engagement
May 09, 2015

Every couple of years, everyone in my office has to fill out a big survey on what is basically "how we feel about the company".

Actual Definition:
"Employee engagement is a workplace approach designed to ensure that employees are committed to their organisation's goals and values, motivated to contribute to organisational success, and are able at the same time to enhance their own sense of well-being."

Because it isn't enough to do your job and collect your pay and that's that. No, you have to be high as shit on the corporate koolaid, too. (The "Walmart Cheer" all over again. Ugh.)

And here's the thing. Over the past ten years or so, it has gone from being called the "Employee Satisfaction Survey", to the "Employee Engagement Survey", to the "People Equity Survey". That seems about right, in view of the trend in Corporate America to de-humanize the employees. We've gone from PERSONnel, to human RESOURCES, to people EQUITY. Well, it's a lot easier to eliminate equity than a person, I guess.

So at the same time they continue on a very determined and unwavering path to reduce the staff to mere figures on paper, they are looking to that same group of people to be head-over-heels in love with their job. They frame the survey as the opportunity for us to speak up about any issues we have with our jobs, and thus initiate positive change.

But that is not exactly how things seem to go down. There are a few different outcomes, actually:
A.)We stick our necks out, our middle-management gets a lot of crap about poor satisfaction numbers, and then we all spend the next year or two wasting lots of time on meetings and action plans and various other bureaucratic time-wasters, in order to improve. They beat us down until we are thoroughly sick of it all and tell them what they want to hear. Nothing actually changes except that we are all more dissatisfied than ever.

B.) Having learned by mistakes of option A, we mark go down the rows of questions marking everything the same--neutral, decent or yippy-skippy hip-hooray. The whole thing comes out skewed and screwed, and everybody gets flack from the top management for not taking it seriously and wasting the company's money.

C.) We somehow manage to hit the sweet spot with our replies, corporate masturbation gets a "happy ending", and the powers that be get to build another floor onto their skyscraper of self-delusion.

In my perception, a focus on the engagement of the employees could be useful, if they intended to actually use it as designed. But they don't. They are only seeking validation for their own management and HR decisions. If they get it, they pat their own backs, and if they don't, they beat ours. And the very engagement they appear to desire so much gets destroyed in the process.

It would be funny, if it wasn't so sad.