In the last blog, I discussed a survey my employer sent out to all employees. If they use the results, then they should address highlighted issues (if any), and aim to keep positive aspects unchanged. This blog is about the results.
The findings were presented to us by some of the Directors. It was full of hype as expected.
“We will provide an update on our journey to become an Employer of Choice and outline the key work-streams that underpin this business-wide programme; many of which will be supported and informed by the feedback captured as part of the Glint survey.”
Director
Firstly was a sales pitch of why Glint is good (some good business jargon and hype here):
- “Strategic approach to measuring engagement”,
- “ownership for engagement is enabled”,
- “Improved effectiveness and efficiency of surveying”,
- “Improved understanding of how we compare externally”,
- “Employer of Choice programme enabler.”
87% participation, standard participation for Glint is in the 70-80% range. Our Group-wide Engagement Index score is 70 (100-point rating).
The score is calculated from the first 2 questions of the survey, which were:
- I would recommend The Company as a great place to work
- How happy are you working at The Company?
The other questions in the survey are basically to drill-down deeper. Or in their words:
“to improve engagement, we need to focus on improving the more tactical areas included in the survey”
The questions were responded to on a 1-5 scale. The Rating breakdown was as follows:
- 67% positive (4,5)
- 23% neutral (3)
- 10% negative (1,2)
As a side-note, one department leader discussed his department’s score:
“our department engagement index is 55 which is a little bit lower than the company at 70”.
Departmental Manager
That kinda looks significant to me. 55 sounds very poor in isolation, and lagging behind the 70 as a whole.
There were around 2,000 total comments, left by 37% of respondents. They determined 58% of the comments were negative, 34% positive, 8% neutral. I assume this was judged by an AI, categorising the sentiment. Unclear if Glint provides this but it is a great feature if they do.
“It’s in the comments where the richest data is available to us”
Director
Why wasn’t it mandatory then? I felt it was way too easy to not think about the question and just give a random score without justification. I discussed this in the previous blog.
We were shown a tag cloud which is quite meaningless in isolation. Included words like:
- Development
- Action
- Knowledge
- Pressure
- Raise
- Barrier
- Manage
- Team member
- Deliver
- Workload
- Responsibility
- Request
- Software
- update
- Remote working
We seemed to score particularly high on “Camaraderie” (Question: I have a good working relationship with members of my team); and “Work-life Balance“: (Question: I am able to successfully balance my work and personal life). I personally scored these high.
“These particular results show that The Company, on a personal level, is a welcoming, fulfilling and supportive place to work where colleagues feel safe and cared for, in particular by their immediate teams, and can enjoy a role which does not infringe on their personal lives. This is a reassuring picture, reflecting the nature of our business, the quality of our people, and the importance of our values.”
Director
We were really bad at “Barriers to Execution“: (Question: We do a good job removing barriers that slow down our work); “Collaboration“: (Question: Teams collaborate effectively to get things done); and “Culture“: (Question: has a great culture). Personally I was unsure about Barriers To Execution and Collaboration, and I feel Culture is too vague without examples of what it actually means. I would have thought Barriers and Collaboration would vary drastically between departments, so amalgamating the score as a whole seems a bit random to me.
“Our opportunities reflect a picture that shows colleagues are most frustrated when it comes to being able to effectively do their job to a high standard, especially when this involves working with wider teams or departments – either due to internal processes and tools or a lack of effective cross-departmental collaboration, communication, appreciation or awareness.”
Director
The HR director was appalled that we also scored low in “I believe meaningful action will be taken as a result of this survey.”. Despite hyping up our focus for this Employee of Choice thing, our employees don’t believe the Senior Management will improve things! 😀
“We know from the survey that many colleagues are sceptical as to whether this new approach to measuring employee engagement and responding to employee feedback will result in any meaningful action being taken.”
HR Director
One comment they picked out suggested that people complain about things but don’t actually raise these issues with management, so suggested we need more “Director Q&A” Sessions, or an “Employee Forum” where we can ask questions or raise issues. Maybe we really do need a culture change.
The thing is, we once created a Slack channel where we could contact the Software Development department managers (so that was specific to my department only). The Managers did respond to some concerns and one issue I remember we complained about was communication, where the Head of Development sends an email to 3 managers below him, and then those 3 managers forward the email on to their line reports, who then have to forward the email on to their line reports; but someone will be on leave, or just didn’t forward it on – then people miss out on info. After promising they would put an end to the madness, I think 6 months later it just started again. Then after a few more months, the Slack channel was completely dead. I think another issue is that it seems so obvious when there are issues, it seems crazy to think that managers don’t know about them. I mean, that communication example is an obvious problem! So then people may feel like they don’t need to raise it, or think managers won’t change their ways. It also doesn’t help that the HR Director keeps dismissing people’s rants on Glassdoor. She is always like “this doesn’t reflect my experience“. Well yeah, you are on a high paid job sat in a fancy office, of course you don’t know what it’s like on the ground.
“I want to reassure you that we are committed to learning from these results and will dedicate time to identify what actions are needed or where further exploration is required, at a Group-wide level. By providing line managers with rich and actionable data via personalised dashboards, we are empowering you all to drive change within your areas too. This is not a top-down approach but a collective one where we all have a role to play.”
Director
Group-wide Objectives
- Improve cross-team collaboration
- Improve understanding of cross-team priorities including wider strategic clarity
- Ensure better communications between teams and business areas
- Equip colleagues to have honest conversations
- Create a mind-set change
Personally, I have no idea how you implement these. Surely some departments have these problems and others don’t. Only the individual departments would know if they can be fixed.
Q&A
Then in the Q&A section at the end, there was one complaint from Development, highlighting the increase in attrition and the general problem of us replacing Seniors with Juniors which was affecting the ability to complete projects on time.
Another complaint was how we posted record profits, boasted about the generous pay rises they dished out…but was still below the rate of inflation.
Another staff member challenged how someone had a correction to their pay due to the “gender pay gap”, but then excluded from the pay review because they already had a pay-rise that year. A similar thing happened to me actually where I was underpaid for my role and level of experience. It shouldn’t matter why you had a pay-rise before, you should get it adjusted for inflation as standard, and not be told you’ve already had a rise. All the current mindset does is re-introduce the pay disparity they were trying to address.
Another person made the point that sometimes Directors respond to questions on these Q&A sessions by saying they will “take it offline” and answer the person one-on-one. This means others in the company never see the answer to these tough questions – which then breeds a bad culture and then the feedback is only given via channels such as this Glint survey.
Closing Thoughts
You can easily understand why people doubt meaningful action will be taken from the results of the survey. We often highlight problems and then they just get shrugged off. I understand people always seem to moan about pay, so it is easy to shrug that off as “not an issue”.
I’ll be intrigued what they actually do to meet these objectives, and to become this “Employer of Choice” they keep stating.
Stranger Coding Tings 