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Comment by oxymoran | Hacker News Reader

Interesting tidbit regarding Gallup: the Fortune 500 company I work for manipulates our surveys by asking general questions about the company and then holding the supervisors accountable for the results even if all of the questions are way out of their control. So they leverage the the employee-supervisor relationship to make it seem like there is more happiness and less discontent.

That being said, I find it hard to believe my company is the only one doing that, I even called Gallup about it and they did not seem to care. At all.

Imagine what the real numbers look like.

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Seen this before too.

1. Company makes unpopular decision (cuts a benefit, partners with someone unpopular, enforces some tedious process to make management life earlier)

2. Next poll season comes round

3. Shock, results are down

4. Declare an aggregate engagement measure as an action item which incorporates both the happiness metric but others such as understanding of company strategy

5. Declare the problem with this metric are line managers not conveying company direction well enough

6. Declare you're taking action by measuring line management on this metric

7. A bunch of ensuing makework on something execs think is important (at a certain size, a singular company vision is just too generic for line employees to care), yet they sell it as taking action

simple solution == flat-as-possible org structure?

But once you make a formal structure flat enough, informal structures can start to solidify and dominate (think High School).

I always try to keep this in mind, Valve which famously has a completely flat structure, ended up turning into an environment where things like popularity and ability to dispense resources defined the practiced org structure. Be careful what you wish for.

Perhaps "popularity and ability to dispense resources" is better than just "ability to dispense resources" (i.e. traditional hierarchy).

Did you go to High School with the rampant bullying? Popularity is not linked at all with personality traits that make someone a good leader afaik. Traditional hierarchy at least tries to keep people who are a competent in power.

"Did you go to High School with the rampant bullying"

Do adults have judgement of pre-pubernecent 14 year olds? I mean, maybe some do, but...

High school age is generally 14 to 18. And I wouldn't be so confident adults in unchecked power are better then high schoolers on morality and decency.

So the concept of "well adjusted adult' is a myth?

I'm not entirely sure what you are expecting me to say. I didn't say every adult will be a bully. But not every teenager in high school is a bully either. The existence of "well adjusted adult" doesn't have anything to do with this. You can have "well adjusted adults" and still have rampant bullying. The point I'm making is that a traditional hierarchy tries to put the "wall adjusted adults" with good leadership skills in leadership positions. In contrast to a flat hierarchy where it's essentially just a popularity contest.

yes. More or less.

What happens is that we learn to "hide" our impulses in more social acceptable behavior.

We didn't have that many bully's when i grew up but most of them are just slightly more polished version of themselves.

But when they are drinking or emotions are high they revert back. (which is bad since 2 of them are cops now)

I am not saying that person cannot change his life and ways around. I know some that have done that. But most people (in my expirience) don't

> Popularity is not linked at all with personality traits that make someone a good leader afaik.

On the contrary! Good personality traits evolved because they make for good leaders.

…which makes me depressed about being on the spectrum because it means I had to accept I could never be a “leader”.

(Well, I am a technical lead, it’s in my job-description, but that’s only because I get -Wpedantic on peoples’ code - and not because I can inspire people)

Do you have a source for this. I wouldn't say from for example actors and musicians(ultimate popularity contests) that most of them would even be remotely good leaders.

I work at a place with a flat structure and I can’t emphasize enough how true this is.

It’s especially noticeable when you’re not one of the in-crowd.

My employer administered questions regarding how many days per week the employees wanted to spend in-office versus WFH.

Zero days per week in the office was not presented as an option.

How many days per week do you want to spend in the office versus work from home?

(A) Seven in office

(B) Six in office

(D) Please replace me

(E) I have COVID and am going into the office to screw the company over.

Will be interesting to see if this choice happens.

AKA "we spent way too much on the lease for you to just work from home pleb"

I honestly think it comes down to this in the majority of the cases.

"Look, we have a two-years contract where we pay X thousand dollars a month for 100 desks and we have on an average day 3 developers in our office. After one year of lockdowns, we know our developers work at least as well from home as from the office, but higher ups ask us why we pay so much for an empty building, so we will force you come back to the office as soon as we can, even if we don't save any money with that and most likely decrease our efficiency and employee satisfaction."

I live in Germany and that's more or less what's happening at my company as we speak. Nobody complained about our performance or said they wished the company would enforce "work from office" rules, yet, they already try to slowly increase the days where we need to work from the office.

In my opinion, once a month in the office is great for chatting and connecting with people, but when it comes to work output, it doesn't move the needle, it's actually a day lost to the business.

Yeah I have been going in as requested but without my laptop. I am happy to chat but not going to pretend to do actual creative work.

Sunk cost fallacy! Keep it empty and save on the variable electric and heating/cooling costs.

There's another aspect here, too. Companies get tax breaks to put offices in certain locations, and those tax breaks are frequently based on having a certain percentage occupancy.

In government situations, the space itself is at a premium (not what it costs). If your org has a certain amount of space for use, other orgs will try to steal it from you. The amount of space you control is an indication of how awesome your org is.

There was this one org that had a few floors of a building for their use, but most of the desks sat empty most of the time. This came to the attention of a different org that was hard up for space. That had 2 people per desk at many desks. They got the "space manager" to take a look, but the target org got wind of what was going on and they called everyone to be in during that time. Those floors were overflowing with people when the space manager showed up.

I bet they wish they had leased! This employer owns many large campuses...

Surveys set up by the likes of "Great Place to Work" and similar are nothing but HR and PR fluff. It's set up to be spinned and covered up.

This. You can only win with quite a bit of work which a company without issues will not put in.

I've said it before and I'd say it again with or without a throwaway: being certified “Great Place to Work” doesn't mean we're a good work environment, merely that we allocated >1 FTE to winning the contest.

FTE?

Full-Time Employee

*Equivalent, can be a freelancer too.

Indeed.

(actual employees in our case)

I took the GPTW survey a while back at a former workplace.

I wholeheartedly agree. It's come to the point where if a company mentions that they participate in those surveys during the hiring process, that's a yellow flag.

Hahaha you too? Saw this at a previous employer. Suddenly the Gallup scores became the sole responsibility of your direct manager. So guess what? One year later, everyone briefs their reports to make sure they don’t get in trouble, Gallup scores were through the roof, trebles all round for HR!

I've seen our internal surveys go like this as well. They'll be critical on themselves with easy-to-solve issues but if it's something substantive then the polling will be very obtuse.

In my company (a famous company which builds trucks) they introduced those bullshit happiness surveys during Covid. So we coordinated so that the average of our marks were 1, 3, 4, 10, 5, 5, 10, 4, 3, 1, which is a Batman graph. Fortunately the “1” matches the first lockdown, but the managers are still wondering why the spikes at 10.

doing the real work right here!

Reminds me about a cohort of colleagues at a place I worked that would have some fun conspiring similarly to this. Seemed HR and the company wanted everyone to fall in line. We called ourselves "the loose ends".

Not exactly the same, but your experience reminds me of this old tidbit from Yes, Minister: https://youtube.com/watch?v=G0ZZJXw4MTA

I work for an employer where anything is on the table for dealing with the deservedly poor reputation including buying "Best Workplace" awards. So... most of these surveys are actually probably counter-indicators.

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