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Ask HN: CEO wants us to fill out NOT ANONYMOUS survey that only he can read

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41–50 of 62 posts

Re: Ask HN: CEO wants us to fill out NOT ANONYMOUS survey that only he can read

#41

> I find this odd and suspicious. I would too. What's the point of not sharing the results with anyone. >Should I be worried? Depends on the survey questions, and what your perception of the survey results will do. Can you share some more details here? Are they all manadatory. All in all, you are likely a good person so I would advise, dont worry. >How should I handle the situation? Read the survey, understand how it…

>How should I handle the situation?

In your responses, avoid saying anything "that would put anyone at odds with anyone else". (I learned this quote from a principal of a K-5 school I once dated)

Re: Ask HN: CEO wants us to fill out NOT ANONYMOUS survey that only he can read

#42

It's better to assume incompetence than malice. Some bosses legitimately want to follow up on feedback. But yeah, it's pretty dumb - he won't actually get honest answers this way. I would shoot straight. Not once in my career have I ever suffered for an honest assessment given humbly. And you'll sleep better at night for it.

Incompetence, when exercised by people in a position of power, is indistinguishable from malice.

Re: Ask HN: CEO wants us to fill out NOT ANONYMOUS survey that only he can read

#43
So, it's basically just an email to your CEO?

I would be professional. Don't criticize the silliness of the exercise. Treat it like it's the most ingenious idea you've ever been asked to participate in. Mention how much you admire his vision and how grateful you are for blah blah blah. Don't go overboard though. Some CEOs are smarter than they look.

Re: Ask HN: CEO wants us to fill out NOT ANONYMOUS survey that only he can read

#44
1) Don't fill out the survey if you don't want to, and in all likelihood it will be assumed you were too busy or forgot to get to it.

If he chases responses from people that haven't filled out the survey, and you feel like it could hurt your standing to abstain:

2) Fill out the survey with the most egregious wall of brown-nosing that he could possibly want to hear, making sure to talk about how he's clearly the brain of a Stephen Hawking in the body of a Chris Hemsworth. You could also point out how a leader of this caliber only comes along once in a generation and how lucky you are to just be present to witness it.

There are other options, but none that are of no risk to you, and why take that on? It's an odd and suspicious request, but that's encountering other human beings in the workplace.

Re: Ask HN: CEO wants us to fill out NOT ANONYMOUS survey that only he can read

#45
post #9

Just answer everything is great, five stars, top job, couldn't be happier! It's still 0 information, but more convenient for you

Is it actually more convenient if it’s not true? Because if things actually suck, but you lie and say things are great, aren’t you just consenting to the status quo and even giving permission for things to suck more in the future? I’m the long run this sounds less convenient than dealing with it up front or just finding another job.

One person isn't going to steer the ship of a large company. To make meaningful change, people have to come together as a group and work together.

Individual surveys are the antithesis of coming together to solve problems. You're basically hoping that other people will say the same things as you, and that the people in charge will come up with a good strategy to fix them.

Re: Ask HN: CEO wants us to fill out NOT ANONYMOUS survey that only he can read

#46
As someone who works in security and has sent out anonymous surveys in a corporate environment.

* Never trust a survey to be truly anonymous *

Sure, you can send google surveys that will tell you they don't collect your username and you can trust that. However, a lot of surveys still collect information like your IP address. Unless you're sitting in the office and know for a 100% certainty that your reported IP address will be the same as everyone else... you're at risk. Even then, unless the survey is from a trusted vendor like surveymonkey, you're at risk of the URL being tagged (assuming you know what good/bad URLs from SurveyMonkey even look like).

In the past I've been asked to figure out who completed an anonymous survey based on IP address and it was not hard nor time consuming. For someone in IT or Security, there is plenty of information sources for cross-referencing.

Unless you don't care about your job...Always answer any corporate survey as if the CEO themselves is talking to you in person.

Re: Ask HN: CEO wants us to fill out NOT ANONYMOUS survey that only he can read

#47

Depends on the questions, doesn't it? Asking employees for feedback on how the business is running and how it might be improved seems reasonable to me. Possibly even encouraging. Don't answer questions you don't feel comfortable answering, for whatever reason. If that's a problem for the CEO then it's their problem; your integrity is worth more than your job, right?

Integrity?

Meritocracy is a lie, competence is circumstance, self reliance is antisocial, criminality is environment. We are all exactly the same and any difference is due to the outside. You are better than no one. Nothing within yourself gives you any more integrity than any other person, so you might as well do what any other gray person would- your job.

Re: Ask HN: CEO wants us to fill out NOT ANONYMOUS survey that only he can read

#50

I was once asked to fill out a detailed questionnaire at work for a personality type test administered by a 3rd party (Taibi Kahler model). We were told the result would be confidential. Then my boss asked to see my report - telling me that all the rest of his team had shared theirs. I gave him the report. He was surprised when he read it because he didn't think it was like me at all. But then I had answered every qu…

I used to administer instruments (tests) like that.

In most cases it was a successful and enjoyable activity, and there wasn't this confidentiality issue because we structured around that.

However I also made it clear that the whole point was understanding how to embrace differences. So sharing one's personal reported result, while optional, was done a lot.

But in a couple of cases, people like the boss took the activity way too seriously, no matter what caveats or warnings they received. So either the (non)-sharer or the requester raised the stakes for themselves without realizing what they were doing, and I had to have a talk with them.

It's not really a good idea to seriously rely on results from a test with some known, significant, and published (by the authors) accuracy, validity, and test-retest error. This is why the "reported result" is generally considered inferior on its own. It's also known to repeat back to you what you tell it, but in different words / models.

So, since the boss may decide to raise the stakes like that and make things awkward, etc--these days along with a bunch of other colleagues in the field I use a format that's more like a flexible, open-ended sorting exercise. It's less about who you are, and more about ways you might tend to think about things, for example.

This works around the issues above, and naturally accommodates other conclusions, like yep, some people will rate themselves differently here at work than they would at home in private, for example.

But also: We can train people to recognize the processes that they use to communicate and to take in information. Thus it doesn't matter so much what they think they "are", or what someone else thinks. The process speaks for itself. It's no longer an identity issue so much.

It's an interesting field in which there have been a lot of changes since the personality tests of the 1960s...

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