In her post, Nikita brought up the theory of Employee Engagement. In general, this is a Human Resources theory about employee management, which uses things like annual surveys to gain information about employees. The goal is to get a sense of employee’s happiness within the company. Most questions revolve around company goals and employee satisfaction with the company.
As Nikita explained, the main problem here is that these surveys are not a useful evaluation of employee opinions and knowledge. Answers may be biased due to incentive for employees to retain jobs, or just because different types of employees have different personal reasons for working for the company. Incentives are not aligned, which is the main reason why the surveys are often useless of ineffective.
In answer to some of Nikita’s questions: in my opinion, these surveys are very irrelevant because they do not reflect the actual situations and their contexts. Information needed would be much more easily attained through one on one questioning of the employees, using personalized questions custom to the company. Depending on what feedback the employer might be looking for, upfront approaches or inquiries are usually much more successful. Personally, I think that frequent inquiry is the most effective way to gain business related information about employees.
Nikita Joshi’s Post: The Employee Engagement Racket