Office Shenanigans: The Satisfaction Survey

Pretty typical for the Satisfaction Survey campaign

“Do we have to reward coworkers for completing the surveys, or can we torture them until they get it done?”

I worked in advertising for eight years, and in all of the strategy meetings and brainstorming sessions I sat through, this was the single most devious and brilliant question ever asked. Those words (paired with a reluctant “whatever it takes” from senior leadership) from my former co-worker kicked off a week-long harassment campaign that united the company in filling out surveys, to shut us up.

Every year, my former company has employees fill out a fairly lengthy and anonymous 30+ question satisfaction survey to identify what the company is doing well, and how it can improve. And with over 300 employees over multiple years, there’s enough longitudinal data to flag actual areas of interest and concern.

So, the company was strongly incentivized to get people completing those surveys. Enough so to reach out to two of the more mischievous employees for an official campaign. My coworker’s brilliant question set off the tone for the week: torture the office into submission.

TECHNICALLY ACCURATE PROMISES: GIFT CARD SHAPED ENVELOPES
The torture started with a relatively innocuous promise: every employee who filled out the survey on Day One and emailed a screenshot of the confirmation page to me would receive a “gift card shaped envelope of indeterminate value”.

If you’ve read enough of these Office Shenanigans posts, you know exactly what was coming. I went to Staples, bought a ton of plastic card blanks and coin envelopes, and thanked coworkers with pictures of cute animals. Because I’m not a complete monster, I also got a roll of pennies so everyone could be thanked for their two cents worth to the company with…well, two cents.

Since Human Resources was going to be ground zero for the distribution of these cards, we made sure each card was clearly labeled: “DON’T BLAME GIA SHE’S JUST THE MESSENGER”. We even salted 10% of the envelopes with actual gift cards (with values ranging between $5 and…okay they were all $5 gift cards), although those odds were never disclosed.

Half of the company fulfilled their day one obligations and got a card. All those surveys, received before they knew there was new cause for dissatisfaction!

BANNERS ARE FREE: IRREVERENT REMINDERS EVERYWHERE
The greatest resource we had for the Office Satisfaction Survey campaign was free reign over adding signage to an entire office, and we took full advantage of that ability. The goal? Personalized messages for every location.

Office coffee machines? Threaten the supply.

“NO SURVEY, NO COFFEE” — celebrating how switching to Wawa coffee was a direct response to prior Satisfaction Surveys

That office printer that always breaks? Remind people that things don’t get fixed until somebody says they’re broken.

Yes, I realize this is effectively “See Something Say Something” messaging. The apology was because this went up deep into the Survey campaign

I’m probably the proudest of the bathroom posters: I had a reputation to uphold from previous Bathroom Banners hijinks, so I went all out with posters designed to make people do a double-take.

Mirrored writing is a severely under-utilized trick in the location-specific advertiser’s arsenal

I realize, this poster looks perfectly normal. But remember, you’re looking at a picture of its reflection in a mirror, not the original poster. The top headline may be mirrored text, but the bottom is written in reverse, so no matter where you’re looking half of the message is always hard to decipher.

The coup de grace, however, was a move that cut deep. Since I worked in an advertising agency, vendor and client meetings often featured free lunches — and after those meetings came to an end, leftovers would be moved to the cafe and placed on a free food table for the vultures to feast.

FREE PIZZA!

So it was a relatively simple task to collect a handful of empty pizza boxes, and turn them into stealth advertisements to fill out the darn survey. Upon opening the box, the cruelest trick we played was revealed.

At this point, the senior leadership were fully invested in the campaign, and every time someone would throw the box out in disgust, one of them would reset the trap for the next batch of hungry coworkers

The Results: High Conversion Rates, General Acclaim, and a Promise of “Never Again”
Our targeted harassment campaign didn’t just help cause a double digit percentage lift in survey responses for our agency — our two sister agencies that shared a building with us also saw significant increases in completion rates that year. We did offer rewards as well (tiered offers of free food based on how many surveys were completed), but in this case, the carrot wasn’t as compelling a draw as the stick in getting the office buzzing with anticipation for what was to come next.

Don’t worry, Jane confirmed the accuracy of this quote I actually hung at my desk

While enthusiasm over the campaign within the company was mixed (I suspect a few former coworkers still hold a bit of a grudge over the gift card shaped envelopes), feedback among friends was universally positive.

“Can I hire you to design my life please?

…I think there is a TEDx Talk or Buzzfeed article or both in this campaign you’re running. You have got to document and share this publicly. It’s so creative and it keeps getting better. I wish I could subscribe to this campaign.”

-Jane McGonigal
Author of Reality is Broken, Superbetter

The campaign may have been wildly successful by most measures, but it also comes with a promise: never again.

It’s very easy to trade campaign effectiveness for audience enjoyment, because the two do not always go hand in hand. Just look at any political email campaign haranguing you for donations. Literally no one enjoys those emails, but it gets the job done. But when that trade-off comes with a betrayal of trust, the tactics may continue to work but the overall sentiment will suffer.

It’s somewhat ironic that the project I skewed furthest towards a mercenary optimization for campaign effectiveness was for a project centered around Employee Satisfaction. And while I still believe the campaign stayed on the safer side of that line, I might have let it edge a little too close for comfort, at least with the pizza.

Last time on Office Shenanigans: Michael writes earnest reviews of how enjoyable it was to work with former coworkers rather than their on-the-job skills.