Major discovery announced with my org when discussing employee survey results:
"I feel actions have been taken as a result of pervious employee surveys."
Executive officiers and HR ranked at 90+% positive.
All business units ranked around 50% positive.
So the problem is a perception one, and communication needs to be improved. What a shocker? You will be told what the right answer is, never mind overwhelming survey respondents have poor feedback. Welcome to the alternate universe.
T uses employee surveys for JD Power rankings ONLY. There are never tangible actions taken from results.
I'm 58 years old, have been working since graduating college back in '87, and over the course of these last 45 years have worked at 6 companies, ranging in size from about 250 employees to T.
In all this time, T is the only company that sends out these surveys. The. Only. One.
At first, I thought these were actually an honest attempt to understand the problems, pressures, and stress on workers in order to address them and make things better. It didn't take long to realize that these surveys were actually a pathetic attempt by a pack of insecure and incompetent executives groveling to hear how great they were.
Having worked at T it's not difficult to understand why the execs need to slink to these desperate and embarrassing tactics.
It's all spin, what "actions" are they really talking about? Actions around reading, acknowledging employee feedback and making policy changes, haven't seen much of these.
Proclaiming pay and benefits are great, career growth opportunities are plenty, and you must be extremely grateful to have a job here, expect more these "Actions" to be taken.
Just like you can't out train a bad diet, T's can't fix the bad perception with more talk. But, rest assure, more talk is absolutely what we will get.
A few years back I was in an org that had consistently low survey responses. Word came through management - if this didn't improve, leadership would view it as a group of employees/location that was less engaged, and basically, let loose the layoff monster. So having in effect been threatened with firing if they continued to be negative, people were more positive in the next survey. Then we had an all hands meeting where the VP stood in the big room in that location and jokingly said to a few hundred people "the scores improved because you're smart people haha".
The only question is why they bother since everyone involved in these surveys at every level knows it's a pointless game.
What's really stupid is they ask these high level questions about things like vision, integrity, trust. Then they want the supervisor to hold a meeting and come up with a plan - as if any of that could be changed outside the top 2-3 levels of the company. Why don't they ask about, oh, prices in the cafeteria, temperature of the water fountains? (Abysmal) performance of the web sites we all use? If it was about things that were remotely actionable maybe people would respond productively. They may as well ask about the weather as about the stuff they do ask.
Care for surveys about as much as spam phone calls.
It’s almost funny how many people in the company really think upper mgmt cares about them. Upper mgmt cares about their job, their income and their future. What they don’t care about is you.
Then when you have a survey, you might be inclined to answer the questions in a way that truly expresses the difference between you and them.
This is a bit of a long reply, so apologies in advance.
This isn't new. After T invaded DTV there was a survey asking for opinions regarding the new owners, employee sentiment, and confidence. I'll never forget this sequence because it was so incredibly revealing about the T executives' thinking.
The results were:
*L3 and lower (mainly DTV staff) rated the takeover as very negative, hated the new structure and corporate environment, and had negative feelings about the future.
The T people were clearly surprised, because they must have thought that the DTV folks were hoodwinked by their fake humility and 'aw shucks' cosplay. There was an all-hands meeting where the T overlords promised to address employee concerns.
About 6 months later we had another ENPS survey, superficially to check how effective the T response has been but really as a redo of the initial survey so they could all bask in the new great scores.
The results were even more divergent than before: L4s and above were more positive while L3 and below had even worse scores. The worst score was for the question asking the same thing: do you feel that positive action resulted from previous surveys.
The response we got from the executives? Oh, the low scores had to be due to the fact that all the great work T execs have done weren't properly communicated to the rank-and-file. With that, the T execs essentially dismissed the survey results in order to reassure themselves about how great a job they were doing, and that any morale problems were because the drones simply didn't understand how great a place T was.
That was in 2016-2017. I see nothing has changed.
"team"....hahahahahha
It's a job.
Go to work.
Every day.
On time and ready to work.
Never talk to management if possible. And then only by text and email and VM.
They hate you.
They don't care about you, your family, your home, your pets.
They want you gone.
You're not on a "team" .
You're on your own.
You folks will be far happier and make more $$$ if you would only understand that.
I would love to see the raw numbers for the question "I trust my leadership team." Not a composite one that gets watered down with other questions and isn't even broken out via the various responses. Because they like to lie about being transparent, I am sure they won't release results at that kind of level.
Executives and Human Resource employees have Cush jobs that pay well AND have great benefits. The employees that really make the company work are those that build, repair and interact with the customer. Many of these employees feel that their efforts are not appreciated especially since their benefits have been cut over the years. All need to remember that the customer pays for all wages and benefits. The 90% positive respondents are benefiting greatly. The 50% not so much.
Also look at the asterisk to the approval numbers. They group strongly agree and agree as the same thing. Probably why they abandoned the "net promoter" model where you had to be at the very high end of approval for it to mean you really approved.
@shx+1gLFQ8MJ To quote Bruno Kirby in Good Morning Vietnam: "That's humor. I recognize that."
Go executive officers and HR! Finally getting an abundance of credit for what they do for T. I would like to suggest a major bonus for these individuals. These are the folks that make AT&T successful.