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The 2% Illusion: When Asking for Feedback Teaches Employees…
The Faux-Wood Grain and the 2% Victory
I was tracing the miserable, faux-wood grain of the conference table-the cheap laminate peeling near the corner-while the VP of People Operations, bless her heart, tried to make 2% sound like a victory. Her hands were gripping the clicker so tightly the knuckles were white. The air conditioning was failing, and we were trapped, 238 people packed into a room built for 108, listening to a presentation about our ‘unprecedented increase’ in engagement scores.
This is the annual ritual. We spend 8 solid minutes filling out the forms, carefully crafting sentences in the optional comment box, detailing the specific, tactical failures that make our jobs impossible-the broken software, the nonexistent training, the fact that our compensation hasn’t kept pace with inflation, let alone the $878 million in Q4 revenue we just helped generate. And then, six months later, we get the PowerPoint. It distills our messy, human reality-all the ambition, the exhaustion, the quiet dread-into a single, brightly colored dial.
The Illusion of Tuning: 2% vs. Reality
The 2% difference barely moves the dial on a large, rattling machine.
They showed us the heat map. Green was everywhere. Why was it green? Because, they explained, the engagement score had moved from 68% to 70%. Two percentage points. When you operate a machine with 2,000 moving parts, and you tune one screw by 2%, the machine doesn’t suddenly sing. It still rattles, but the executives can claim they’re ‘actively monitoring vibration levels.’
I admit I am part of the problem. I filled out the survey last year while I was actively interviewing for a new role. I rushed through the positive affirmation questions, deliberately marking neutral or slightly positive responses just to finish the damn thing faster. I didn’t want to get flagged by the system as a ‘flight risk,’ which is how the HR algorithm translates ‘honest feedback.’ I lied to protect myself, which proves the system’s genius: it incentivizes dishonesty to achieve a favorable score. It achieves the exact metric it seeks by suppressing the very truth it claims to seek.
We focus so much on the score itself that we miss what the ritual actually *does* to people. When you repeatedly and emphatically ask employees for their voice, their lived experience, their pain points, and then you respond with a committee and a 2% bump, you are actively teaching them that their voice is worthless. You are modeling learned helplessness. You are training the workforce to be quiet.
The Human Cost vs. The Score
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I’m thinking of Luca M.K., an elder care advocate I met who works with our foundation. Luca doesn’t need a survey to tell him there’s a problem with staffing. He knows it because the amount of time he has to spend with each patient has been halved. He knows it because the response time to a critical incident jumped from 8 minutes to 48 minutes in the last quarter. Luca’s metric isn’t arbitrary engagement; it’s the human cost of negligence measured in concrete time units. Something a multiple-choice question about ‘feeling valued’ can never capture.
This is where the contrast becomes painful. True engagement is rooted in specific, immediate recognition of value and contribution. It’s tangible. It’s the difference between buying a mass-produced product and appreciating something that carries the clear mark of human effort and story. When you deal in things that are genuinely crafted, where the story of the artisan matters more than the quarterly trend line, like the delicate, hand-painted narratives you find at the Limoges Box Boutique, you realize how much weight a single, honest piece of feedback carries. That connection is real; the survey is vapor.
The Survey Score
Tangible Recognition
This isn’t to say that the People Operations team is malicious. They are caught in the middle. They are tasked with quantifying the unquantifiable for a highly skeptical, number-driven executive team. They are genuinely trying to create a healthier environment, but they are limited by the tools and the budget they are given-a budget that prioritizes $878,000 worth of new chairs over $878,000 worth of retention bonuses. (The numbers always land awkwardly, don’t they?)
Flipping the Script: Action Over Metrics
We need to flip the script. The problem isn’t the data we collect; it’s the action we fail to take, and the *type* of action we are willing to consider. Forming a ‘Culture Committee’ is rarely the answer. Changing the way work actually happens, altering the resource allocation model, and firing managers who actively degrade the environment-that is the answer. But those actions are messy. They require accountability that goes beyond checking a box on a mandated annual review. They require a kind of bravery the VP’s PowerPoint slide simply can’t contain.
The Coffee Machine Wisdom
My former boss, a cynical but honest woman, used to say, ‘If you want to know how engaged people are, just look at the condition of the coffee machine. That tells you everything about mutual respect.’ It’s a clumsy metric, but infinitely more honest than the output of a thousand-question survey. Because the coffee machine reflects shared ownership. If it’s always broken and sticky, it means no one cares enough to fix it, and management doesn’t care enough to notice.
The Proposal: Measure Action, Not Apathy
What would happen if, next year, the engagement score was replaced with a ‘Willingness to Respond’ score, measuring not how happy employees are, but how many documented, material changes were implemented based on the 108 most critical written comments from the previous year?
The score is never about them. It’s about us.