Employee Engagement

Now here's a 20th century term that I absolutely hate and my skin crawls every time a manager in my company uses it. What the hell is employee engagement anyway and how well can you really measure it?

My company has this survey once a year to measure employee engagement. It's supposed to be an anonymous survey, although I highly doubt it, and it has all these questions about the company, the managers, etc... a way to gauge employee attitude towards the job. Now there's nothing wrong with that per se, however, I find the questions there to be quite leading and somehow never seem to touch upon any of the subjects that really matter. They really only ask about the good stuff and every year they come up with some more questions to make us feel like they're really trying to make a comprehensive survey, but in fact, it's not comprehensive at all. And then, what they do is, the managers go around "encouraging" people to do the survey and they get really upset when there's someone in the department who hasn't done it. What if I don't want to fill out the survey? What if I don't care enough to do it? I'm entitled to that right, aren't it?

Of course, after all that "encouragement", they congratulate themselves and everyone else because we've had a 100% response rate and take that as a sign that everyone is truly engaged. When the results come out, we all sit around and discuss them, where whatever anonymity vanishes into thin air, and they promise to do something about the issues raised, and that's it. We don't hear anything about it again until the following year when we have to fill out the stupid survey again... And guess what, nothing's changed.

Well I'm not doing it anymore... I'm not going to fill out the stupid survey and give them the 100% response rate. I'll be the one employee who is not engaged and that's that...