursday and then have an ice cream and macaron party on the Friday, but overall it's a good idea to get a continual sense of the feeling of your teams and what might be troubling or exciting them.
- banana_giraffe 6y ago
  You're basically describing Officevibe. It emails people with some frequency between weekly and monthly, and it only asks you a few questions every time. Mostly it's a 1-10 scale thing, with cute little graphics. It also asks open ended questions where you're told the answers are anonymous. That's all well and good, but if your manager can't figure out who's who from the tone of the message, they're a new manager. And sure, it sounds like a great idea to spot issues. The instant two managers compare scores, or worse, are compelled to compare scores, all bets are off on it's usefulness. Then when you have a meeting where a high level manager painfully asks for input on how to make things better from the entire team while going over each chart in painful detail, the clear goal every individual contributor has is to just pick 8 or 9 and make the stupid meetings stop.
  - lb1lf 6y ago
    -At a former employer - a vast engineering multinational - we had a big, annual questionnaire to determine how happy we were to work there. 'On a scale from 1-10, how satisfied are you with...' We were assured the results were only to be used in aggregate and no response would be possible to trace back to the individual who'd made it. I almost fell off my chair laughing when the report had been compiled - the responses were anonymized. Of sorts. Responses used in aggregate. Of sorts. The engineer, female, age bracket 40-49 years, $SITE in the office next door wasn't as amused. As the sample size was one, her every response had been printed in the report. Oops.
    - notabee 6y ago
      Recently had a similar "anonymization" experience in a workplace survey. There were a lot of short answer questions, and people's names were converted into numbers. The same number for each employee, on every question. Not exactly hard to correlate who's who with a few dozen responses from each person. They also failed completely to clean up any names mentioned in the reponses.
    - namrog84 6y ago
      Where I work our similar reports only will show average number values in context of at least 6 responses. And open ended text responses in context where at least 25 people responded. So often a direct manager can't see open ended text in their context but their skip level manager could. They shouldn't have ever reported on a sample size of 1. That's a bad system
  - abqio 6y ago
    Officevibe is not anonymous in certain circumstances. It shows which city (And maybe IP?) the questions were answered from. If you're working remotely this could easily identify you.
    - banana_giraffe 6y ago
      Huh. I am working remotely (well, most of my team is now), but more importantly, I'm the only person in the city I'm in. Not that it really changes my responses, I've kind of always assumed my anonymity wasn't guaranteed with this, though it does make me hate Officevibe just a little bit more. I should start responding to the survey behind a different VPN endpoint each time. See if anyone asks questions.
pklausler 6y ago
My organization has also switched to web-based "frequent quick anonymous surveys". I always do them to keep my boss out of trouble for poor response rates, but I skip all of the questions and just add a comment that I don't believe in the anonymity guarantee. Someday, I'll get asked why that is, and I'll get a chance to quote Seymour Cray's "I think that you just answered your own question."
- reaperducer 6y ago
  While going over the latest "anonymous" department survey early last year, one of the HR people slipped up and said something like, "...and Mike had really good feedback at the end of his survey." She then had to admit that the surveys weren't anonymous. A lot of people were pissed. We haven't had a survey since.
  - tintor 6y ago
    Surveys can't be anonymous if they require login or custom URL for each user.
    - rtkwe 6y ago
      They can be if the results are decoupled from the tracking URL and the results aren't shown live (to avoid a really dedicated manager matching changes in the results to changes in who's responded).
      - tintor 6y ago
        Problem is that as user of the survey you can't verify that results are decoupled from the URL / login.
throwaway888abc 6y ago
Always randomly clicked through it ie Form filler. https://fakefiller.com/ https://fakefiller.com/ Feel your pain

danudey 6y ago

I saw a great idea for a Slack integration a few years back. Instead of having these quarterly "how is working here?" surveys that no one likes, you could input a bunch of questions and it would "randomly" (probably not randomly, but arbitrarily) message them to members of your organizations, and anonymise the results. That meant that instead of having some huge process every quarter where everyone just kind of skips through the whole thing, if they even read it at all, you could get a semi-live feel for how things are going day to day or week to week, and even get relatively-realtime indications about what effect company events were having on employees. You can easily get into cynical territory, where you know that an impromptu office ice cream and macaron party will bump up morale by 30%, while laying off an entire team will generally drop it by 20%, so obviously you should lay people off on the Thursday and then have an ice cream and macaron party on the Friday, but overall it's a good idea to get a continual sense of the feeling of your teams and what might be troubling or exciting them.

banana_giraffe 6y ago
You're basically describing Officevibe. It emails people with some frequency between weekly and monthly, and it only asks you a few questions every time. Mostly it's a 1-10 scale thing, with cute little graphics. It also asks open ended questions where you're told the answers are anonymous. That's all well and good, but if your manager can't figure out who's who from the tone of the message, they're a new manager. And sure, it sounds like a great idea to spot issues. The instant two managers compare scores, or worse, are compelled to compare scores, all bets are off on it's usefulness. Then when you have a meeting where a high level manager painfully asks for input on how to make things better from the entire team while going over each chart in painful detail, the clear goal every individual contributor has is to just pick 8 or 9 and make the stupid meetings stop.
- lb1lf 6y ago
  -At a former employer - a vast engineering multinational - we had a big, annual questionnaire to determine how happy we were to work there. 'On a scale from 1-10, how satisfied are you with...' We were assured the results were only to be used in aggregate and no response would be possible to trace back to the individual who'd made it. I almost fell off my chair laughing when the report had been compiled - the responses were anonymized. Of sorts. Responses used in aggregate. Of sorts. The engineer, female, age bracket 40-49 years, $SITE in the office next door wasn't as amused. As the sample size was one, her every response had been printed in the report. Oops.
  - notabee 6y ago
    Recently had a similar "anonymization" experience in a workplace survey. There were a lot of short answer questions, and people's names were converted into numbers. The same number for each employee, on every question. Not exactly hard to correlate who's who with a few dozen responses from each person. They also failed completely to clean up any names mentioned in the reponses.
  - namrog84 6y ago
    Where I work our similar reports only will show average number values in context of at least 6 responses. And open ended text responses in context where at least 25 people responded. So often a direct manager can't see open ended text in their context but their skip level manager could. They shouldn't have ever reported on a sample size of 1. That's a bad system
- abqio 6y ago
  Officevibe is not anonymous in certain circumstances. It shows which city (And maybe IP?) the questions were answered from. If you're working remotely this could easily identify you.
  - banana_giraffe 6y ago
    Huh. I am working remotely (well, most of my team is now), but more importantly, I'm the only person in the city I'm in. Not that it really changes my responses, I've kind of always assumed my anonymity wasn't guaranteed with this, though it does make me hate Officevibe just a little bit more. I should start responding to the survey behind a different VPN endpoint each time. See if anyone asks questions.

pklausler 6y ago

My organization has also switched to web-based "frequent quick anonymous surveys". I always do them to keep my boss out of trouble for poor response rates, but I skip all of the questions and just add a comment that I don't believe in the anonymity guarantee. Someday, I'll get asked why that is, and I'll get a chance to quote Seymour Cray's "I think that you just answered your own question."

reaperducer 6y ago
While going over the latest "anonymous" department survey early last year, one of the HR people slipped up and said something like, "...and Mike had really good feedback at the end of his survey." She then had to admit that the surveys weren't anonymous. A lot of people were pissed. We haven't had a survey since.
- tintor 6y ago
  Surveys can't be anonymous if they require login or custom URL for each user.
  - rtkwe 6y ago
    They can be if the results are decoupled from the tracking URL and the results aren't shown live (to avoid a really dedicated manager matching changes in the results to changes in who's responded).
    - tintor 6y ago
      Problem is that as user of the survey you can't verify that results are decoupled from the URL / login.

throwaway888abc 6y ago

Always randomly clicked through it ie Form filler. https://fakefiller.com/ https://fakefiller.com/ Feel your pain