Lowered Expectations
These were getting handed out at work as part of a company initiative called Mitarbeiter Engagement IndeX. (Staff Engagement Index if "Mitarbeiter" gave you the vapours).
I have well developed sense of dread when companies introduce "Staff Questionnaires".
At the last company I worked for in Schottland we had a thing called Q12. It was supposed to be a measure of how "engaged" we were and the scores were used partly to determine the Bonus our Managers got.
Given that it was important to managers, it had to be important to us too. Regardless of how ****ing stupid it was. The name was stupid - Q12. it was meant to be 12 questions, but people-who-knew-better go at it and included other questions so it was really Q18 or 19 if you include the question that was number 0 (no, really).
And then you had the questions like "I have a best friend at work - do you agree or disagree" and then you scored it 1 to 5 (or you could abstain but then Santa would be disappointed in you).
And once the inanity of that was over, the scores for your team came back and then we had to discuss them. Not in a 5 minute "well, the stupid questions produced these meaningless numbers. Here's hoping nobody actually gives a toss" conversation. Oh no. This was a full-on, totally in earnest "how can we possibly improve the score to our answer for question number 1? we scored 2.8 and the company average is 3.6".
We wasted hours doing that.
And if you voiced the opinion "this is totally meaningless b*ll*cks". You would be told "the CEO thinks this is a brilliant way of measuring how engaged we are and He says it's important. There are studies that show how brilliant this is. And if you don't agree with us, you're a terrorist*."
Said studies were never made available. And when the CEO retired, the guy who replaced him ditched Q12 straight away.
I'll leave you to draw your own conclusions. Fair to say I'm a bit meh about MEX.
*Really. They used the word "terrorist" to describe people who didn't agree with everything management did.
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