Sunday, April 08, 2007

Optional, but NOT Optional

One thing that has bothered me is that our leadership speaks out of both sides of the mouth. MS Poll is supposedly a "voluntary" activity, but from what I hear, managers get pushed from more senior leadership to complete the poll. Completion reports are sent out to the district in an attempt to get people to complete the poll. If a team has a low completion rate, it doesn't reflect well on that manager. So that creates a flood of email and conversations to "encourage" people to complete the Poll. Call a spade a spade. It's completely hypocritical. Is it really "optional" if a manager is viewed poorly if their team has a low participation rate?

Softies what do you think?

1 comment:

Matteo said...

I saw my manager being under pressure during the last few weeks and I wondered if the poll completion rate is going to impact on his review; that would be unfair.

I understand the wish of a manager to get feedback through the poll, but not the unreasonable pressure put on this thing by upper management.

If the organization is concerned by poor completion rate, it should probably better try to understand why people is not interested/willing/whatever to answer the poll.

I answered the poll cause I still believe it is a good way to let management know how good/bad the organization is, but I'm aware of many colleagues that simply think the poll is useless and brings to no real change when necessary.

This is however just another example of some insane pressure put on people to get the numbers. I see it everyday in other aspects of my job and am not surprised to see it once more.

Oh, I obviously raised all these concerns in the poll too :)