Vibecatch – Easiest job satisfaction poll
vibecatch.com
vibecatch.com
Regardless, as an employee I've learned to either ignore these things outright, or at least give the most artificially bland non-feedback possible. On many of the occasions in the past when I've given meaningful feedback... despite the "anonymity", that feedback has been repeated to me verbatim by a manager in later conversations. Often in a passive-aggressively angry or intimidating way.
It's a problem of population size. For company survey data to be all that meaningful, you have to AT LEAST segment the "anonymous" responses by location, group, etc. So even if the text doesn't include your individual name... it still narrows your identity down to a couple dozen people in a HUGE company, and probably just 2 or 3 people in a small company.
With that small of a population, it's really not that hard for managers to piece together who said what. My experience is that when management receives feedback they'd rather not hear, often they REALLY do want to piece together who said what. So whatever your noble intentions are in creating an "anonymous" survey system, I believe that human nature works against you on this. You're really just creating a honeypot trap to help root out "negative influencers".
Talk to your people. I know that a lot of employees roll their eyes at regular "1-on-1's", and a lot of managers don't like doing them either (so they're often not done very well). However, I just can't comprehend how anyone could consider themselves an effective manager without having those with every direct report on at least a bi-weekly basis, preferably weekly. If you're doing those right, then you'll have a strong relationship within your team even if everyone doesn't always see eye to eye.
Of course, 1-on-1's and manager-employee communication at the team level is a separate matter from COMPANY WIDE feedback. Upper management can (and usually does) have blind spots due to information getting blocked by poor managers in between them and staff. If you have a solution for bad managers, or for bad organizational structures that leave employees with either multiple managers or none at all, then you'd be a messiah. Generally, that's the last thing in the world that upper management really wants to tackle, though.
This happened to me once and that was quite enough.
Filling in "anonymous" surveys doesn't benefit employees at all. It's going primarily towards the company or department performance indicators. Putting in a complaint might just harm your position.
I agree: if something needs fixing then it needs to be addressed openly and informally first: discuss it with colleagues and see what support you have, discuss it constructively with a manager and see what they're willing to do about it.
I really wish this were universally true, but many of us deal with the wildly different personalities of our co-workers and bosses. This leaves some uneasy and insecure about sharing even constructive feedback. I don't think surveys are the answer, but for some it is much easier to take those than try to tip-toe around.
I'd pick the sad face every week and type "this form makes me sad :( "
If you are unhappy it is usually obvious and your manager usually knows about it -- if they haven't done anything to rectify the situation, they likely can't or won't do anything about it.
Saying you are unhappy just creates a more tense situation.
In my experience, the only option you have in these situations is changing your role or group within your organization or leaving your organization for another job.
If you don't tell your management that you're unhappy, you're bound to remain unhappy because your management may not notice that you're upset, at least not in a specific way. Being given a clear problem, "I'm unhappy because of _____," gives us an actionable goal to work toward to making your work life more enjoyable.
Management aren't mind-readers, and it's particularly frustrating when you ask an employee if anything is up and they say "no," when you know there is an issue.
And most managers are, statistically, going to fall into good/mediocre/poor categories, all of whom will doubly need you to tell them when something's up.
Ctrl-F "privacy": no results. So in that case it's mandatory to always tick all the happiness boxes. You don't want to draw attention to yourself by being unhappy on record.
"what do you think of the CEO" is a question that only the CEO is interested in the answer to. That's a silly choice of question. Not a single person will be honest.
You can use Google docs. Or you can just walk up to people and ask how they're doing. This just feels passive-aggressive.
I put those off as long as possible until the nag emails start escalating.
And now you want me to do a weekly survey on whether or not I'm happy?
Other posters have brought this up. What about privacy? How do I know my answers will be anonymous? The company is (assumedly) paying for this. They're the customer. Do I really think they're not going to get this information if they want it?
Annoyingly, if I have to do this, you've now made me think of all these issues. There is a cognitive cost with doing so.
What possible reward/benefit is there for being honest? No, no, "I love the Leader!"
There should be other way to do this, this definitely doesn't work for me.
It was pretty easy to crank up the "training" on a spare computer. Then just reach over and click something random every once in a while and (poof!) you were done. I have no memory of most of the videos except that they usually portrayed idjits in sitcom-like skits ("Susan, do you think it's against our corporate ethics to steal this truck of PCs from the loading dock and sell them in a supermarket parking lot so we can buy more drugs for the team that's writing the malware that we sell protection services for? Whaddya think?")
Just having a lot of polls doesn't tell much of a story, I think. Most people will simply not do them.
As an employee, I would NEVER fill out this form. I'm the only guy in my department, and as soon as I started talking about aspects of my job, the boss would know who it is. And retaliate. Cuz he's a jerk.
Leadership 101: Go on the floor, talk with your people. You'll get the vibes right away.
Anonymity is key in these things or employees won't be able to answer truthfully. I can't tell if Vibe Catch is anonymous or not. Anyway, managers don't always know when something is wrong when they are dealing with multiple projects and a bunch of different employees. Trends over time are usually pretty interesting in these kinds of apps too.
It's been a while since I liked a typo this much.
I think the idea of actually checking for this kind of thing is great, I don't just want to attack this, but I think it certainly requires a culture which is genuinely open to this kind of criticism, and in my experience that's incredibly rare.