This isn't even close to satire anymore. I know managers who track which of their employees have read Google Docs they send out, and how long they take to first open it.
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?".
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.
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.
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.
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
If you're working remotely this could easily identify you.
I should start responding to the survey behind a different VPN endpoint each time. See if anyone asks questions.
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."
Feel your pain
If you have to ask..