Kill me now
At work, in the grand quest to make everyone Happy! and Productive!, my corporate masters periodically do "employee satisfaction surveys." Well, we're about to be instructed to do another one -- the vomit-inducing Gallup 12 questions employee survey.
Why vomit-inducing? Is it the little inspirational video where Gallup hired a british actor to yammer on at you for 15 minutes or so, talking about how the people at gallop are much smarter than you, and how they scientifically proved that these 12 questions will answer everything about employee satisfaction in much the same way that the Micronesian Cargo Cults kept a steady stream of US goods flowing after the second world war finished and the US abandoned all of their military bases in the South Pacific. No, it's nothing like that, though I'm sure that the video raises the definition of patronising to new heights. No, what makes the gorge rise and the productivity come out is one of the questions.
Question number 10 (in parentheses, capital letters, quotated), is, in full:
Riight.
Now how would you answer this fucking stupid question? Remember, it's multiple choice, so you can't write a paragraph or two describing what the Gallop organization can do with their stupid survey, along with the phone number of the local sex shop so they can properly lubricate the survey before they process it in the recommended way.
I think I'll just bring a d20 and roll for my answers, then buy a whole bunch of lottery tickets in case the "anonymous" survey turns out to be not-so-anonymous.
Apparently this survey is the ISO9000 for 2005; thousands of companies are paying Gallup the Big Bucks to have their employees fill out a stupid multiple-choice quiz, which is then printed into a spiffy little document that (oh, dear lord) compares workgroups to divisions and to the company and to the weighted average of companies that have been suckered into paying for this quiz. And there's a certain sort of executive manager and HR drone that will all-but-orgasm over the comparison with other companies, so they can put on their advertising copy "we're a 90% Q12 company!" (translation: the beatings will continue until morale improves.)
My corporate masters are generally pretty sensible people who treat their employees well (with the notable exception of healthcare, but since the United States has the worst healthcare system in the first world there's not much they can do other than pick up the company and move it to Europe or Canada), but I just don't get this fascination with cargo-cult employee relations techniques.
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I always like references to Alice.
And just how 7th grade can that question be?