Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross got a grilling of survey intentions that company leaders never get. ... [+]
The topic of the executive session at a prominent global corporation was the morale of their employees.
The company’s products were mature and, therefore, becoming commoditized. To maintain margins and keep investors happy, the business laid off a chunk of its workers. The leadership team told the workforce they could breathe easy now, as no further terminations were planned. But when results again came in low, the company cut loose even more people.
The engagement of the survivors took a hit. When the firm commissioned an employee census, it showed quite a bit of frustration, fear, and intentions by many to find new jobs elsewhere before they, too, were pushed out of the boat.
One of the executive vice presidents couldn’t handle that truth. During the executive briefing, when I advanced to a slide showing the proportion of workers who were now demoralized, he erupted. “Disengaged employees are like a cancer,” he said. “They should be cut out!”
The EVP was arguing for what researchers colloquially call “weaponizing” an employee census. Leaders weaponize a survey anytime they destroy the integrity of that research to use it for their own punitive ends.
Weaponizing is what the Trump Administration is attempting to do to the 2020 U.S. Census. Coming from someone like him, the president’s comment last week that “it is very important to find out if somebody is a citizen as opposed to an illegal” ran parallel to the EVP’s find-the-cancer directive.
The perniciousness of weaponizing rests in the fact that the tactic coops legitimate inquiries. Beyond making the census “short form” not as short, there is nothing wrong with a citizenship question being on the census – a survey that in its 2010 incarnation also asked intrusive questions such as birth date, race, the identity and relationship of everyone else in the household and “Does this person sometimes live or stay somewhere else?”
It’s not the legitimacy of the question; it’s the impurity of the intentions. It was suspected ulterior motives that convinced a narrow majority of the U.S. Supreme Court to prohibit the citizenship question.
Chief Justice John Roberts didn’t say the Trump Administration lied when it claimed the question was to be added to help enforce the Voting Rights Act. He wrote there is a “disconnect between the decision (to add the question) and the explanation given,” that the reason “seems to have been contrived” and that the administration’s rationale “was more of a distraction.”
Tomato. Tomahto.
As they watch the census drama continue from a distance, corporate leaders need to appreciate the same issues pervade their organizations anytime they gather information from their employees, whether it’s through the annual employee survey, those fitness trackers or whatever is in the “secret sauce” IBM claims allows them to know with 95% accuracy who is planning to resign.
For companies, there is nothing inherently wrong with asking employees how well their managers manage, how much they trust the leaders or whether they are considering leaving the company in the near future. Faithfully interpreted to help the company improve, these and similar questions are essential information. But in a weaponized survey, these answers boomerang to hit respondents square in the head.
The short-sightedness of weaponizing is that it’s a trick that can only be played once. As soon as word gets out that the survey is a search-and-destroy tactic, people cease incriminating themselves, even if the professional researchers who do the fieldwork protect their identities, as my colleagues and I did against the EVP and as census professionals would against any attempted misuse. Then it’s game over. Companies and countries end up spending a lot of money to get data riddled with misinformation. They have to fly blind.
Justice Roberts noted that non-citizen households “tend to be more distrustful of, and less likely to respond to, any government effort to collect information.” He also ruled that those suing to stop the question “have met their burden of showing that (non-citizen households) will likely react in predictable ways to the citizenship question, even if they do so unlawfully and despite the requirement that the government keep individual answers confidential.” Chances are that even without the citizenship question, the controversy itself will suppress census participation among non-citizens.
Companies have a parallel problem. Rather than getting full participation among non-citizens, theirs is an issue of getting responses from the so-called “disengaged.” Two years ago, my colleagues and I estimated that because of weaponizing, roughly one-third of employees in the U.S. refuse to be candid on employee surveys, either by not participating or by falsely indicating they are happy when they are not. At many companies, it’s much worse, with surveys gaining fewer than half of the employees.
Corporate leaders who want the benefit of accurate information about their state of their workforces need to be vigilant against the weaponizing of that information. If they are not, the information will continue to evaporate.
This will be the “predictable” reaction to being considered “cancer” in need of excision.
