Is anyone else tired of “employee engagement”?

True employee engagement is Unionization.

No, it’s filling out surveys and dismissing the result. I’m pretty sure.
Effective, sure. But, if a company is truly engaging, listening, adapting to the employees needs and feedback, unions would be a lot less needed or effective. When companies are exploiting workers, lowering wages and benefits, causing more problems and not listening to employees, unions can really make a huge difference. If the people are looking to unionize, the company is failing and the workers aren't being listened to and they want change to happen.

Unions can do a lot of good. I'm very pro-union. But, people don't go looking to unionize if things are going great and the company is really listening and adapting to employee concerns.
True employee engagement is Unionization.

How does adding extra electrons help with employee engagement? /s

I always get super triggered at the "Do you have a best friend at work?" question that my old organization used to roll out during engagement planning. No, you motherfuckers, I already have a best friend. They don't happen to work here.

So I answer no every single time. And then in the interview afterward they go on about how "well, it's not LITERALLY if your best friend works here. The survey just asks the question like that because blah blah blah...". Trying to over examine what it means to "have a best friend at work". To interpret that question in some other way to maybe get me to answer yes next year.

I don't care what the intent behind the question is, they will never convince me to not answer "no", unless my best friend happens to join our team. I feel like they're trying to gaslight me into feeling more connected to the team or some bullshit. Drives me up the fucking wall.

You're doing the right thing. They're just trying to juice their own numbers by pressuring you to say something effusive.

But it makes me feel so empowered and involved in change. Maybe we can find the budget to have a pizza party for the team who made the company millions. Probably not though. Money is tight right now.

Unfortunately, the pizza budget line item was deleted and there’s nothing we can do about it.
- Don't worry. I bet the boss will perform miracles to get some money for a pizza party and make sure we know it was a miracle.

I went HAM on my most recent one. They’re anonymous but I’m sure my direct manager can tell my writing style. But the place I work for has been in refusing to do any hiring including backfills so now I’m a team of 1 doing what 7 people used to do and I let them know I’m not pleased.

Just FYI, they’re not really anonymous. These surveys get reported back to each individual manager with the responses, ratings given, and counts of staff completed; so it is very easy for managers to discern who wrote what.
- I figure they aren’t. I didn’t curse or name anyone by name, I just made it pretty clear that the understaffing is job performance at a pretty severe level and that the workload has everyone miserable
Ah yes, the old “lazy, entitled” employee doing the work that was formerly performed by an entire team. I know them well.
They're anonymous ...

No they are not.
Probably time to leave at that point....
You hold the bargaining power of 7 people. You can force changes just by waving the "I can quit anytime" card around
- This is bad advice. Do this and your name will go on the Problem List. Now, if you don’t care about getting laid off, go nuts.

I just got invited to a staff BBQ at the manager's house. It's at 5PM. On Friday. I just spent 50 hours this week with you guys! Wasn't that enough?

We have surveys at my job 2-4 times a year, where we answer how we feel the company is doing in various aspects on a scale of 1-5.

Last year, they went over the results, focused on the lowest scores, and had our supervisors talk to their teams to have us make "action plans," to address the issues. In retrospect, I think it was my region's way to get us to score them higher on the surveys by giving us negative busy work if we scored them too low. But it backfired; we all said, nah, these are your issues, you action plan to fix them.

The whole thing is just ridiculous. Nothing important ever changes from this feedback.

I recently tested out our system for reporting problems anonymously. It was utter crap. Raised to my boss who is C-level, I don't know, I think it's intended to be utter crap. Sometimes I just feel like I'm trying to nail jelly to a tree.

Funny enough, I'm about to receive the results of our latest employee survey. I have about 15 direct employees, and at least with the one we use, it's completely anonymous. To just see results, 11 people need to have responded. To see written results, 25 ppl need to have responded (so I'm not going to get to see written results). As a manager, I honestly don't care who wrote what...I genuinely want to improve the work environment to make everyone happier. Employee surveys aren't the only input I use for making things better, and I certainly can't make magic happen, but I use the results and trends of the survey to push hard on upper management for what people are asking for. In fact, I'd say the survey results are the single metric that reflects my effectiveness as a manager. It sure sucks if these surveys are being misused or ignored - why on earth would you want respond?? Happy people are proven to be more creative and innovative, plus its way more fun. If your manager doesn't care about that...all I can say is this manager doesn't represent the mentality of all managers - find a new job :-)

I put "pay us more money" in every comment box I can. It hasn't worked yet, weirdly... It's just a tool so upper management can jerk themselves off to anything good they can find, justifying their continued repression of the workers. They can point to one comment going "I love it here!" and then say any bad comment must be a bad employee.

Even when I was in the military we did these “employee” surveys. We were encouraged to bring up any issues we had before the survey and leadership would act like they were listening to get us to put down positive remarks. Even if you still brought up your concerns nothing would be done about it.

Apart from the inaction, these surveys are not really anonymous and each response gets reported back down individual managers with the response, ratings given, and count of their direct staff that have completed it.

Unfortunately, in my years as lead, I’ve seen this used more for managers to get a pat on the head or for managers to push people out, rather than implement any actual change.

Yeah, it’s an interesting process for sure. I took an Org Leadership course as part of my MS and it seems like it was an idea born out of good intentions with real promise that has (of course) been weaponized and turned against workers because everything is. You’re really supposed to use it to find low-hanging fruit to fix to keep the workers happy. But nobody does that.

Every year, we have to fill out a blank "what changes would you make" section, and every year, me and rhe maintenance crew (100+ people strong) put in "4 day work week". Thats all we want. It provides a better work life balance, and we are efficient enough to get it done. But year after year, crickets.

All the office schmos get working from home, "relaxation rooms" at the office, ergonimic furniture, blah blah blah, while us maintenance slobs (who had to keep working in the field through the pandemic) get sweet dick all.

Its frustrating because its not like I want to take away those benefits from the office workers, but it seems things get cushier and cushier for them while our jobs stay the same amount of shitty.

I recently quit a job that was suspicious of how I interacted with clients since I was uncomfortable with sending "rate me" emails to boost the company's rating on google. I don't even answer those emails when I get them, why the hell would I send one?

During the height of Covid I worked at a local pet supply chain. Corporate wanted us to call customers who hadn't shopped in a while and beg them to come back. Not only were we short-staffed, now they wanted managers to sit on the phone all day spamming former customers instead of helping out on the sales floor.

I refused to participate since we always promised customers that we'd only call them if there was a recall on pet food. Of course I got reprimanded for keeping that promise. We were already losing business to Chewy and Amazon—why would we want to burn through our customers' goodwill by calling and guilt-tripping them for not shopping with us?
- You did the right thing. I would never shop there again if I got such a call. That's pathetic of your company's leadership.

For three years now, I've put in real low scores and real critical comments on these things, and literally everyone I know at work says they've done the same (we are all so stressed) but then next quarter comes along and the execs share the survey results and wouldn't you know it, engagement is great, the best it's ever been, no problems here!

Amazing how that happens.

My job actually did listen and gave us 6 holidays paid after the survey.

I feel this post so much.

Does anyone have advice for how to approach 1:1s with my manager when they ask questions like this? I am extremely burnt out. But I also struggle with not being honest about my feelings (my default is honesty and openness). I don’t want more attention from my manager. I just want to quiet quit and suck down as many paychecks as I can before I get so burnt out that I am forced to quit.

Just find one thing to lightly bitch about so they feel engaged. You can’t just say everything is fine because they know that’s bullshit.
I feel you on this. I'm usually way too honest but I'm working for a company I hate and these meetings are more of a liability for me than anything else. I'm also quiet quitting as kind of a moral imperative to take as much from this truly evil company as possible while I prep for the next gig.

Until you can find yourself somewhere you want to be you just have to prep a little for those meetings with some canned responses. At least 1 thing that is going ok, 1 very small thing that you feel could be improved, and then just say that's all you have for this meeting. In my limited experience, managers are more than happy to give your time back. One other trick to burn time in the meeting is to change the topic to weekend plans, asking your manager first what they're doing and then having anything, even if it is boring, to respond with about your plans.

Best of luck 🤞

This is funny because I literally just did the annual one at my office and shit all over my company. I can't wait to see them say they had a ton of positive reactions and make zero changes.

All this make-believe "we listen to our employees" crap came to be around the mid 90s when MBAs started getting common in company management.

It's also when employees started being described as "human resources" and making your whole career in just the one company stopped being a thing (at least in Europe).

I was actually starting my career in Tech when this stuff started taking of in the Industry :/

I just tell them my opinions on business matters aren't free.