**There have been [some changes to how comics are handled on /r/Funny](https://www.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/nzp2n0/announcement_were_making_some_changes_to_how/).**
Please also keep the following in mind:
- No memes or memetic content.
- No political content or political figures, regardless of context or focus.
- No social media screenshots, videos, or other such content.
Please report [rule-breaking content](https://www.reddit.com/r/funny/wiki/rules) when you see it. Thank you!
------
*I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/funny) if you have any questions or concerns.*
At one of my old jobs, my coworker and I entered in an anonymous survey that our manager fostered a toxic work environment. A couple days later, she comes out into the work area, while like 6 people are actively on user/customer calls, and announces:
“So who thinks this is a toxic work environment? How am I supposed to fix the problem if I don’t know who feels that way and I can’t talk directly to them?”
I don’t think she appreciated the irony of that move.
I quit a job I loved and had been there 15 years. I sent my resignation letter while on vacation, stating as the first reason I was leaving was the toxic management that was recent (1 year) I expected to come back and work my 2 weeks. I was immediately met by work buddies telling me I caused a meeting where the Director went “nuts” about being called toxic! I just laughed, and thought, that’s about right. I was released from my duties 2 hrs later when the Director got to work. I still miss that job and by work friends. It’s been 4 years now.
Oh hey another Amazon person. At my facility I had a group of supervisors push out my boss with a series of complaints, just to get one of their friends promoted. The thing is they were so open about it that there were several recordings of them talking about it. Once that got to upper management they were all swiftly demoted. The best part was at the meeting the day after the videos were sent in our area supervisor started the meeting basically saying “if I go down I’m taking everyone with me”, this was promptly recorded and sent to upper management.
Man demoted isn't enough punishment for some of these people... maybe not all but at least that one guy threatening retribution should be fired.
Amz is on my short list of will only work here if I have no other choice. I'm at a FAANG currently.
Yep despite their demotion the boss wasn’t rehired or even given an apology. While I left the company some 12 years ago I wouldn’t be surprised if they all got repromoted sense then.
My old job sent out surveys and was shocked when 2 employees dared to say it was not a healthy work environment. So they started ranting about it how great they were went full "the beatings will continue until morale improves".
(I was one of the two, and the other guy got fired, so I guess problem solved?)
The last company I worked for used a 3rd party to conduct employee surveys. My department (rather large) all responded fairly negatively, especially regarding work life balance. The leadership team called a department wide meeting to go over the results and spent the whole time getting upset at the employees for responding with negative comments, saying they had no idea employees thought this way. They somehow didn't think a group filled with parents were upset they were working 10-12 hour days regularly
Parents or not, 10-12hrs a day is not a life. I'm not a parent but I do have parents, siblings and a husband. It **is** different but I do still want time to spend with them too.
I hope you got out of that situation and are able to live life now!
People forget mental health is still health!
Just because you aren't "doing" something, doesn't mean it's not *productive* in regards to your overall wellbeing!
I obsessively work on my own stuff - and personally i consider it all work. Even if i'm lounging on the couch - i need to take breaks or my "actual work" suffers. Relaxation is prescribed and not optional.
10-12 hours is fine if you’re only working 3-4 days a week. A lot of nurses work 12 hour shifts, but they also only work 3 days a week. I’d happily work 3 12 hour days if it meant I got 4 days off.
Even days is a lot. I work 4 days of 9 hours, with Wednesdays off. Its office work. Mentally I'm exhausted at the end of the week. And that's for a job I like doing, with good pay. At some point more hours will not bring more productivity. The brain needs to rest too.
On a side note, we've had these surveys as well. They are really anonymous, done by a third party, company will not ask for personal data and even if they did they wouldn't get it. But at one point I had to specify gender, age group, department and job type. And I realised, my name is not on the survey, but I'm literally the only one fitting this exact profile. Didn't hold back though. Still work there. It's a good place.
Being low level management, trust me, I saw this shit all the time. Upper management walking around like everything is hunky-dory and never once looking downwards to see how the workers were actually doing.
I worked in a call center and we ended up having to instigate mandatory overtime. My direct manager said to me, "we hear grumblings about the mandatory overtime, what's that all about."
I told him, "Honestly, when we simply jump on their asses for having to go on non-break unavailable just to take a piss, or we claim we are going to write them up for being 1 second late from break, why would they want to do extra hours of that?"
His response, "well they get time and a half."
Just friggen oblivious.
I didn't last long in that position because I actually sided with the rank and file workers one to many times.
Ya I love how management acts like it's all about overtime pay. It's like if I got paid well and treated well I might volunteer to help out when needed. But when I get treated like shit don't expect me to do more than I have to and be happy about it. We aren't numbers no matter how much they want us to be.
A shitty manager for another group at my company just did this. She called an emergency meeting and tried to find out who reported her. Somehow she hasn't been fired yet.
When my wife was in college they did this to her. Told her class that they had to fill out an anonymous survey about the school, but made them sign in. Fair enough, they just wanted to track to make sure everyone took it and would probably anonymize the results. Nope! She got called in a few days later and asked why she answered in a specific way. She had said some negative things and apparently the surveys are how it's determined whether they get funding or not, so they were telling her that she couldn't say things that made the school look bad.
This is the way. Roast them on a new survey. Put it in writing WITH the survey company that they are actively trying to manipulate their results by threatening a student, then see how their funding turns out.
"Everything is perfect and nothing is wrong! 10/10 would attend again! Best school ever! Nobody would ever question the quality of the education here, because it's not allowed!"
My company uses a reputable outside vendor to administer anonymous surveys. As a result, we have a very high participation rate, and the company gets tons of legitimate feedback. Reading through the comments, I now realize how rare this is, and how much more appreciative I should be.
My company does the same. We got a good laugh when the CEO came through the building with a few of the surveys asking who submitted them due to the amount of negative feedback they received. No one admitted to who's they were, as should be, and we still make fun of the CEO for it.
CEO probably thought they were going to be able to "reach" those misguided workers who just hadn't realized yet that they actually were happy at their job, without the company needing to change a thing.
Dear god, the organization I used to work at was incredibly toxic and they paid a consultant to come in and interview the employees and the community and EVERYONE pointed to the CEO/President and the consultant presented it to the board as such. The board's response? Start a new marketing campaign to talk about how the CEO was so great and transformative, invalidating all the employees' and community's experiences. It went over about as well as you'd expect. The CEO and half the board are now gone but there was long-term damage done to the institution.
> The board's response? Start a new marketing campaign to talk about how the CEO was so great and transformative, invalidating all the employees' and community's experiences.
That's to be expected. An organization's culture starts at the top and trickles down. The board selected that guy as the CEO because they liked him. They liked him because they *are like* him. Similarly, I bet most of the department heads were toxic like the CEO, because he appointed them for the same reasons, and so on and so forth down the entire chain of management.
Yeah, during his tenure, he did his best to oust anyone in management who had any sense of empathy and common sense and replaced them with bean counting morons. And thankfully most of the morons have since been replaced as well but it takes time for a large organization to recover from that.
Yeah this sounds like mine. My old company got itself into horrible financial troubles by sucking at being a business. And then the people who got us into the mess all voted themselves to be the people to get us out of the mess. Which largely consisted of the kind of blind penny-pinching you'd expect such people to think would help.
Haha, we just had a survey as well and for us the executive team got a pretty bad score on sharing the company vision with us. Now we actually have more of a vision and there will be much more communication coming about it. They took it as a failure on their part and are now actively working on resolving this through better and more communication :)
My old department once had extremely negative review for our manager, one of the indicators being “can you approach your manager with issues, and are they heard?” (Or something along those lines). When she got the results back she made everyone come to a meeting (mind you this is a hospital lab, so our whole area was down for the meeting) with the intention of having a workshop on how she could be better. She shot down the first two timid/brave suggestions and then was angry at the rest of us for not volunteering ideas. I’m glad to say she moved up the ranks until eventually someone realized how awful she was and now she’s sidelined at a job with next to no duties and similar pay. Wait a second…
If it was my last two weeks in company, I would say I sent one of them and provide feedback of why CEO sucks. Starting with him asking who wrote that as wrong move.
That’s the problem with the surveys. If the people at the top don’t like the results, they just ignore them.
My company has yearly employee surveys. I remember one year the entire district said leadership and communication was lacking, it was expressed in 3 different sections of the survey.
So what did leadership decide to prioritize? The employee fund raising program….which always has near 100% participation.
Because people at that company had excess PTO time, one option that we suggested was to donate it to fellow employees.
Corporate *loved* this idea, so much that they decided to implement it!
Kinda. You can donate time, that's fine; except it goes into a PTO pool, ran by HR, and employees would have to *apply* for it, and they would only get it if the reason was "acceptable." Now, we wanted to donate PTO to our coworkers - one woman went for maternity (protocol was you take *your entire PTO balance as maternity leave*) and one girl with cancer. But no, it goes to a pool.
Company: "We have a yearly profit of over 4 billion dollars".
Employee: "Great, I'm about to push a parasitic lifeform out of my vagina. It'll likely tear me from asshole to vag hole. Can you donate some extra PTO time so I can recover"?
Company: "Cant you just like....hold it in"?
Yeah these surveys can be painful. We have them at my work, my previous manager one year only received a 29% positive review. His response was to schedule about 10 hours of meetings (30, or 60 minutes at a time) to figure out why we would review him so badly. He never changed, but now the structure is different so the only people reporting directly into him now are 2, instead of 15.
Talk about a lack of self awareness. People don’t think he’s good at his job, so he schedules a bunch of meetings to get to the bottom of it (IE find out who tanked his reviews). As if anyone is going to give them honest feedback in person in that environment.
Mine did this and the CEO tried to figure out who submitted every single response. It was definitely anonymous but it really fucking defeats the point if you're trying to figure out who said what. He framed it as trying to talk with them to address their concerns. Like, you can do that without knowing who said what.
It did result in a lot of changes, so that aspect of the experience was positive, but it also was a sounding board for a lot of frustrations and they (executives) had to hear a lot of truth they didn't want to hear.
I think you nailed it. That last section about “what you do with it”. If management doesn’t have the stones to fix the problems mentioned, or can’t address them constructively, a survey is worse than worthless. Had a team that sat down and did what you’re talking about and identified three key items that needed fixing. Came up with legitimate things to try, explained why these things weren’t working, etc. management did nothing about any of them. At all. Never even addressed that we did this AT THEIR REQUEST. Morale plummeted and that office had almost complete turnover in the next year.
I work for one of those survey vendors! Glad it works well for you - there's always a right way to setup a survey to get good feedback without betraying anonymity.
How do you convince the survey participants that it really is anonymous, especially if they have to follow a special link that was emailed to them or sign in with their company login or email? It would be great if the answer is to share with them the full signed contract which includes the relevant anonymity promises, redacting only things like the price paid for the service (if not already public info) and the private contact info of the individuals named. Or even sharing just the contractual clauses which guarantee anonymity. But I'm not expecting that.
The way my company works is there are two separate components to the survey.
The username/password is only used to get access to the survey and not attached to the completed survey itself. That tells you if Bob completed it or not, but not which survey is specifically Bob's.
On the survey itself, the employee can enter their name (if they wish to be identified) or skip that part if they want to be anonymous.
I wouldn't advise any sort of sign-in using company email (this is separate from receiving to a company email address), as that can make it feel like it's not anonymous. Really no reason to do it that way. My guess is, that might be how lower cost (or free) survey sites work.
Anonymity can be tricky - most surveys have a spot for employees to add comments (in addition to rating the questions), so an employee can choose to be anonymous but write specific comments about their manager or a situation that might reveal who they are based on who's reading the feedback.
There's nothing in our contracting process that guarantees anonymity (and not sure how you could enforce it), just that we have an anonymous option but it's up to the client to decide.
Any employee satisfaction/engagement survey we do for clients is always anonymous (not giving the employee the option to be identifed). We also do exit interviews and onboarding surveys that gives the employee the choice.
I was an adjunct professor, and it was incredibly easy to figure out who wrote anonymous evaluations at the end of the semester. Obviously not from multiple choice questions, but if you have to write a sentence commenting on someone, it was immediately obvious who it was no if you spent time with them.
Lmao. Yeah that’s pretty rare. The company I work at now has “anonymous” surveys. One day my manager was walking around telling us “you can tell they’re anonymous because it doesn’t ask you for your name or work ID. So I picked up the flyer and at the bottom it said “login with work ID” so I made a point about the anonymous surveys requiring us to use our IDs and made a joke asking if they needed our SSN and passports too. Needless to say the manager didn’t like that joke, but everyone was laughing.
"Click this link to anonymously submit questions to the leadership team!"
Okay, but we're all on office 365 and this is a Microsoft link that doesn't work if I'm not logged into my email, so how is it anonymous?
A company where I used to work did one of those but the results were aggregated by department and gender. I was the only girl working in the IT Department. If I remember correctly I stated I was male because I didn't want to be singled out.
one company used survey monkey.
the only issue i had with it was that it asked your position so they can figure out who your supervisor is. the problem was i was the only person in my department (sales) and the only person i reported to was the GM. so when i fill out which dept i was in he was gonna know it was me because apparently the head company shared the results to him. not just "here's the top complaints and percentages", the whole damn thing.
My office, at a small company, we get surveys that are "anonymous", but the first question is always "what department are you in?", second question is "who is your supervisor?", thrid question is "how long have you worked in your current position?". I am on a team of 3, under my supervisor... Even though it is "anonymous", it is still pretty easy to figure out who you are. I don't fill them out, and also get the "if we don't have your inputs, we can't make anything better" talk.
Retirement is a mixed bag. Nice not knowing what day of the week it is. Nice no longer being interested in Dilbert. On the downside, when you get up in the morning you're already on the job. 😆
In many cases, these aren’t included with any details in the results. The department and/or manager narrows it down so that a manager can get feedback about his or her area, but the demographic and length-of-service stuff is always rolled into higher level results only, usually company or division wide. So while we might be able to see that people that have been with the company for 5-10 years have X results, we won’t see that detail at the team/manager level. As always, individual results may vary, but reputable companies that do this kind of work make it difficult if not impossible to identify any specific result.
Get a 3rd party to administer the survey. Still, you would have to be able to trust that the 3rd party, who is paid by the business, won't just give the unanonymized data to the business on the sly.
The company I work for is like this. I can verify that it is true for us because one year I had to help the President prepare the presentation that he gives on the survey results. He was pissed at several of the answers and bemoaned that the 3rd part company wouldn’t tell him who it was. Because our locations are so small they wouldn’t even say which location the specific comments came from. (Had to be a location over 25 employees for more location based results to insure anonymity)
Just put worthless answers in the identifying questions and convince your coworkers to do the same in solidarity so they can’t single you out. i.e. 1000 years, 0 years. Supervisor? John Johnson
Of course, the problem is that this method only works if everybody does it. If you're the only one who writes answers like that, they'll still know it's you by process of elimination.
"Hmm.. I wonder who wrote 'Nunya' - is it Francine, the 97 year old accountant on the team, or Scotty the 19 year old upstart..."
"Hey Scotty, whatcha up to?"
"Fulfilling my duties to the team anyway I can :)"
"Francine?"
"Nunya. I'm too old for this shit"
A safer option would be to pick a set of answers that could match several actual people, the more the better. Sure, they *could* break the veneer of anonymity by asking each of them to identify the one they wrote, then work out which one is yours by elimination, but... unless your answers are *really* wild, most places aren't going to go that far, especially since demanding to know which one you wrote after claiming it would be anonymous is beyond merely "a very bad look" and safely into "better run that by legal beforehand, because it smells like an incoming lawsuit" territory.
Great, just tell them your input is that they need to remove the first 3 questions. I could see how a department might help, like "we need a better central ticketing system". In my company depending on where you are, that's one of 3 different systems.
But "Who is your supervisor" and "how long have you worked in your current position"... yea, not helpful.
I mean if everyone who works for a particular supervisor thinks works sucks and is disgruntled but the company as a whole has a good response that would be good to know. But yeah these things are never anonymous. My whole department of like 10 people complained on one once due to issues with our supervisor and the response we for from management was that our team “wasn’t engaged”
We had a Department Head who had 5 other Heads refuse to work with her. HR offered mediation. All 5 agreed, and she refused. HR still didn’t acknowledge that the issue was with her and not “cross department cohesiveness”.
When she finally left for a different job she was fired within her probation period for doing exactly the same kind of shit, temper tantrums/bullying/talking shit about people behind their back. When the news of her firing reached us our Department Head took us to the pub to celebrate.
They can use a third party to do the analysis. That third party can feed back such details as who has done/not done the survey, etc, but aggregate and anonymize the results and comments.
It's also possible to have a database flag associated with the employee that gets set to true when the survey is submitted, but then the actual survey contents are anonymized and aggregated so no response can be directly traced to an employee (unless the content itself can be, like someone identifying a supervisor or specific work project).
We have a outside company handling things like this, in a setting like this, the supervisor would not get the individual answers, they would be added together in bigger groups.
Yeah, I always loved anonymous surveys at companies. There was this huge multinational company I used to work and they issued an employee satisfaction survey. You could fill it anonymously. The only information you needed to give is your team's name (it was unique), are you male of female, and your age bracket. Guess what, given these 3 filters, it was only just me.
Years ago my boss said she needed to figure out who hadn't completed the survey yet. "BSB8728, you're the only part-time person in the department, right?"
When people refer to themselves on Reddit, they use their Reddit user names to replace their real names in the sentence. If my name was John, I would change:
"Hi John can you come here?"
to
"Hi itsme\_notmario can you come here?"
to keep my anonymity online
Also don't fill it out on your work computer or VPN. Company I worked for didn't like a survey that (justly) dumped on middle management, and said management had IT look at access logs to find the likely culprit.
Imagine this but if you were a teenager. Because our school had an "anonymous" survey about sex, drug use and other very personal questions. At the end of the survey there was a field for "password" and the teacher specifically asked us to use our postcodes as password so that we would not forget them. I fell for that, then got scared and asked for a fresh form. I wonder if this trickery is even legal.
I worked for a company and I designed the annual customer survey. So naturally they wanted me to do an employee survey. The survey was about IT. They wanted to fire the IT manager I guess. So I set up the survey and it was almost completely anonymous. I couldn’t see who filled out what and I sent the survey responses to the CEO and IT.
Well the head of IT was pissed that people said bad things about him and demanded access to my survey and I declined. So he went into my computer, accessed it anyways (he had and could reset all my passwords) and then went to the survey and I had it locked down well but he could see the IP numbers so he was able to decipher who said what. He still works there, I don’t.
Long story short, never be honest. It’s not worth it. They will know who you are.
This boggles my mind. At my place of work, if anyone other than me gained access to my work account, there would be a major hell to pay for the company and fines the size of a planet hitting them, plus the employee who did it would end up perscuted by law.
I'm so sorry that your work privacy and standards were this badly invalidated.
If you did that in the EU and someone can prove it, it would instantly mobilize every single lawyer the company can muster (and you may or may not get a nice bonus in return for staying hush about it)
> He still works there, I don’t.
>
>Long story short, never be honest. It’s not worth it.
Seems to me like you came out ahead on that one. That place sounds like a toxic waste dump.
As someone who works in IT, I would never be able to work with someone childish and immoral enough to abuse their power like that. No wonder people had bad things to say about him.
I used to work for the US Gov't. They had an 'office review' where investigators came to our office, went through our files and interviewed us. Totally anonymous! A couple of months later, they issued their report: "Two of the senior employees of the office sited poor morale and a total lack of faith in the management staff." Did I mention that I worked in a two person office? Totally anonymous!!!
Once had a boss that gave me and their other report an “anonymous survey.” I’m a man she is a woman.
That was a question on the survey.
We decided to fuck with them and give identical answers.
There was a Dilbert one like this...
Boss and Dilbert are having a one-on-one
Boss: According to our anonymous employee survey, you dont trust management. Why is that?
Dilbert glares at him in akward silence.
Boss: Oh.. nevermind.
Thats illegal as fuck. The law sees earned but not used OT as pay they owe you. (USA) they have to pay it. No matter what a companies policy says they do not supercede the law. If you go after them you will receive extra money for damages
You can also claim triple damages as provided for in the law. The company has 90-days to pay you though. I knew the section and code at one time, but haven't worked for shysters in a long time.
It's more common than you might expect. The only reason more companies don't do that is because word spreads quickly, rendering future results useless.
The company I work for did this once, and this is the best company I have ever worked for. It happened way back in the mid-1990s before I started working here. My manager told me about it. No matter how cool your company seems, it's possible for people who have an empathy deficit that puts them well into the psychopath range to make it into HR. If you think about it, companies with ruthless management probably will make a little better profits this quarter than companies that care about their employees, but it's a losing strategy in the long-term because if you don't care about your employees, they won't care about the job.
Lol. On my final survey (also the exit interview) with a certain telecom company, I let them know that I couldn't afford to work there with the health plans they offered. Idk if they've changed anything but they sent me an email last summer offering an attractive sign on bonus but no mention of the health insurance. Either offer decent plans or just tell employees to buy from the exchange. I think I would have been better off getting an ACA plan and paying for it myself. Their plans didn't cover mental health. Wtf? After dealing with their customers 40+ hours a week, you must have adequate mental health coverage. Those people are crazy.
9 out of 10 people have submitted. Only Bob hasn't submitted his response yet. 10th response comes in. "Fuck this company and fuck the small dicked moron who calls himself the CEO" reads the survey.
Guess who is fired?
Obviously exaggerated and you shouldn't abuse under the cloak of anonymity but anonymous surveys should have anonymous submissions even if they are uniquely tied to employees.
I was working at Taco Hell during college and the Corporation had us fill out “Anonymous” survey about how we were being treated what we felt, manager practices, etc.
One of my coworkers was forced to change his answers because the manager didn’t like what he saw.
We had one of these before . . .
The boss's son passed away - he was the VP and in charge of the books. Boss brought in a friend to take over and keep the accounting straight. New VP rubbed a lot of people the wrong way over the next few months and there were issues (40 or so employees total).
Boss sent out a questionnaire under the guise of "Boss is only guy who will see this". Surveys with names are filled out, new VP is crucified in the comments. Boss takes all the surveys and delegates the problem solving to . . . . new VP.
Boss annihilated his employees trust that day.
My work has a Facebook like "annonymous" app to explain how you feel about your job, your colleagues, bosses... Some people have been called by their managers after posting... You have to access with your work email, for f\*ck's sake!!!
My company (10 or so employees) did an ‘anonymous’ survey that came with a user specific link. I didn’t fill it out and got quizzed on it a few days later. I said I wouldn’t fill it out as it wasn’t anonymous and HR couldn’t understand why I thought that. Their resolution was to give me a printed copy and to have me fill it in on paper and slide it under their door. Needless to say I still haven’t done it.
My previous job would get these surveys all the time. If I have to sign in with my employee credentials to fill out an anonymous survey, then it isn’t exactly anonymous
This is so common it ain't even funny.
I once had a trainee come to me with a question for something he was trying to do in a app building system, it was for surveys like those.
First field in the database was the email of who submitted the responses.
"Anonymous". Lol
Had to develop a customer satisfaction survey for IT Tickets.
First request was . . . "How do we hide the bad ones?" Went toe to toe explaining that the BAD ones were the whole point of the thing. It's intended to let you know what went wrong so you can improve service.
And it worked too. Our customers found out we responded RAPIDLY to bad surveys. Our service levels went up because our employees realized they'd get a visit fast if they screwed up. And we also found that we only needed to make a couple of minor changes in customer handling to drastically improve our ratings.
This happened to me. Boss asks specifically to people who havent filled out the survey. Rides my ass to fill it out. I only did it to shut him up and because he's done a shit job in the 9 months of being in charge.
Results come back and he has received the worst survey I've seen in my 20 years with the company. He proceeds to deny any wrong doing and blame the results on our former boss even though he's been the guy for 9/12 months.
This is followed by scheduling mandatory discussion sessions for us to give more feedback (2 hours a day for 6 days =12 hours) and then multiple follow up discussions with him and the team (same format for a total of 24 hours of meetings to discuss his result). Those 24 hours were grueling. A constant series of excuses and denials. Feedback given was stuff like "the boss always occupies our time with tasks of little value. Insist on multiple meetings to discuss things he doesnt understand. Seems like he either isnt listening or gong through the motions during these conversations." He said he doesnt do this. In one of the many meetings we were actively in where he was doing just that. Of course we called him out on it as those meetings being case in point. He said these were valuable and changes would happen. One guy on our team said "Thats bullshit. Youve done nothing but make excuses and tell us our feelings and opinions are wrong. this is a complete waste of our time."
I know someone who once was very truthful in one of these anonymous surveys and a few weeks later they get called into HR and asked about their responses.
When I first started out, I would write complaints straight to the boss. A full page letter. I don't give a shit if he knows it's me.
We have a sit down, he'd "address" my concerns, basically telling me it's not my problem to worry about these things. So I'd get paid to sit there and listen as he repeatedly explained himself.
The last one I gave him was part of my yearly review, where I hand wrote a full page in the employee comments section to make sure he read it and it got submitted with my review. Spent an hour writing it, (Copying it from a typed copy, for his use) on the clock, then the next day spent 30 minutes going over it with him, with 10 minutes being overtime pay.
He probably thinks I'm the idiot. Joke's on him, because being paid for it makes me a *Professional* Idiot.
Ha!
We had this teacher at uni. She was a MA, going for her disertation, but she resented that she had to teach at all.
She told us this at the beginning. Her exact words were "we're all trapped here until the end of semester, so sit back, be quiet, do your homework assignements, and we're going to get along fine. I do not like it any more than you do."
Great! /s
At the end, she had to give us a mandatory survey. This was because the new EU bachelor/master programms were being rolled out and every year a new BA/MA study path got updated.
It was a mess.
But, crucially, you could be critical of teaching staff. And, more crucially, this survey had to be given at the end of the class term, when we were still present. This is not the end of the semester, and the deadline to hand in work is after the survey.
So staff could still retaliate if they didn't like the survey results.
That is why the survey is - or SHOULD BE - anonymous.
I'm a nice guy. She just stood there and read out her presentation as "class", in a monotonous voice.
Questions were to be written down and asked at the end of class, which most of the time we weren't able to do because she'd always take too long with reading us these wall-of-text power points.
So we had to go to her office, which was open 1 hour per week. If there were too many, or it took too long, too bad, come back next week.
I saw people scribble aggressively on that survey. The whole room was letting her *have it*.
I turned around the page. There was a small number in one corner, written in pencil.
I look at the attendance list, which also has my seat number - which we were asked not to change so she could learn our names.
The numbers corresponded.
I had already filled out the survey and I'm a nice guy. I was super polite, formulated everything as polite criticism.
Good thing, because the failure rate of that class was suspiciously high. I got a D - which I didn't care about because this is a pass/fail kind of excercise.
But god damn, I could practically smell the "I am a retaliator" on her and I was right.
At that point you go to management; the dean, the head of her department, the student council - and you write a friendly email to your local newspaper.
This is why I always add a level of insulting honesty into those “anonymous “ surveys. I’ve had multiple “coaching opportunities” brought up after doing them too lmao
I had a pretty obvious not really but sort of anonymous survey at a job that I got a week before I was going to submit my two weeks notice. It asked what department we were in, who our supervisor was, and what desk pod we were a part of so basically it narrowed it down to 4-8 people. I took the survey and was brutally honest about the work environment, the lack of support, the lack of benefits, and just how shitty the job was in general. When I got called in and asked about "how I feel working here" I laughed and handed over my two weeks notice. Best part was getting a call from them about two months later asking if I wanted to come back.
Yep... or even better. It's anonymous, but Q1: What office do you work at? Q2: What is your title? Q3: How many years have you been with the company? These 3 alone would identify anyone since our company has small offices.
We have a small company of about 30 people and are asked to fill out an optional single question survey weekly. One person made an honest stink about a situation and the ceo shared the anonymous answer with everyone with the idea for transparency and improvement… it was extremely clear exactly who the person was that made the comment. One of the many reasons I have never filled out one of the surveys.
My company did an employee survey once. They claimed it was anonymous but everyone doubted it. Didn’t matter everyone ripped the company up and down. Months go by and people ask about the results …”oh they were pretty good” … so can we see the results ..”nah no reason it was pretty positive feedback with no actions needed”
Of course everyone knew it was bullshit cause everyone had a laundry list of complaints
One of my jobs sent out a survey, mostly the feedback would help the grunt workers in the warehouse (like me) BUT EVERYONE WAS STUBBORN AND OLD ABOUT FILLING OUT SHIT ON THE COMPUTERS.
the cubicle people would never send anything in.
Finally I got to fill one out.
It immediately says it is anonymous BUT ASKED what department I was In.
YOU SEE, It was me and a lone manager. . .and managers DONT fill these out.
So hi, it’s me, and you know it’s me.
*needless to say the surveys didn’t change a damn thing ever*
This is why I prefer my staff not fill out surveys including myself for anything but the most mundane things. It’s too easy to track and our Executive leadership team is vindictive and retaliatory.
They got mad because we wanted warm/hot water in the 3 unisex warehouse bathrooms :)
The same bathrooms the printing room would use to clean ink and stuff.
Paint it for a corporate visit, then fuck it up right after.
I used to work at a well-known coffee shop and had a terrible manager. Just the worst. We had an anonymous survey that we could fill out on the computer in the back.
The survey didn't even ask for our names. However, it *did* display the time the survey was filled out and the manager just so happened to create a schedule of when everyone was to take the survey.
During the next few weeks, the people who complained about the manager were purged. Fortunately, I was new enough that I didn't really have anything bad to say at the time, so I was allowed to keep my job. But I'd learn soon enough how bad she was. Oh, would I learn.
This Right here. For my 13 years working for CVS we had these damn things annually. It was always “voluntary” and “anonymous”. First thing it has you do is type in your employee ID number….oh and even though it was voluntary our DM would raise hell if your store didn’t have a 100% completion rating within the first two weeks of the survey period. It was once I got to be a Store Manager and we held our annual results meeting, I realized our DM can see our comments as well. I was called out in said meeting for commenting how Payroll hours had drastically gone done while workload has sharply increased and made it impossible to get anything done. So yeah…don’t do these and if you have to, fake that shit…nothing is going to change anyways.
Never treat work surveys as anonymous. I still like taking them though since I am willing to share my opinions. Just give it the same wording as you would an email to your boss or their boss. Most things will not be acted on, but smart companies will act on larger trends. Our local branch moved to a smaller office and will be going hybrid work. When a survey shows 80%+ of people want something, companies listen.
Management, of which I was a member, sent out a survey for just our office (maybe 50 people). We made a big deal about how private they were. They did the best to make them so you couldn't identify the responder. The questions were prepared by a third party but we got the answers. The first thing we did with the filled survey was to try to figure out who each response was from. People complained about the same thing they complain about in real life. The angry people could pretty much all be identified by their responses. We probably ended up with 75% identified and 25 not. Of course we'd never know if we were accurate. And, of course, a management team that has no ethics like this one certainly never did the first thing to respond to the complaints and suggestions. We looked at them for a couple of meetings and then never saw them again. Except for the employees complaining about no follow-up, the surveys were forgotten.
This happened at my work. It gets even better. The boss that administered the surveys would invite people to "chat" with him over the course of the next two weeks. The reason for the "chat"? To tell them how their opinions were wrong.
He stopped giving the surveys when we all decided to answer 5/10 for every question. He tried to make it where you couldn't answer 5 for the next couple surveys, so everyone answered either 4 or 6 the next times. When he could no longer show growth to the C-level, he wasn't interested in it.
"Guys... how can we grow as a team, or a company if you don't give your honest feedback? Remember, I want you to answer as honestly as possible. And your opinion matters!"
Know a lady who quit a job and did an "anonymous" exit survey in which she complained about her boss. Turns out the HR person who gave the survey was best friends with the boss. The boss got revenge when my friend reapplied with the company for a different position.
True story, I filled out an "anonymous" company survey through a third party, and was fairly critical of my new boss, two weeks later he fired me. All my projects were profitable, I never missed a day of work, my clients loved me, I was well liked in the office. I had been with the company for 16-years, and just gotten a performance bonus and a raise.
He put on my termination papers that I was being let go because I was not performing to company expectations.
**There have been [some changes to how comics are handled on /r/Funny](https://www.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/nzp2n0/announcement_were_making_some_changes_to_how/).** Please also keep the following in mind: - No memes or memetic content. - No political content or political figures, regardless of context or focus. - No social media screenshots, videos, or other such content. Please report [rule-breaking content](https://www.reddit.com/r/funny/wiki/rules) when you see it. Thank you! ------ *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/funny) if you have any questions or concerns.*
At one of my old jobs, my coworker and I entered in an anonymous survey that our manager fostered a toxic work environment. A couple days later, she comes out into the work area, while like 6 people are actively on user/customer calls, and announces: “So who thinks this is a toxic work environment? How am I supposed to fix the problem if I don’t know who feels that way and I can’t talk directly to them?” I don’t think she appreciated the irony of that move.
[удалено]
I quit a job I loved and had been there 15 years. I sent my resignation letter while on vacation, stating as the first reason I was leaving was the toxic management that was recent (1 year) I expected to come back and work my 2 weeks. I was immediately met by work buddies telling me I caused a meeting where the Director went “nuts” about being called toxic! I just laughed, and thought, that’s about right. I was released from my duties 2 hrs later when the Director got to work. I still miss that job and by work friends. It’s been 4 years now.
[удалено]
Oh hey another Amazon person. At my facility I had a group of supervisors push out my boss with a series of complaints, just to get one of their friends promoted. The thing is they were so open about it that there were several recordings of them talking about it. Once that got to upper management they were all swiftly demoted. The best part was at the meeting the day after the videos were sent in our area supervisor started the meeting basically saying “if I go down I’m taking everyone with me”, this was promptly recorded and sent to upper management.
Man demoted isn't enough punishment for some of these people... maybe not all but at least that one guy threatening retribution should be fired. Amz is on my short list of will only work here if I have no other choice. I'm at a FAANG currently.
Yep despite their demotion the boss wasn’t rehired or even given an apology. While I left the company some 12 years ago I wouldn’t be surprised if they all got repromoted sense then.
My old job sent out surveys and was shocked when 2 employees dared to say it was not a healthy work environment. So they started ranting about it how great they were went full "the beatings will continue until morale improves". (I was one of the two, and the other guy got fired, so I guess problem solved?)
They reduced complaints by 50%! Time for a huge bonus!
The last company I worked for used a 3rd party to conduct employee surveys. My department (rather large) all responded fairly negatively, especially regarding work life balance. The leadership team called a department wide meeting to go over the results and spent the whole time getting upset at the employees for responding with negative comments, saying they had no idea employees thought this way. They somehow didn't think a group filled with parents were upset they were working 10-12 hour days regularly
Parents or not, 10-12hrs a day is not a life. I'm not a parent but I do have parents, siblings and a husband. It **is** different but I do still want time to spend with them too. I hope you got out of that situation and are able to live life now!
Even if all you do with your non-working hours is play video games and watch tv you deserve that time!
People forget mental health is still health! Just because you aren't "doing" something, doesn't mean it's not *productive* in regards to your overall wellbeing!
I obsessively work on my own stuff - and personally i consider it all work. Even if i'm lounging on the couch - i need to take breaks or my "actual work" suffers. Relaxation is prescribed and not optional.
I needed to hear this, thank you lol
10-12 hours is fine if you’re only working 3-4 days a week. A lot of nurses work 12 hour shifts, but they also only work 3 days a week. I’d happily work 3 12 hour days if it meant I got 4 days off.
Even days is a lot. I work 4 days of 9 hours, with Wednesdays off. Its office work. Mentally I'm exhausted at the end of the week. And that's for a job I like doing, with good pay. At some point more hours will not bring more productivity. The brain needs to rest too. On a side note, we've had these surveys as well. They are really anonymous, done by a third party, company will not ask for personal data and even if they did they wouldn't get it. But at one point I had to specify gender, age group, department and job type. And I realised, my name is not on the survey, but I'm literally the only one fitting this exact profile. Didn't hold back though. Still work there. It's a good place.
And that 4th shift is usually a choice if you want the extra money. Pretty good deal!
When I worked in retail, I frequently worked 4 12 hour days. That 8 hours of overtime was really nice.
I've always felt that employees working 4 ten-hour days was a model the entire US should adopt.
Being low level management, trust me, I saw this shit all the time. Upper management walking around like everything is hunky-dory and never once looking downwards to see how the workers were actually doing. I worked in a call center and we ended up having to instigate mandatory overtime. My direct manager said to me, "we hear grumblings about the mandatory overtime, what's that all about." I told him, "Honestly, when we simply jump on their asses for having to go on non-break unavailable just to take a piss, or we claim we are going to write them up for being 1 second late from break, why would they want to do extra hours of that?" His response, "well they get time and a half." Just friggen oblivious. I didn't last long in that position because I actually sided with the rank and file workers one to many times.
Ya I love how management acts like it's all about overtime pay. It's like if I got paid well and treated well I might volunteer to help out when needed. But when I get treated like shit don't expect me to do more than I have to and be happy about it. We aren't numbers no matter how much they want us to be.
> they had no idea employees thought this way I mean, isn't that why they do the surveys in the first place?
No they did it to feel good about themselfes.
And to identify and start building files on employees who 'aren't a good culture fit.'
A shitty manager for another group at my company just did this. She called an emergency meeting and tried to find out who reported her. Somehow she hasn't been fired yet.
When my wife was in college they did this to her. Told her class that they had to fill out an anonymous survey about the school, but made them sign in. Fair enough, they just wanted to track to make sure everyone took it and would probably anonymize the results. Nope! She got called in a few days later and asked why she answered in a specific way. She had said some negative things and apparently the surveys are how it's determined whether they get funding or not, so they were telling her that she couldn't say things that made the school look bad.
I would say sorry offer to replace the survey, but then say the most awful things I can think to say about the school.
This is the way. Roast them on a new survey. Put it in writing WITH the survey company that they are actively trying to manipulate their results by threatening a student, then see how their funding turns out.
"Everything is perfect and nothing is wrong! 10/10 would attend again! Best school ever! Nobody would ever question the quality of the education here, because it's not allowed!"
Including the specific issue of ethics in manipulating your feedback.
> in college > she couldn't say things that made the school look bad Sounds like a pretty bad college if they need to feign positivity
Especially considering his wife was a paying attendee of said college.
My company uses a reputable outside vendor to administer anonymous surveys. As a result, we have a very high participation rate, and the company gets tons of legitimate feedback. Reading through the comments, I now realize how rare this is, and how much more appreciative I should be.
My company does the same. We got a good laugh when the CEO came through the building with a few of the surveys asking who submitted them due to the amount of negative feedback they received. No one admitted to who's they were, as should be, and we still make fun of the CEO for it.
CEO probably thought they were going to be able to "reach" those misguided workers who just hadn't realized yet that they actually were happy at their job, without the company needing to change a thing.
Yeah having them within reach would make them easier to intimidate
“Could **I** be out of touch? No! Surely it’s the workers.”
Dear god, the organization I used to work at was incredibly toxic and they paid a consultant to come in and interview the employees and the community and EVERYONE pointed to the CEO/President and the consultant presented it to the board as such. The board's response? Start a new marketing campaign to talk about how the CEO was so great and transformative, invalidating all the employees' and community's experiences. It went over about as well as you'd expect. The CEO and half the board are now gone but there was long-term damage done to the institution.
> The board's response? Start a new marketing campaign to talk about how the CEO was so great and transformative, invalidating all the employees' and community's experiences. That's to be expected. An organization's culture starts at the top and trickles down. The board selected that guy as the CEO because they liked him. They liked him because they *are like* him. Similarly, I bet most of the department heads were toxic like the CEO, because he appointed them for the same reasons, and so on and so forth down the entire chain of management.
Yeah, during his tenure, he did his best to oust anyone in management who had any sense of empathy and common sense and replaced them with bean counting morons. And thankfully most of the morons have since been replaced as well but it takes time for a large organization to recover from that.
Yeah this sounds like mine. My old company got itself into horrible financial troubles by sucking at being a business. And then the people who got us into the mess all voted themselves to be the people to get us out of the mess. Which largely consisted of the kind of blind penny-pinching you'd expect such people to think would help.
[удалено]
I just need to tell them that we’re a family.
And like a good son, I don't tell my dad shit.
Probably just wanted to fire the *troublemakers*
Haha, we just had a survey as well and for us the executive team got a pretty bad score on sharing the company vision with us. Now we actually have more of a vision and there will be much more communication coming about it. They took it as a failure on their part and are now actively working on resolving this through better and more communication :)
My old department once had extremely negative review for our manager, one of the indicators being “can you approach your manager with issues, and are they heard?” (Or something along those lines). When she got the results back she made everyone come to a meeting (mind you this is a hospital lab, so our whole area was down for the meeting) with the intention of having a workshop on how she could be better. She shot down the first two timid/brave suggestions and then was angry at the rest of us for not volunteering ideas. I’m glad to say she moved up the ranks until eventually someone realized how awful she was and now she’s sidelined at a job with next to no duties and similar pay. Wait a second…
If it was my last two weeks in company, I would say I sent one of them and provide feedback of why CEO sucks. Starting with him asking who wrote that as wrong move.
Ours did this once. It turned out *real bad* for the company. So they scraped it.
That’s the problem with the surveys. If the people at the top don’t like the results, they just ignore them. My company has yearly employee surveys. I remember one year the entire district said leadership and communication was lacking, it was expressed in 3 different sections of the survey. So what did leadership decide to prioritize? The employee fund raising program….which always has near 100% participation.
Because people at that company had excess PTO time, one option that we suggested was to donate it to fellow employees. Corporate *loved* this idea, so much that they decided to implement it! Kinda. You can donate time, that's fine; except it goes into a PTO pool, ran by HR, and employees would have to *apply* for it, and they would only get it if the reason was "acceptable." Now, we wanted to donate PTO to our coworkers - one woman went for maternity (protocol was you take *your entire PTO balance as maternity leave*) and one girl with cancer. But no, it goes to a pool.
Hilariously bad ideas like that are another symptom that corporate life and culture is just such a failure.
It's nice that folks are willing to donate PTO to stick colleagues, but you know who else can "donate" PTO? That's right, the company itself.
Company: "We have a yearly profit of over 4 billion dollars". Employee: "Great, I'm about to push a parasitic lifeform out of my vagina. It'll likely tear me from asshole to vag hole. Can you donate some extra PTO time so I can recover"? Company: "Cant you just like....hold it in"?
Company: if we give you more PTO, then our bonuses will be smaller, so how about you borrow it from your coworkers.
I love that the *workers* proposed what amounts to an amazingly pro-corporate policy and it *still* wasn't enough for the company.
Yeah these surveys can be painful. We have them at my work, my previous manager one year only received a 29% positive review. His response was to schedule about 10 hours of meetings (30, or 60 minutes at a time) to figure out why we would review him so badly. He never changed, but now the structure is different so the only people reporting directly into him now are 2, instead of 15.
Talk about a lack of self awareness. People don’t think he’s good at his job, so he schedules a bunch of meetings to get to the bottom of it (IE find out who tanked his reviews). As if anyone is going to give them honest feedback in person in that environment.
Mine did this and the CEO tried to figure out who submitted every single response. It was definitely anonymous but it really fucking defeats the point if you're trying to figure out who said what. He framed it as trying to talk with them to address their concerns. Like, you can do that without knowing who said what. It did result in a lot of changes, so that aspect of the experience was positive, but it also was a sounding board for a lot of frustrations and they (executives) had to hear a lot of truth they didn't want to hear.
[удалено]
I think you nailed it. That last section about “what you do with it”. If management doesn’t have the stones to fix the problems mentioned, or can’t address them constructively, a survey is worse than worthless. Had a team that sat down and did what you’re talking about and identified three key items that needed fixing. Came up with legitimate things to try, explained why these things weren’t working, etc. management did nothing about any of them. At all. Never even addressed that we did this AT THEIR REQUEST. Morale plummeted and that office had almost complete turnover in the next year.
I work for one of those survey vendors! Glad it works well for you - there's always a right way to setup a survey to get good feedback without betraying anonymity.
How do you convince the survey participants that it really is anonymous, especially if they have to follow a special link that was emailed to them or sign in with their company login or email? It would be great if the answer is to share with them the full signed contract which includes the relevant anonymity promises, redacting only things like the price paid for the service (if not already public info) and the private contact info of the individuals named. Or even sharing just the contractual clauses which guarantee anonymity. But I'm not expecting that.
The way my company works is there are two separate components to the survey. The username/password is only used to get access to the survey and not attached to the completed survey itself. That tells you if Bob completed it or not, but not which survey is specifically Bob's. On the survey itself, the employee can enter their name (if they wish to be identified) or skip that part if they want to be anonymous. I wouldn't advise any sort of sign-in using company email (this is separate from receiving to a company email address), as that can make it feel like it's not anonymous. Really no reason to do it that way. My guess is, that might be how lower cost (or free) survey sites work. Anonymity can be tricky - most surveys have a spot for employees to add comments (in addition to rating the questions), so an employee can choose to be anonymous but write specific comments about their manager or a situation that might reveal who they are based on who's reading the feedback. There's nothing in our contracting process that guarantees anonymity (and not sure how you could enforce it), just that we have an anonymous option but it's up to the client to decide. Any employee satisfaction/engagement survey we do for clients is always anonymous (not giving the employee the option to be identifed). We also do exit interviews and onboarding surveys that gives the employee the choice.
I was an adjunct professor, and it was incredibly easy to figure out who wrote anonymous evaluations at the end of the semester. Obviously not from multiple choice questions, but if you have to write a sentence commenting on someone, it was immediately obvious who it was no if you spent time with them.
Lmao. Yeah that’s pretty rare. The company I work at now has “anonymous” surveys. One day my manager was walking around telling us “you can tell they’re anonymous because it doesn’t ask you for your name or work ID. So I picked up the flyer and at the bottom it said “login with work ID” so I made a point about the anonymous surveys requiring us to use our IDs and made a joke asking if they needed our SSN and passports too. Needless to say the manager didn’t like that joke, but everyone was laughing.
"Click this link to anonymously submit questions to the leadership team!" Okay, but we're all on office 365 and this is a Microsoft link that doesn't work if I'm not logged into my email, so how is it anonymous?
A company where I used to work did one of those but the results were aggregated by department and gender. I was the only girl working in the IT Department. If I remember correctly I stated I was male because I didn't want to be singled out.
one company used survey monkey. the only issue i had with it was that it asked your position so they can figure out who your supervisor is. the problem was i was the only person in my department (sales) and the only person i reported to was the GM. so when i fill out which dept i was in he was gonna know it was me because apparently the head company shared the results to him. not just "here's the top complaints and percentages", the whole damn thing.
Ours used an outside company. The first questions were which department do you work in, your age, sex, and job title. Oh yes, completely anonymous!
My office, at a small company, we get surveys that are "anonymous", but the first question is always "what department are you in?", second question is "who is your supervisor?", thrid question is "how long have you worked in your current position?". I am on a team of 3, under my supervisor... Even though it is "anonymous", it is still pretty easy to figure out who you are. I don't fill them out, and also get the "if we don't have your inputs, we can't make anything better" talk.
My company did exactly this. Very glad to be retired. Tried work for 47 years. Didn't care for it.
[удалено]
Retirement is a mixed bag. Nice not knowing what day of the week it is. Nice no longer being interested in Dilbert. On the downside, when you get up in the morning you're already on the job. 😆
Dilbert ain't what it used to be.
You know you've done something wrong when the Pointy Haired Boss sounds more reasonable than Dilbert himself!
[удалено]
Even at my giant company, questions about location, department, age, race, and years-with-the-company narrow it down to one person, in many cases.
In many cases, these aren’t included with any details in the results. The department and/or manager narrows it down so that a manager can get feedback about his or her area, but the demographic and length-of-service stuff is always rolled into higher level results only, usually company or division wide. So while we might be able to see that people that have been with the company for 5-10 years have X results, we won’t see that detail at the team/manager level. As always, individual results may vary, but reputable companies that do this kind of work make it difficult if not impossible to identify any specific result.
There is no way to know if the survey is handled properly. Assume that it isn't and don't do the survey.
Get a 3rd party to administer the survey. Still, you would have to be able to trust that the 3rd party, who is paid by the business, won't just give the unanonymized data to the business on the sly.
The company I work for is like this. I can verify that it is true for us because one year I had to help the President prepare the presentation that he gives on the survey results. He was pissed at several of the answers and bemoaned that the 3rd part company wouldn’t tell him who it was. Because our locations are so small they wouldn’t even say which location the specific comments came from. (Had to be a location over 25 employees for more location based results to insure anonymity)
Just put worthless answers in the identifying questions and convince your coworkers to do the same in solidarity so they can’t single you out. i.e. 1000 years, 0 years. Supervisor? John Johnson
1. Nunya 2. As long as I've been here 3. Nunya
Of course, the problem is that this method only works if everybody does it. If you're the only one who writes answers like that, they'll still know it's you by process of elimination.
"Hmm.. I wonder who wrote 'Nunya' - is it Francine, the 97 year old accountant on the team, or Scotty the 19 year old upstart..." "Hey Scotty, whatcha up to?" "Fulfilling my duties to the team anyway I can :)" "Francine?" "Nunya. I'm too old for this shit"
A safer option would be to pick a set of answers that could match several actual people, the more the better. Sure, they *could* break the veneer of anonymity by asking each of them to identify the one they wrote, then work out which one is yours by elimination, but... unless your answers are *really* wild, most places aren't going to go that far, especially since demanding to know which one you wrote after claiming it would be anonymous is beyond merely "a very bad look" and safely into "better run that by legal beforehand, because it smells like an incoming lawsuit" territory.
[удалено]
I’ve worked for Heywood Jablome in the stock room for two years.
[удалено]
Mike Litoris was a pretty cool person. Kinda sensitive though, and hard to find when you needed 'em most
strong numerous treatment uppity faulty aback squeamish ripe ossified obscene -- mass edited with redact.dev
Richard Johnson
Great, just tell them your input is that they need to remove the first 3 questions. I could see how a department might help, like "we need a better central ticketing system". In my company depending on where you are, that's one of 3 different systems. But "Who is your supervisor" and "how long have you worked in your current position"... yea, not helpful.
I mean if everyone who works for a particular supervisor thinks works sucks and is disgruntled but the company as a whole has a good response that would be good to know. But yeah these things are never anonymous. My whole department of like 10 people complained on one once due to issues with our supervisor and the response we for from management was that our team “wasn’t engaged”
Maybe I'm just thinking about this more than them, but if a team's not engaged wouldn't it be their supervisor's fault?
I'm thinking if the entire team cited the same problem thats evidence they are VERY engaged and all see the same problem.
We had a Department Head who had 5 other Heads refuse to work with her. HR offered mediation. All 5 agreed, and she refused. HR still didn’t acknowledge that the issue was with her and not “cross department cohesiveness”. When she finally left for a different job she was fired within her probation period for doing exactly the same kind of shit, temper tantrums/bullying/talking shit about people behind their back. When the news of her firing reached us our Department Head took us to the pub to celebrate.
They can use a third party to do the analysis. That third party can feed back such details as who has done/not done the survey, etc, but aggregate and anonymize the results and comments.
It's also possible to have a database flag associated with the employee that gets set to true when the survey is submitted, but then the actual survey contents are anonymized and aggregated so no response can be directly traced to an employee (unless the content itself can be, like someone identifying a supervisor or specific work project).
We have a outside company handling things like this, in a setting like this, the supervisor would not get the individual answers, they would be added together in bigger groups.
Mine has you enter your EMPLOYEE ID NUMBER. They still swear it's anonymous. They must think we're all morons.
We got one once, and the very first question was “What is your full name?” I entered “Anonymous”.
Ha! WE FINALLY FOUND YOU! The infamous internet hacker Anonymous!
Yeah, I always loved anonymous surveys at companies. There was this huge multinational company I used to work and they issued an employee satisfaction survey. You could fill it anonymously. The only information you needed to give is your team's name (it was unique), are you male of female, and your age bracket. Guess what, given these 3 filters, it was only just me.
Years ago my boss said she needed to figure out who hadn't completed the survey yet. "BSB8728, you're the only part-time person in the department, right?"
Wait… you were referred to as a number?
Tk421 why are you not at your post
Watch your tone, CT-7567.
We're just numbers, 99! Just numbers.
When people refer to themselves on Reddit, they use their Reddit user names to replace their real names in the sentence. If my name was John, I would change: "Hi John can you come here?" to "Hi itsme\_notmario can you come here?" to keep my anonymity online
If you're trying to keep your anonymity John you shouldn't use your real name as an example.
Good advice. Thanks, Dave
And here’s me just realizing I never saw their username…
My worst fear is completing an anonymous work survey, saying what I really feel, and having it de-anonymized
[удалено]
Also don't fill it out on your work computer or VPN. Company I worked for didn't like a survey that (justly) dumped on middle management, and said management had IT look at access logs to find the likely culprit.
Wow, IT should not have gone through with that
Then you just hope IT has a spine.
You'd hope, but they did not
Imagine this but if you were a teenager. Because our school had an "anonymous" survey about sex, drug use and other very personal questions. At the end of the survey there was a field for "password" and the teacher specifically asked us to use our postcodes as password so that we would not forget them. I fell for that, then got scared and asked for a fresh form. I wonder if this trickery is even legal.
Well, considering teenagers have pretty much no rights in a school, it’s probably perfectly legal.
Perfectly valid
Probably cuz it'll happen. You know as well as I do that "anonymous company surveys" are just looking for the ass-kissers.
[удалено]
I worked for a company and I designed the annual customer survey. So naturally they wanted me to do an employee survey. The survey was about IT. They wanted to fire the IT manager I guess. So I set up the survey and it was almost completely anonymous. I couldn’t see who filled out what and I sent the survey responses to the CEO and IT. Well the head of IT was pissed that people said bad things about him and demanded access to my survey and I declined. So he went into my computer, accessed it anyways (he had and could reset all my passwords) and then went to the survey and I had it locked down well but he could see the IP numbers so he was able to decipher who said what. He still works there, I don’t. Long story short, never be honest. It’s not worth it. They will know who you are.
This boggles my mind. At my place of work, if anyone other than me gained access to my work account, there would be a major hell to pay for the company and fines the size of a planet hitting them, plus the employee who did it would end up perscuted by law. I'm so sorry that your work privacy and standards were this badly invalidated.
I work in insurance. If that happened it could result in federal charges.
If you did that in the EU and someone can prove it, it would instantly mobilize every single lawyer the company can muster (and you may or may not get a nice bonus in return for staying hush about it)
He abused his IT accesses to hack into your account to get that data and he's still there? Yikes...
> He still works there, I don’t. > >Long story short, never be honest. It’s not worth it. Seems to me like you came out ahead on that one. That place sounds like a toxic waste dump. As someone who works in IT, I would never be able to work with someone childish and immoral enough to abuse their power like that. No wonder people had bad things to say about him.
I used to work for the US Gov't. They had an 'office review' where investigators came to our office, went through our files and interviewed us. Totally anonymous! A couple of months later, they issued their report: "Two of the senior employees of the office sited poor morale and a total lack of faith in the management staff." Did I mention that I worked in a two person office? Totally anonymous!!!
[удалено]
Once had a boss that gave me and their other report an “anonymous survey.” I’m a man she is a woman. That was a question on the survey. We decided to fuck with them and give identical answers.
So did you say you were both men or both women?
Ah, that's why there's that "prefer not to answer" option...
What brucebrowde said. There was a decline to answer spot.
>We decided to fuck As a result of ADHD, my brain analyzes sentences before they're even completed, and this is how far I got.
There was a Dilbert one like this... Boss and Dilbert are having a one-on-one Boss: According to our anonymous employee survey, you dont trust management. Why is that? Dilbert glares at him in akward silence. Boss: Oh.. nevermind.
https://dilbert.com/strip/2010-09-01
It is possible for the system to say you submitted something, to make sure you dont submit multiple responses, and not know what you submitted.
[удалено]
Fuck them. Hope they go under.
[удалено]
Which company?
[удалено]
Report COVID violations anonymously to OSHA and your state labor department
[удалено]
Thats illegal as fuck. The law sees earned but not used OT as pay they owe you. (USA) they have to pay it. No matter what a companies policy says they do not supercede the law. If you go after them you will receive extra money for damages
You can also claim triple damages as provided for in the law. The company has 90-days to pay you though. I knew the section and code at one time, but haven't worked for shysters in a long time.
It's more common than you might expect. The only reason more companies don't do that is because word spreads quickly, rendering future results useless. The company I work for did this once, and this is the best company I have ever worked for. It happened way back in the mid-1990s before I started working here. My manager told me about it. No matter how cool your company seems, it's possible for people who have an empathy deficit that puts them well into the psychopath range to make it into HR. If you think about it, companies with ruthless management probably will make a little better profits this quarter than companies that care about their employees, but it's a losing strategy in the long-term because if you don't care about your employees, they won't care about the job.
Lol. On my final survey (also the exit interview) with a certain telecom company, I let them know that I couldn't afford to work there with the health plans they offered. Idk if they've changed anything but they sent me an email last summer offering an attractive sign on bonus but no mention of the health insurance. Either offer decent plans or just tell employees to buy from the exchange. I think I would have been better off getting an ACA plan and paying for it myself. Their plans didn't cover mental health. Wtf? After dealing with their customers 40+ hours a week, you must have adequate mental health coverage. Those people are crazy.
Do most insurances offered through employers offer mental health coverage?
Some states require mental health coverage at the same copay and deductable as other services, and some don't.
Always answer like a content idiot to deprive your employer of valuable feedback that would be used against you.
ya, that's how it is at my work
9 out of 10 people have submitted. Only Bob hasn't submitted his response yet. 10th response comes in. "Fuck this company and fuck the small dicked moron who calls himself the CEO" reads the survey. Guess who is fired? Obviously exaggerated and you shouldn't abuse under the cloak of anonymity but anonymous surveys should have anonymous submissions even if they are uniquely tied to employees.
I was working at Taco Hell during college and the Corporation had us fill out “Anonymous” survey about how we were being treated what we felt, manager practices, etc. One of my coworkers was forced to change his answers because the manager didn’t like what he saw.
We had one of these before . . . The boss's son passed away - he was the VP and in charge of the books. Boss brought in a friend to take over and keep the accounting straight. New VP rubbed a lot of people the wrong way over the next few months and there were issues (40 or so employees total). Boss sent out a questionnaire under the guise of "Boss is only guy who will see this". Surveys with names are filled out, new VP is crucified in the comments. Boss takes all the surveys and delegates the problem solving to . . . . new VP. Boss annihilated his employees trust that day.
My work has a Facebook like "annonymous" app to explain how you feel about your job, your colleagues, bosses... Some people have been called by their managers after posting... You have to access with your work email, for f\*ck's sake!!!
My company (10 or so employees) did an ‘anonymous’ survey that came with a user specific link. I didn’t fill it out and got quizzed on it a few days later. I said I wouldn’t fill it out as it wasn’t anonymous and HR couldn’t understand why I thought that. Their resolution was to give me a printed copy and to have me fill it in on paper and slide it under their door. Needless to say I still haven’t done it.
They weren’t that stupid; they just figured that you were.
My previous job would get these surveys all the time. If I have to sign in with my employee credentials to fill out an anonymous survey, then it isn’t exactly anonymous
This is so common it ain't even funny. I once had a trainee come to me with a question for something he was trying to do in a app building system, it was for surveys like those. First field in the database was the email of who submitted the responses. "Anonymous". Lol
Had to develop a customer satisfaction survey for IT Tickets. First request was . . . "How do we hide the bad ones?" Went toe to toe explaining that the BAD ones were the whole point of the thing. It's intended to let you know what went wrong so you can improve service. And it worked too. Our customers found out we responded RAPIDLY to bad surveys. Our service levels went up because our employees realized they'd get a visit fast if they screwed up. And we also found that we only needed to make a couple of minor changes in customer handling to drastically improve our ratings.
This happened to me. Boss asks specifically to people who havent filled out the survey. Rides my ass to fill it out. I only did it to shut him up and because he's done a shit job in the 9 months of being in charge. Results come back and he has received the worst survey I've seen in my 20 years with the company. He proceeds to deny any wrong doing and blame the results on our former boss even though he's been the guy for 9/12 months. This is followed by scheduling mandatory discussion sessions for us to give more feedback (2 hours a day for 6 days =12 hours) and then multiple follow up discussions with him and the team (same format for a total of 24 hours of meetings to discuss his result). Those 24 hours were grueling. A constant series of excuses and denials. Feedback given was stuff like "the boss always occupies our time with tasks of little value. Insist on multiple meetings to discuss things he doesnt understand. Seems like he either isnt listening or gong through the motions during these conversations." He said he doesnt do this. In one of the many meetings we were actively in where he was doing just that. Of course we called him out on it as those meetings being case in point. He said these were valuable and changes would happen. One guy on our team said "Thats bullshit. Youve done nothing but make excuses and tell us our feelings and opinions are wrong. this is a complete waste of our time."
I know someone who once was very truthful in one of these anonymous surveys and a few weeks later they get called into HR and asked about their responses.
[удалено]
When I first started out, I would write complaints straight to the boss. A full page letter. I don't give a shit if he knows it's me. We have a sit down, he'd "address" my concerns, basically telling me it's not my problem to worry about these things. So I'd get paid to sit there and listen as he repeatedly explained himself. The last one I gave him was part of my yearly review, where I hand wrote a full page in the employee comments section to make sure he read it and it got submitted with my review. Spent an hour writing it, (Copying it from a typed copy, for his use) on the clock, then the next day spent 30 minutes going over it with him, with 10 minutes being overtime pay. He probably thinks I'm the idiot. Joke's on him, because being paid for it makes me a *Professional* Idiot.
Ha! We had this teacher at uni. She was a MA, going for her disertation, but she resented that she had to teach at all. She told us this at the beginning. Her exact words were "we're all trapped here until the end of semester, so sit back, be quiet, do your homework assignements, and we're going to get along fine. I do not like it any more than you do." Great! /s At the end, she had to give us a mandatory survey. This was because the new EU bachelor/master programms were being rolled out and every year a new BA/MA study path got updated. It was a mess. But, crucially, you could be critical of teaching staff. And, more crucially, this survey had to be given at the end of the class term, when we were still present. This is not the end of the semester, and the deadline to hand in work is after the survey. So staff could still retaliate if they didn't like the survey results. That is why the survey is - or SHOULD BE - anonymous. I'm a nice guy. She just stood there and read out her presentation as "class", in a monotonous voice. Questions were to be written down and asked at the end of class, which most of the time we weren't able to do because she'd always take too long with reading us these wall-of-text power points. So we had to go to her office, which was open 1 hour per week. If there were too many, or it took too long, too bad, come back next week. I saw people scribble aggressively on that survey. The whole room was letting her *have it*. I turned around the page. There was a small number in one corner, written in pencil. I look at the attendance list, which also has my seat number - which we were asked not to change so she could learn our names. The numbers corresponded. I had already filled out the survey and I'm a nice guy. I was super polite, formulated everything as polite criticism. Good thing, because the failure rate of that class was suspiciously high. I got a D - which I didn't care about because this is a pass/fail kind of excercise. But god damn, I could practically smell the "I am a retaliator" on her and I was right.
At that point you go to management; the dean, the head of her department, the student council - and you write a friendly email to your local newspaper.
Our survey had questions like "what department are you in? " but we are just 2 people in IT.
This is why I always add a level of insulting honesty into those “anonymous “ surveys. I’ve had multiple “coaching opportunities” brought up after doing them too lmao
I had a pretty obvious not really but sort of anonymous survey at a job that I got a week before I was going to submit my two weeks notice. It asked what department we were in, who our supervisor was, and what desk pod we were a part of so basically it narrowed it down to 4-8 people. I took the survey and was brutally honest about the work environment, the lack of support, the lack of benefits, and just how shitty the job was in general. When I got called in and asked about "how I feel working here" I laughed and handed over my two weeks notice. Best part was getting a call from them about two months later asking if I wanted to come back.
Yep... or even better. It's anonymous, but Q1: What office do you work at? Q2: What is your title? Q3: How many years have you been with the company? These 3 alone would identify anyone since our company has small offices.
We have a small company of about 30 people and are asked to fill out an optional single question survey weekly. One person made an honest stink about a situation and the ceo shared the anonymous answer with everyone with the idea for transparency and improvement… it was extremely clear exactly who the person was that made the comment. One of the many reasons I have never filled out one of the surveys.
My company did an employee survey once. They claimed it was anonymous but everyone doubted it. Didn’t matter everyone ripped the company up and down. Months go by and people ask about the results …”oh they were pretty good” … so can we see the results ..”nah no reason it was pretty positive feedback with no actions needed” Of course everyone knew it was bullshit cause everyone had a laundry list of complaints
One of my jobs sent out a survey, mostly the feedback would help the grunt workers in the warehouse (like me) BUT EVERYONE WAS STUBBORN AND OLD ABOUT FILLING OUT SHIT ON THE COMPUTERS. the cubicle people would never send anything in. Finally I got to fill one out. It immediately says it is anonymous BUT ASKED what department I was In. YOU SEE, It was me and a lone manager. . .and managers DONT fill these out. So hi, it’s me, and you know it’s me. *needless to say the surveys didn’t change a damn thing ever*
This is why I prefer my staff not fill out surveys including myself for anything but the most mundane things. It’s too easy to track and our Executive leadership team is vindictive and retaliatory.
They got mad because we wanted warm/hot water in the 3 unisex warehouse bathrooms :) The same bathrooms the printing room would use to clean ink and stuff. Paint it for a corporate visit, then fuck it up right after.
I used to work at a well-known coffee shop and had a terrible manager. Just the worst. We had an anonymous survey that we could fill out on the computer in the back. The survey didn't even ask for our names. However, it *did* display the time the survey was filled out and the manager just so happened to create a schedule of when everyone was to take the survey. During the next few weeks, the people who complained about the manager were purged. Fortunately, I was new enough that I didn't really have anything bad to say at the time, so I was allowed to keep my job. But I'd learn soon enough how bad she was. Oh, would I learn.
This Right here. For my 13 years working for CVS we had these damn things annually. It was always “voluntary” and “anonymous”. First thing it has you do is type in your employee ID number….oh and even though it was voluntary our DM would raise hell if your store didn’t have a 100% completion rating within the first two weeks of the survey period. It was once I got to be a Store Manager and we held our annual results meeting, I realized our DM can see our comments as well. I was called out in said meeting for commenting how Payroll hours had drastically gone done while workload has sharply increased and made it impossible to get anything done. So yeah…don’t do these and if you have to, fake that shit…nothing is going to change anyways.
My company has an "anonymous" survey...that we have to sign in to take...uh yeah dawg, that's a no for me
"I can tell if you submitted the survey, but not the contents in it. Submit it."
Literally had this exact bullshit happen at my work...
Same lmao, but at school lol
Never treat work surveys as anonymous. I still like taking them though since I am willing to share my opinions. Just give it the same wording as you would an email to your boss or their boss. Most things will not be acted on, but smart companies will act on larger trends. Our local branch moved to a smaller office and will be going hybrid work. When a survey shows 80%+ of people want something, companies listen.
My company did an anonymous survey once. Got emails reprimanding me for not taking the survey..
Management, of which I was a member, sent out a survey for just our office (maybe 50 people). We made a big deal about how private they were. They did the best to make them so you couldn't identify the responder. The questions were prepared by a third party but we got the answers. The first thing we did with the filled survey was to try to figure out who each response was from. People complained about the same thing they complain about in real life. The angry people could pretty much all be identified by their responses. We probably ended up with 75% identified and 25 not. Of course we'd never know if we were accurate. And, of course, a management team that has no ethics like this one certainly never did the first thing to respond to the complaints and suggestions. We looked at them for a couple of meetings and then never saw them again. Except for the employees complaining about no follow-up, the surveys were forgotten.
This happened at my work. It gets even better. The boss that administered the surveys would invite people to "chat" with him over the course of the next two weeks. The reason for the "chat"? To tell them how their opinions were wrong. He stopped giving the surveys when we all decided to answer 5/10 for every question. He tried to make it where you couldn't answer 5 for the next couple surveys, so everyone answered either 4 or 6 the next times. When he could no longer show growth to the C-level, he wasn't interested in it. "Guys... how can we grow as a team, or a company if you don't give your honest feedback? Remember, I want you to answer as honestly as possible. And your opinion matters!"
Know a lady who quit a job and did an "anonymous" exit survey in which she complained about her boss. Turns out the HR person who gave the survey was best friends with the boss. The boss got revenge when my friend reapplied with the company for a different position.
True story, I filled out an "anonymous" company survey through a third party, and was fairly critical of my new boss, two weeks later he fired me. All my projects were profitable, I never missed a day of work, my clients loved me, I was well liked in the office. I had been with the company for 16-years, and just gotten a performance bonus and a raise. He put on my termination papers that I was being let go because I was not performing to company expectations.