Yes, that is crazy. But management had to justify the bonus cut for some reason. We had just announced record profits but membership was down so they were tightening the belts. By looking at the insider trading activity, senior management certainly didn’t have any of their options cut.
That was also the year where one of my leaders asked us to fill out an “anonymous” survey on survey monkey or some other similar site to figure out why we scored so poorly on certain questions. I provided specific examples of why people would respond negatively and a few days later my boss comes up to me and says, “Do you even want to work here?” If you don’t want honest feedback to improve things, don’t bother asking.
Hmm, let me rephrase that: I was brought into a meeting after my fellow plebes and I honestly answered survey questions.
After that I always ANSWERED survey questions 5 (out of 5) regarding management at large and my manager in particular.
I hope that clears up your grandiose image of me.
If I tell you what’s wrong and you come to me with a statement like that, I’m immediately looking for another spot and giving you the bare minimum required notice and basically closing up projects and doing nothing else.
This does bring to mind past observations about employee surveys:
Given enough time at a place, you can get a feel for how things are and know how much faith to put into employee survey results. That will let you know what kind of messaging to expect when a survey is announced and results are compiled.
If results are great, management will brag about them endlessly and probably in great detail. If they’re not, they’ll get excused for various reasons and you’ll still hear how great things are. If they’re really bad, they’ll be ignored (unless the CEO says to managers this is completely unacceptable, improve this or some of you will be looking for new jobs shortly as happened at one place) or described something like results were as we expected with no additional information ever being released. If you’re lucky, you might get yeah, we know results aren’t good, we’re going to try and improve on things - just realize the we’re going to try and improve on things line, which really means we’re not going to do anything and hope things magically get better.
Corollary to the above: management will advertise any positive results as being truly representative of the state of affairs, while dismissing negative results as not representative in some way. (If it reports on the negatives. If it does, it will probably be the “this negative is not really that negative at all, in fact it might even be a positive” game.) It might even ask to have positive responses segregated from negative responses to pitch a desired narrative and ignore any negative feedback, no matter how obvious it might really be.
If things are bad, management will admit to it no more than once. After that, see points 2 and 3 above.
When you’re asked for ideas on how to improve things, it’s nothing more than a pat-on-the-head thing to make you feel like you have a voice. Management doesn’t really care about your ideas for improving things.
As noted above, your “anonymous” responses are not really that anonymous - especially when it comes to your immediate supervisors, no matter how high the survey taker claims responses are aggregated. Well, your department’s responses are too small to preserve anonymity so we’re aggregating them with Finance. Yeah, that’s nice - your boss is still going to see how direct reports feel and will seek to find whoever had less-than-stellar grades and “deal with them appropriately.”
Corollary to #6: If you’re ever given an open-ended area to express thoughts, DO NOT EXPRESS NON-POSITIVE THOUGHTS. Better yet, leave it completely blank. Otherwise, you’re giving away any pretext of anonymity - which is bad, unless you’re already looking for another job.
My boss’s concern was that I had a bad attitude and maybe a foot out the door. The reality was that other than being mostly minor annoyances, the examples I provided were the kinds of things that just are. For example, one of the questions was about the quality of our facilities. The building I’m in has a mouse problem. It’s always had a mouse problem. It will probably always have a mouse problem. I can’t honestly grade the question high when we have mice! Not that I’d complain about it or quit over it but when you ask me for feedback I’ll tell you. I probably doxed myself with the examples I provided.
I always give my honest opinion on the employee survey. I’m at a point in my life where I just can’t care enough to lie. If get fired for being me, I’m okay with that. I do like how uncomfortable management gets when they present bad results. I’ve been tempted to respond with all 1s just to see what the reaction is.
I always answer then honestly, too. I’m cognizant that my manager will recognize my “tone of voice” in any open answer, and try to provide… constructive criticism. Fortunately, I haven’t had a really bad manager in a while, and “my manager sucks” has never been something I felt the need to say in employee opinion surveys. I mean, even when I did have a crappy manager, no survey results were going to fix it. Whereas if enough employees bitch about the lousy drug benefits it might get addressed.
Yes! I’ve worked several places where they changed benefit providers based on employee feedback.
And one, that I’ve written about on AO and perhaps here as well, where they did eventually figure out that the 115% annualized turnover was due to shitty management, not shitty employees. Unfortunately they didn’t figure this out until after I left, but it was shortly afterwards. I was friends with the gal who did my exit interview and I suspect that my exit interview may have been the straw that broke the camel’s back.
The last place I left, I was the 11th person to leave the department in the time I was there. (I was there under a year.) The 10 people prior, to a person, cited the manager as the reason they left and gave examples of the manager’s completely unprofessional behaviors. I did the same. So did the 2 that left within a month after me. So did 2 others who left within 2 months after that.
That manager was still there a year later, even after an incident which led to the immediate firing of someone else in the department which the manager knew about and attempted to cover up. They were later promoted after giving a promote me or I’m leaving ultimatum, a few more people bailed in protest, and a few months later that manager bailed for another company.
I worked at a small life company in the mid 90’s. Shortly after I started there were entire departments leaving and going to Manulife. Not an exaggeration. The joke was that Manu was going to start running a bus shuttle for the employees.
Dead silence on management. I doubt management even discussed if there was a problem to be addressed other than perhaps in passing.
SO and I just drove by the residences at UWaterloo this afternoon. I pointed and said “I used to live there”. Then I realized that was actually 36 years ago. FFS. I don’t actually feel old though. I’m nowhere near retirement,and my lifestyle hasn’t slowed down and I’ve no intention of it either. What am I going to do if I retire? Follow my SO around the grocery store and bitch about the price of hamburger? No.
Plus, I like what I do for a living - a lot.
I was victim to unrealistic company enrollment targets. I had 4 years where my bonus was 60-70% of target. I could only take so much before I took these feet to the streets. Been raking in 100-140% of target now and I am much happier.
