For the past several years, we have been asked to take an employee survey. It is not
totally anonymous, when we do it on line from our home computers, that they can identify us one way or the other with our responses.
It is not to improve our work place or our work conditions or our
even our insurance benefits.
They want us to think that there will be a change, but if you think back how many of your responses have
been answered with actual changes? They don't care about our needs or our issues,
they only care or are interested in their big bonuses and raises and if giving
us an inch infringes on that, you will never see those changes.
In discussing his role in selling his services to management,
Martin Levitt
(page 137-8) discusses an anti-union service that he commonly sold.
The job of talking a businessman with no noticeable union problem
into buying “preventive” services was a bit more challenging, but we
consultants did it all the time. For those sales calls we made use of an
incomparable tool-the employee attitude survey. With its sheen of cool
scientific objectivity, the attitude survey, which later became known as
the “opinion” survey, has made believers out of a multitude of timorous
business administrators and won a great many clients for employee
relations and management consulting firms…
The attitude survey still reigns as one of the premier sales devices of
latter-day labor relations consultants, including the host of former
Sheridanites and Three M’ers, and their children, and their children’s
children. And why not? After all, how could a population conditioned to
check the political polls before making up its mind on electoral
candidates and social policy questions resist the temptation to find
answers to its business problems in the same way? Along with a battery
of astounding psychological tests purported to be capable of identifying
a proclivity toward theft, union activism, or other “undesirable”
behavior, the employee attitude survey is a shameful example of science
twisted into service by industry.
One of
the reasons why the EOS scores have been improving is that an increasing
number of us see the futility in providing candid responses. Think about
it.
