
Vibecatch – Easiest job satisfaction poll - juhani
https://vibecatch.com/
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StevePerkins
I'm not sure what separates this from a Google Form doc, or a SurveyMonkey, or
any of the 100 other "anonymous" survey devices on the market already.

Regardless, as an employee I've learned to either ignore these things
outright, or at least give the most artificially bland non-feedback possible.
On many of the occasions in the past when I've given meaningful feedback...
despite the "anonymity", that feedback has been repeated to me verbatim by a
manager in later conversations. Often in a passive-aggressively angry or
intimidating way.

It's a problem of population size. For company survey data to be all that
meaningful, you have to AT LEAST segment the "anonymous" responses by
location, group, etc. So even if the text doesn't include your individual
name... it still narrows your identity down to a couple dozen people in a HUGE
company, and probably just 2 or 3 people in a small company.

With that small of a population, it's really not that hard for managers to
piece together who said what. My experience is that when management receives
feedback they'd rather not hear, often they REALLY do want to piece together
who said what. So whatever your noble intentions are in creating an
"anonymous" survey system, I believe that human nature works against you on
this. You're really just creating a honeypot trap to help root out "negative
influencers".

Talk to your people. I know that a lot of employees roll their eyes at regular
"1-on-1's", and a lot of managers don't like doing them either (so they're
often not done very well). However, I just can't comprehend how anyone could
consider themselves an effective manager without having those with every
direct report on at least a bi-weekly basis, preferably weekly. If you're
doing those right, then you'll have a strong relationship within your team
even if everyone doesn't always see eye to eye.

Of course, 1-on-1's and manager-employee communication at the team level is a
separate matter from COMPANY WIDE feedback. Upper management can (and usually
does) have blind spots due to information getting blocked by poor managers in
between them and staff. If you have a solution for bad managers, or for bad
organizational structures that leave employees with either multiple managers
or none at all, then you'd be a messiah. Generally, that's the last thing in
the world that upper management really wants to tackle, though.

~~~
vijayr
Do we really need anonymous surveys? We are all adults, can't we just sit down
and talk and sort out issues? If a team is already beyond that point, what is
the guarantee that being anonymous will work (assuming it is kept fully
anonymous somehow)?

~~~
nicarus1984
> _We are all adults, can 't we just sit down and talk and sort out issues?_

I really wish this were universally true, but many of us deal with the wildly
different personalities of our co-workers and bosses. This leaves some uneasy
and insecure about sharing even constructive feedback. I don't think surveys
are the answer, but for some it is much easier to take those than try to tip-
toe around.

------
degenerate
I'd respect you more as a manager if you caught me in the hallway and spent 2
minutes asking about _that thing_ I was doing over the weekend, and were
genuinely interested. Having me fill out this form every week would surely get
on my nerves.

I'd pick the sad face every week and type " _this form makes me sad :(_ "

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cheetos
The reality of every workplace I've been in is that it is never in your best
interest to say you are unhappy.

If you are unhappy it is usually obvious and your manager usually knows about
it -- if they haven't done anything to rectify the situation, they likely
can't or won't do anything about it.

Saying you are unhappy just creates a more tense situation.

In my experience, the only option you have in these situations is changing
your role or group within your organization or leaving your organization for
another job.

~~~
mattlutze
I don't think this is necessarily true for part-time managers -- those folks
that have productive work to do, but also have a team of people to do formal
paperwork, timesheets and such for.

If you don't tell your management that you're unhappy, you're bound to remain
unhappy because your management may not notice that you're upset, at least not
in a specific way. Being given a clear problem, "I'm unhappy because of
_____," gives us an actionable goal to work toward to making your work life
more enjoyable.

Management aren't mind-readers, and it's particularly frustrating when you ask
an employee if anything is up and they say "no," when you know there is an
issue.

~~~
tixocloud
True but that's where great managers differ from mediocre managers. Great
managers have stronger EQ qualities that help them sense when potential issues
may arise. They have good self-awareness on what's going on without being
buried in the productive work.

~~~
mattlutze
Even "great" managers don't know what's going on in your personal or internal
life unless you tell them.

And most managers are, statistically, going to fall into good/mediocre/poor
categories, all of whom will doubly need you to tell them when something's up.

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pjc50
_Weekly_ happiness surveys? This is the "are we nearly there yet?" grade of
annoying question.

Ctrl-F "privacy": no results. So in that case it's mandatory to always tick
all the happiness boxes. You don't want to draw attention to yourself by being
unhappy on record.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
I was thinking of privacy from the angle of mining data on companies to sell
to investors. If you know a company is running well and everyone is really
happy then that's probably a useful indicator for investors (eg to buy the
firm, reduce wages to unhappy levels, sell on with an 'efficiency saving'
before the shit hits the fans /cynicism).

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striking
Wow that's so weird, I think I found a prototype of this software:
[https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1vxKCv9rScwm2sE3EKMeApuPkhdN...](https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1vxKCv9rScwm2sE3EKMeApuPkhdN8Dmo0qyelNmgOQJE/viewform?usp=send_form)
(I would have made it faster but Google Docs breaks badly on mobile.)

"what do you think of the CEO" is a question that only the CEO is interested
in the answer to. That's a silly choice of question. Not a single person will
be honest.

You can use Google docs. Or you can just walk up to people and ask how they're
doing. This just feels passive-aggressive.

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cletus
So one of my annoyances at work is the mandatory "training" I have to do for
compliance/legal/CYA reasons, which amount to wasting 20 minutes of my life
with "are you an idiot?" type questions on, say, bribing foreign government
officials.

I put those off as long as possible until the nag emails start escalating.

And now you want me to do a weekly survey on whether or not I'm happy?

Other posters have brought this up. What about privacy? How do I know my
answers will be anonymous? The company is (assumedly) paying for this. They're
the customer. Do I really think they're not going to get this information if
they want it?

Annoyingly, if I have to do this, you've now made me think of all these
issues. There is a cognitive cost with doing so.

What possible reward/benefit is there for being honest? No, no, "I love the
Leader!"

~~~
kabdib
Microsoft does this. They don't care about passing grades, they just care that
you've been exposed to the content.

It was pretty easy to crank up the "training" on a spare computer. Then just
reach over and click something random every once in a while and (poof!) you
were done. I have no memory of most of the videos except that they usually
portrayed idjits in sitcom-like skits ("Susan, do you think it's against our
corporate ethics to steal this truck of PCs from the loading dock and sell
them in a supermarket parking lot so we can buy more drugs for the team that's
writing the malware that we sell protection services for? Whaddya think?")

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erikb
I thought this would be an analysis of mails, meetings and Issue comments,
looking for who talks to whom and which words are used. That would be really
cool.

Just having a lot of polls doesn't tell much of a story, I think. Most people
will simply not do them.

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robgibbons
Pretty sure I would be less happy getting polled every week.

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normloman
Ideally, management should be open to hearing criticism, and employees would
feel safe giving their feedback. In reality, management is self -serving and
hostile to dissent. If you get to the point where you have to make employees
give comments anonymously, you're culture is already screwed up. And maybe you
should focus on being less of a jerk boss.

As an employee, I would NEVER fill out this form. I'm the only guy in my
department, and as soon as I started talking about aspects of my job, the boss
would know who it is. And retaliate. Cuz he's a jerk.

------
SuddsMcDuff
I sent my team a link to
[https://www.retroospect.com/](https://www.retroospect.com/) each week, the
novelty wore off after 3 weeks.

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guiomie
Seriously?

Leadership 101: Go on the floor, talk with your people. You'll get the vibes
right away.

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larryprice
Neat! This is like a super-customizable version of this tool my company sues
called Morale ([https://moraleapp.com/](https://moraleapp.com/)).

Anonymity is key in these things or employees won't be able to answer
truthfully. I can't tell if Vibe Catch is anonymous or not. Anyway, managers
don't always know when something is wrong when they are dealing with multiple
projects and a bunch of different employees. Trends over time are usually
pretty interesting in these kinds of apps too.

~~~
fyolnish
> sues

It's been a while since I liked a typo this much.

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lolo_
One big problem is the willingness to be honest. If you feel very unhappy and
say so, even if it's anonymised there are probably means of finding out who it
might be (or the boss might even assume) and maybe even based on that fear an
employee won't be honest.

I think the idea of actually checking for this kind of thing is great, I don't
just want to attack this, but I think it certainly requires a culture which is
genuinely open to this kind of criticism, and in my experience that's
incredibly rare.

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izolate
We're trying Subcurrent, which integrates with Slack, but haven't really felt
the benefit of something like this yet.

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CPLX
I am not sure what bearing it has on this discussion, but I was intrigued to
discover that this site is Finnish in origin:
[http://www.rakettitiede.com](http://www.rakettitiede.com)

