Why All Companies Need Anonymous Surveys

Recently I was in discussion with a young friend of mine that works as a nurse at a local research hospital. She was upset. She works on call, and she mentioned that she was reprimanded again for not coming in to work on a day she was expected to fill in for a nurse on vacation.

I asked her why she didn’t go in to work. She told me she wasn’t scheduled. To be scheduled, the scheduler needs to email her via her work email address and tell her she needs to come in.

She showed me her emails and there was nothing about coming in on that particular day. Then she told me this happens once every few weeks or so, and not only to her – to the entire on call nursing staff. So I asked her why the scheduler is still employed.

She told me she’s not sure. I mentioned it would probably be a good idea to tell her manager, and she told me she didn’t want to, because the manager and the scheduler were close. When I asked if anyone else had spoken up, she told me that she wasn’t sure, but that she knows several had not.

While a research hospital may not be a “company” in the traditional sense, it’s clear that there were significant staffing problems at the hospital that were drastically harming both employee satisfaction and productivity. Employees were constantly “missing work,” even though none of the employees were actually missing work – the scheduler simply wrote them on the calendar without notifying the on call staff they were scheduled for that day. And yet rather than provide a safe, anonymous medium, like a survey, that could allow the hospital to uncover these glaring flaws and an incompetent employee, instead the employees were afraid to speak up out of fear, risking their own jobs and their own happiness in order to avoid an important conversation.

Stories like this are quite common in all types of businesses, and highlight the need of an in-depth employee satisfaction survey that covers all aspects of a company, because without an anonymous way to highlight serious problems, it is unlikely that that these issues are going to be approach – especially by low level employees that fear the long term repercussions. Perhaps more importantly, good employees are being reprimanded for problems that are not their fault. It’s not uncommon for semi-serious issues to be hidden because employees are afraid of speaking out.

In depth employee satisfaction surveys are a great way to solve this problem, no matter what size the company.