A tsunami of surveys

Business Insider

7 days ago

Iwas in a particularly sour mood at an old job one afternoon when a notification popped up in Slack, reminding me to fill out my Peakon, the employee engagement survey our HR department used. In exchange for our candor, the HR team promised total anonymity and assured us that our concerns and comments would be heard by top brass.
I liked my job, so I typically filled these surveys out with a perfunctory four-out-of-five-star acquiescence, never eager to rock the boat. I truly cannot recall now what had made my day so bad, but I decided to take it out on the survey. In response to extremely mundane questions about my daily motivation and whether my work goals were clearly defined, I said things like this organization absolutely stinks and our customers are marks. I was specific without revealing my identity, but I lurched roundhouse kicks like no sane person would work here if they had a better option. With the vitriol of an anonymous Yelp reviewer, I let 'er rip. It felt amazing — in the moment.
The next morning, I found in my inbox a letter from the CEO.
Sent via Peakon, it said something to the effect of, I can't tell who you are. But it seems you're unhappy. I have an offer for you. If I identified myself and then resigned, they'd give me a bit more than a standard severance. My resignation would be written as a layoff, so I could collect unemployment, and they'd even hook me up with the external recruiters they used to staff the company, to help me find a better role in some place where I would be happier. My employer was not doing layoffs or buyouts, and no one else, to my knowledge, had gotten this kind of offer. It seemed the object of my unhappiness at work had struck a nerve.
While you may have a manager who genuinely loves you and wants you to be happy, the reality is that from an organizational perspective, your happiness at work has a literal, and hefty, price tag. Companies spend a fortune finding and hiring talent; it can cost 15% to 25% of a role's salary to source the right person to fill an opening. Maybe my old CEO (who through a representative declined to comment for this story) agreed strongly with the market firm MSW's survey that found that disengaged workers are 2.5 times as likely as an engaged worker to leave a company, and he just wanted me to get on with it.
A Gallup survey found that about one-third of US workers were "actively engaged" at work in 2023, with the larger pool of less engaged and " actively disengaged" workers (who make mistakes at work more often and show up to work less often) accounting for an estimated $1.9 trillion in lost productivity. Our "engagement" — the quality by which work feels immediate and meaningful — was defined as recently as 1990 by the Boston University professor of organizational behavior William Kahn, whose studies around employee engagement transformed how corporations think about workforce productivity. Employees who are not able to engage with their jobs are rendered "emotionally, cognitively and psychologically unavailable," as Kahn has put it. Negative and positive engagement is now considered an indicator of both positive and negative lagging effects for businesses, including profitability, turnover, and employee absenteeism. So for the last 35 years, HR departments everywhere have created a culture of questionnaires determined to uncover, isolate, and nurture their company's engagement.
There's a very good chance you've been pinged and asked sometime in the past few months to fill out your Deel engagement survey, or your ThriveSparrow, SurveyMonkey, Workleap, Paycom, Lattice, People Element, or Engagedly. Software companies generated almost a billion dollars in 2023 selling and administering third-party engagement surveys to corporations everywhere. Peakon sold to Workday in 2021 for $700 million. A 2021 fundraising round catapulted the Melbourne, Australia-founded engagement startup Culture Amp to unicorn status, with a $1.5 billion valuation. The action is picking up, as increasingly dispersed post-COVID workforces have exacerbated the need for more vibe checks. If you're in the business of soliciting opinions from employees, business is booming.
Less satisfied with employee satisfaction surveys are many of the employees taking them. Some two-thirds of US employees believe their companies don't respond to engagement surveys in a meaningful way, according to a Quantum Workplace survey of more than a thousand workers. "Employee surveys mostly seem like a way for the executive suite to pat themselves on the back," Nick Gaudio, the creative director at the Austin-based chatbot startup Manychat, tells me. "They want to believe in the power of anonymity to induce honesty, but at the end of the day, the power dynamic is always there, hanging over the head of their employees."
While I experienced a surprising assertion of this power dynamics firsthand — my bosses didn't like my answers, and tried to do something about it — in general, the people I spoke to for this story placed surveys in the taxonomic rank of workplace annoyances somewhere around "filling out timesheets." Surveys can be annoying because they're persistent, doubly so when you perceive that your employers won't do much with the results. This can lead to survey fatigue, where the response rate falls off a cliff after being asked to submit too many.
When you're constantly filing your anonymous grievances into an anonymous digital suggestion box, you may begin to wonder not if the survey will help improve your workplace, but if you aren't perhaps participating in a kind of "snitchware." Are you voluntarily telling on yourself?
If we survey the history of surveys, we find that they were once considered novel, exciting, and based in real utility, much as the kanban project management board was born out of a working system in a real factory. Before World War I, most bosses were primarily concerned with their employees' external lives and work outcomes — the inner toils and happiness quotients mattered very little, as the historian Sanford Jacoby wrote in a 2008 paper called "Employee Attitude Surveys in Historical Perspective." But strikes and wartime labor shortages gave the workforce some modicum of power. This gave the educational psychologist J. David Houser the perfect platform to take the "consumer attitude studies" he'd been doing on behalf of public utilities into an entirely new field of study: employee satisfaction and morale.
While anonymity can lend itself to candor and equity, it sometimes fails in the way of promoting actual conversation and trust.
By the early 1940s, satisfaction surveys found a champion in the armed forces. Because soldier morale began to be considered paramount to defense success, the military took the results of personnel surveys seriously. This led to some drastic changes, including introducing combat badges, requiring psychological evaluations for returned soldiers, and even helping along the eventual desegregation of the armed forces. (Today, the government's Office of Personnel Management notably conducts agency- and government-wide surveys as a resource for the public trust.) Decades later, Kahn, "the godfather of employee engagement," set up a brilliant framework for understanding employee satisfaction outside the binary of happy/sad.
That same anonymity that Gaudio railed against can also promote a kind of equity. Jenna Eichberg, the chief people officer at AlertMedia, tells me that because surveys aggregate an entire organization's feedback, you don't have to overindex your worry about the loudest outliers. "You can't chase one person. You're here to serve a majority of your workforce," she says, and the beauty of the big dataset is that you can hear just as much from shy employees, or from "people who're different than the ones who mostly talk to you in person." Phil Wilburn, the VP of people analytics at Workday, agrees. A survey, he tells me over email, "gives people who might not feel comfortable speaking up in a meeting — whether they're introverted, more junior, or part of an underrepresented group — a safe space to share their thoughts. And it helps managers respond to those concerns thoughtfully, without putting anyone on the spot."
Still, Eichberg says, if your employees don't feel heard, it's because you're not making them feel heard. "The biggest mistake organizations make is they do all these surveys and they collect all this data, but they don't actually do something with it," she says. "Or they do something with it, and they don't go back and tell their workforce what they did with it." The head of people at a small LA-based startup tells me that his organization similarly seems to freeze whenever a surprising result or answer pops out of the survey black box. "I tell my CEO that by the time a comment winds up in the survey, it's already tried to reach you some other way," he says. Surveys, he continues, are "only as good as the relationships between the people in the company and only as effective as the executives who have to do something about it."
So while anonymity can lend itself to candor and equity, it might still sometimes fail in the way of promoting actual conversation and trust. Consider a 2021 survey from The Workforce Institute that found that only 37% of entry-level employees believe their colleagues are completely honest in their answers and assessments. If 43% of workers fear retaliation for speaking up at work, per a survey from the Institute of Business Ethics, anonymity can only help so much. In the same way remote employees have learned to keep their Slack icon "green," to avoid suspicion of blowing off work, some workers have self-taught to never be entirely honest with their HR surveys. Last year at Amazon, CEO Andy Jassy issued a memo requiring five-days-a-week RTO, touching on connection and communication as principal tenets for this decision. Enough workers were dissatisfied enough to launch their own internal survey about RTO, an ironic Uno reverse card usage of the employee questionnaire to critique how little they felt the self-declared "Earth's Best Employer" was listening.
A former boss once lamented to me that surveys are, by design, akin to "interviewing for pain" — regardless of their intention, they tend to draw out complaints and gripes that aren't as serious as they seem. This may be true, but when you consider the total anonymity of the survey, how is a boss supposed to tell the genuine complaint from the Reddit-like bloviating? In a work world with increasingly labyrinthine and opaque hiring processes, the crisis of "ghost jobs," and built on the legacy of Michael Scott hating Toby, it's not surprising that we're mired in an ongoing HR credibility crisis, with so many workers rejecting the supposed efficacy and value of something as supposedly useful as surveys.
When I ask William Kahn about this hierarchical arrangement and fear of self-reporting, he tells me that "ideally, there would be no need for surveys that are in the service of helping managers understand the experiences, thoughts, and insights of their workers." In an open, trusting workplace, he says, "communication would flow freely based on the idea that the work and healthy relationships matter more than the need of managers to be adored and obeyed." Even so, he adds, "surveys would still be useful to get quick checks on the results of interventions designed to enable workers to fully engage their work."
I ended up not taking my CEO's stunning buyout offer. I was a diligent, productive, and engaged worker, and I believe the CEO was conflating and confusing this engagement with my happiness. Kahn tells me that "highly engaged members are satisfied with their roles and experiences," but "whether they are 'happy' or not — which has as much to do with the totality of their lives — is a different matter." More importantly, that CEO seemed to see the survey results as an end point, evidence of some unfixable condition, and not some part of a workforce to maintain, nurture, and encourage. They supposed that if only we could have more engaged workers, we'd be better off, without contending that the survey revealed opportunity, not a definitive answer. It was, ironically, the moment I thought of most often when I did make the decision to leave the following year.