Recognition survey

A semi-anonymous employee survey was conducted at work. I say “semi-anonymous” because they seem to be treating the survey as anonymous, even though it was poorly designed. For example, respondents are asked to identify their department for the sake of rating their manager. If there are 100 people and 20 departments, you’ve narrowed it down to … 100 divided by 20 … five people. Like fishing survey respondents from a barrel.

The free-form text fields present a problem with those (cough) who have a peculiar vernacular. My signatures are run-on sentences, multiple-levels of parenthetical asides, and sarcastic metaphors. More pedestrian are responses with “y’all” occurring multiple times. (You think that’s Ross, our token Southerner?) Or there’s a pet issue that someone re-mentions. (Okay with the DVD player in the break room request. We fucking get it, Bill, thank you for your anonymous survey.)

By using my super powers, I obtained the raw responses, sliced them, diced them, and julienned them in anticipation of how the data would be communicated publicly to the worker bees.

Only the overall results were presented because one department’s manager fared poorly. People are comfortably numb except for the “benefits” and “feedback received.” These “scores” were low enough to evoke concern from the management team. Based on conversations I have had, the chief benefits issue is the cost of health insurance for anyone with dependents. The second biggest complaint comes from the new hires: our vacation allotment is anemic. The HR person, whose kids have long since graduated college, apparently has enough doubt that the health insurance costs are the issue that she has requested specific comments from people.

To address the lack of managerial feedback, the same department manager that fared poorly on “making smart decisions” is slated to do one-on-ones with his reports… like every other department in the company. Meanwhile, the HR people attended a class on feedback and rewards. No details were provided other than the class was “interesting” and they wanted to do an additional survey. The questions were:

1. What are your interests?
2. What kind of recognition do you prefer? (Public/private, written/verbal)
3. What form of recognition motivates you the most?
4. From whom do you most like to receive recognition?
5. What is the greatest recognition you have ever received?
   

These creep me out. Part of me wants to answer them sarcastically with completely inappropriate information:

1. Directing my own movies, executing opponents, intimidating the Western imperialists.
2. Public, spontaneous celebrations of my leadership. Public, planned celebrations are a good runner-up.
3. Statues, poetry, cognac.
4. My father.
5. Public nickname: “Dear Leader”

I could also justify ignoring it. A “Strengths Survey” was done two years ago ostensibly as a way to identify strengths and leverage those in career growth. Its true purpose was so the administrative department would know “how to deal with you.” That works both ways.

Thoughts?