7 ms·

That assumes that your employees: 1. Know how they feel 2. Can translate that into numbers accurately.

whatshisface 5y ago
3. Are willing to express how they feel instead of how they think they should bubble themselves in on a web app you pointed them to.
gpm 5y ago
Nothing is perfect, this is better than nothing though. [1] The way my company does this is they ask a lot of questions and then mostly look at aggregates. E.g. they might ask 6 questions about "how do you feel about the size of your workload", "do you feel you have time to do the important things in your life", "are you satisfied with the amount of vacation you take", "do you feel stressed", ... and then roll those into a single "work life balance" metric (questions and specific metric entirely made up). And actually we outsource to a survey company that does that for us, which apart from outsourcing the non-core competency, means that there is a reasonably neutral party deciding how to aggregate things (I think, I'm not involved in the survey design). [1] Therefore this is better than perfect?
ClumsyPilot 5y ago
You have to consider the alternative, which us not knowing much at all. This is not a precise science
armoredkitten 5y ago
Psychological science uses this technique a lot. It's not perfect, of course there's lots of noise because of both of the issues you raise (in addition to other issues like how to develop questions to measure nebulous things like "self-esteem" or "extraversion"). But as long as the results aren't pure noise, i.e., there's some signal there, then with an adequate sample size you can do something with it. Lots of fields deal with noisy, imprecise data. It's just conditional on it not being only noise.
theptip 5y ago
It's a good question, which has been extensively studied over the last few decades in the medical context. The industry phrase would be "Patient Reported Outcomes" if you'd like to explore further. After many papers and lots of clinical trials, it's widely accepted in the scientific community that the answers to both of your questions are "yes". E.g. see this FDA paper[1]. Of course, it's possible to design your questionnaire badly and there's an art to this, so it's right to be skeptical/cautious about putting this into practice. But you seem to be getting at a more fundamental epistemic question about whether the approach is possible even in principle, which has been thoroughly investigated. [1]: https://www.fda.gov/media/77832/download https://www.fda.gov/media/77832/download

3. Are willing to express how they feel instead of how they think they should bubble themselves in on a web app you pointed them to.

gpm 5y ago

Nothing is perfect, this is better than nothing though. [1] The way my company does this is they ask a lot of questions and then mostly look at aggregates. E.g. they might ask 6 questions about "how do you feel about the size of your workload", "do you feel you have time to do the important things in your life", "are you satisfied with the amount of vacation you take", "do you feel stressed", ... and then roll those into a single "work life balance" metric (questions and specific metric entirely made up). And actually we outsource to a survey company that does that for us, which apart from outsourcing the non-core competency, means that there is a reasonably neutral party deciding how to aggregate things (I think, I'm not involved in the survey design). [1] Therefore this is better than perfect?

ClumsyPilot 5y ago

You have to consider the alternative, which us not knowing much at all. This is not a precise science

armoredkitten 5y ago

Psychological science uses this technique a lot. It's not perfect, of course there's lots of noise because of both of the issues you raise (in addition to other issues like how to develop questions to measure nebulous things like "self-esteem" or "extraversion"). But as long as the results aren't pure noise, i.e., there's some signal there, then with an adequate sample size you can do something with it. Lots of fields deal with noisy, imprecise data. It's just conditional on it not being only noise.

theptip 5y ago

It's a good question, which has been extensively studied over the last few decades in the medical context. The industry phrase would be "Patient Reported Outcomes" if you'd like to explore further. After many papers and lots of clinical trials, it's widely accepted in the scientific community that the answers to both of your questions are "yes". E.g. see this FDA paper[1]. Of course, it's possible to design your questionnaire badly and there's an art to this, so it's right to be skeptical/cautious about putting this into practice. But you seem to be getting at a more fundamental epistemic question about whether the approach is possible even in principle, which has been thoroughly investigated. [1]: https://www.fda.gov/media/77832/download https://www.fda.gov/media/77832/download