The Survey Says...

There was an employee survey at work recently, and they shared some of the initial results this week.  I won’t go into detail about the results, but the most striking thing for me was the way they talked about highlights and “opportunity areas”.  A classic HR term.  Personally, I would use the term lowlights – but I guess that is too negative a term for management.  I also don’t consider it correct to classify areas that didn’t score well in the survey as “opportunities”.  No, that is another attempt at positive spin - the correct term is “problem areas”.  It is not so much an opportunity as a necessity for management to address any issues that come up – otherwise employees will continue to be unhappy and continue to leave.  Naturally, being the negative person I am most of my responses tended to trend on the negative side – so I’m sure I helped skew some of the results (though not by much given the sample size).  The statistician in me would be fascinated to get hold of the data from the survey and explore the data for myself – especially since some of the cluster analysis they presented seemed like absolute manure (looking for patterns where patterns don’t exist, or proving the obvious, or mixing up “collaboration” with “being told what to do”).