{{first name | Reader}},
The survey is anonymous. It says so at the top and again in the email and again in the reminder email.
It also asks for my department, my tenure band, my level, and whether I manage people. There are four of us who fit.
I answered honestly in 2019. I said the reorganization had been handled badly and that nobody had explained what we were now supposed to be doing. Six weeks later the results came back as a slide titled "What We Heard." The bullet under my department said "opportunities around clarity of direction."
They were not wrong. That is what I said. It had been translated.
I have not answered honestly since. I give everything a four. Four is the number that generates no follow-up.
A RESIGNATION LETTER I WON’T BE SENDING
To: Employee Engagement Survey (Annual)
Re: Your reminder and the two before it
Please accept this as my formal resignation from the Employee Engagement Survey, effective this cycle.
I have completed twelve of these. Forty-seven questions each. I have rated my sense of belonging, my clarity of purpose, my confidence in senior leadership, and my agreement with the statement "I have a best friend at work," which I have now been asked twelve times and answered honestly once.
I want to acknowledge what the survey has achieved. Participation is up. It is up because my manager's participation rate is a metric on my manager's own scorecard, which I understand, and which is why I keep filling it in.
I have no complaint about the instrument itself. It is well constructed. My concern is only that it has never once been the thing that changed anything, and that both of us have known this for some time.
I will continue to give everything a four. I want to be clear that this is not disengagement. It is the most efficient available form of participation.
Regards,
DEEPLY UNSETTLING MATH
Forty-seven questions. Once a year. Twelve years.
That is 564 questions.
Against them: one thing you actually raised in 2019, and no observable change to it since.
Participation was 94 percent. It is always 94 percent.
ONE GENUINELY USEFUL THING: Saying no by asking what to drop.
Refusing work directly is expensive. It puts you on record as unwilling, and it hands the other person a grievance they can repeat later.
The version that costs nothing is not a refusal. It is a question about sequencing.
"Happy to pick that up. Which of the other two should slip, and by how long?"
You have not said no. You have said yes, made the cost visible, and handed the decision back to the person who owns it. Most of the time the request quietly disappears, because whoever asked did not want it enough to trade anything for it.
When it does not disappear, you get something better than a refusal. You get a written record of what was deprioritized and agreed to by the person who asked.
Do it in writing, in the channel the request arrived in. Said out loud in a meeting, it sounds like resistance. In text it reads as diligence.
It fails with the manager who answers "all of them." That is not an answer about sequencing; it is a refusal to own the tradeoff. Keep the message anyway. When something slips later, and something will, you have it in writing that you asked which one and were told everything was first.
PARKING LOT
Second One.
Write the letter you won't send. Hit reply and send it to me. I'll publish it anonymously, and nobody will ever know it was you.
Go do something that isn't work.
R. Countdown
ANY OTHER BUSINESS
I gave this issue a four.
Enough, Already Club. Form EA-1. Distribution: internal.
Retention: until you leave.