Today has been a very good day. The weather was nice, I just finished an online live NFL Fantasy Draft, a nice cold Mountain Dew to go along with it, knowing that I am not getting that calling, and spending a night with my family making slushes and watching AFV. It just has been one of those days where I am plain happy to be where I am. I really have nothing that I should complain about.
When I worked at WestHost my boss Bevan made me sign up to get Dilbert sent to my e-mail everyday. A few days ago this one popped up.
That is EXACTLY like my old job at WestHost. A few months after I was hired the company wanted to see what employees thought about working at WestHost. Honestly, WestHost was not that bad of a place to work even though it definitely had its up and downs. So our Human Resources Manager Smalls (named after that kid in the Sandlot) came around and passed out an anonymous survey. We looked at the survey and my boss called me and Zack in. He showed us this tiny little number that was printed on the back of the survey. We then contacted other people in the company and found that they had different numbers. So they may not be able to tell who took the survey, they would at least know what department it was coming from. And when your company had about twenty employees it would be very easy to figure out who wrote what. And they wanted it hand written!
Smalls was like that annoying dog that was friend's with the bully dog. Always wanting to please the bigger dog no matter how stupid or asinine he looked.
My department, along with a few others, typed our surveys on separate pieces of paper. Smalls really tried his best to make it look innocent. But who would believe him when the evidence was so blatant. Even when we wrote things on separate papers they still tried to figure out who was who. They pegged my friend Zack with a different paper.
Of course this is from the same people who got mad at us when we were trying to do something nice for the company. Somehow our servers got screwed up and a lot of our client's websites were down and Technical Support was in chaos and were insanely busy taking all the calls. So a few of us downstairs thought it would be nice if we all forked in some cash to buy them all pizza and bring it in. We asked Smalls over IM if we could do that (hoping that maybe WestHost would also put up some of the money) and we got this reply:
Smalls: Who's complaining?Safe to say that we didn't get them pizza.
"You're killin' me Smalls!" - loved The Sandlot. What a sneaky survey experience you had! I bet you're glad you don't work there anymore!
ReplyDeleteOMGosh! Sometimes the "little" people ruin it for everyone! My biggest pet peeve is that where I work we actually take great pains to keep the surveys anonymous (seriously LOADS of encryption, etc. that the best hackers would have a hard time getting through) ... but people still hesitate to give open and honest feedback because of experiences with prior companies like you mentioned above.
ReplyDeleteI ask my employees all the time for their input and only a few in the team have trusted me enough to test the theory. Once they share even the tiniest thing, I fix it and now the healing can begin. They KNOW they can tell me what's really going on and usually I can help to fix it.
But I can't fault a person's hesitance to share if the "anonymous" survey is hand-written on an individually numbered piece of paper. Sheesh!
I repeat Jeremy's quote: "You're killin' me Smalls!"