TrenchOps 🐎 
Your ESAT Is Probably Lying to You
And the scary part: it's designed to.
Picture the annual all-hands. A slide appears: "80% of the company is happy to work here. Our department: 83%. We are 3 points above average!" Applause. Someone books a team lunch.
Now run that logic forward a few years. "50% of the company is happy. Our department: 54%. Still beating the average!" Same slide, same applause, and half your people are updating their CVs during the meeting. That's the beauty of relative benchmarks: you can be the tallest passenger on a sinking ship and still get a trophy for it.
I've watched this ritual for over two decades in companies large and small, and I'm still not sure whether upper management genuinely doesn't see through it or just enjoys the theater. Either answer is uncomfortable. So let me walk you through why your ESAT is almost certainly measuring the wrong things - and what actually tells you whether your people are one bad Monday away from resignation.
Problem 1: You're benchmarking against a falling reference point
Comparing your department against the company average tells you exactly one thing: your relative position in a distribution you don't control. If the whole company slides into misery, your "above average" score slides with it, and the slide deck still looks green.
The only comparison that means anything is your own department against itself, over the past five years. Trend lines, not snapshots. A department that went 88, 85, 82, 79, 77 is on fire, even if it beats the company average every single year. Everything else is a participation medal.
Problem 2: Your questions are engineered to be agreeable
Most survey questions are so generic that agreeing with them costs nothing and means nothing.
"I am satisfied with my compensation." Sure, the money arrives on time. But try: "I am satisfied with my compensation and believe it reflects my value to the company." Suddenly you're not measuring whether the salary clears rent - you're measuring whether people feel valued. Those are very different numbers, and only one of them predicts resignations.
"My manager supports my career development." Translation: my manager is pleasant in one-on-ones. Compare: "I know how to develop my career here, I see serious growth potential, and I get concrete support for it." One measures vibes. The other measures whether someone can picture themselves here in three years.
More examples of questions that measure nothing:
"I feel connected to the company mission." Nobody knows what this means, including the person who wrote it. Ask instead: "In the last month, I made a decision differently because of a company priority I understood."
"I have the tools I need to do my job." A question so broad that a broken laptop and a broken org chart produce the same score. Ask instead: "In a typical week, how many hours do you lose to tools, approvals, or processes that don't work?" Now you have a number you can actually attack.
And my all-time favorite: "I believe meaningful action will be taken from this survey." What does that measure - trust in management? Institutional memory? The optimism of people who watched last year's results produced a poster and a pizza day? If your employees have a memory better than a goldfish, this question is a trap you set for yourself.
There's solid research behind this, by the way: survey methodologists have known for years that behavioral questions beat emotional ones. "How would you allocate a 10,000 budget across these five improvements?" gets you actionable data. "Do you feel engaged?" gets you a Rorschach test.
Problem 3: Goodhart eats your survey for breakfast
Goodhart's law: when a measure becomes a target, it stops being a measure. The moment ESAT scores land in managers' KPIs - and in most companies they do - the survey stops measuring satisfaction and starts measuring managers' ability to campaign.
You know the routine. Two weeks before the survey: "Remember all the great things we did this year!" A suspiciously well-timed team event. A gentle reminder that "low scores just create work for all of us." Nobody calls it manipulation. Everybody does it. And the dashboard turns a little greener while nothing underneath changes.
The response rate gets the same treatment. Chasing 95% participation with daily reminder emails doesn't get you more truth. It gets you more people clicking 4 out of 5 on everything just to make the emails stop.
Problem 4: Nobody believes it's anonymous, because it isn't
Your survey tool lets HR filter by department, tenure, location, and role. On a team of six, that's not a filter, that's a name tag. Your employees know this. In the age of AI-assisted text analysis, they also know their free-text comment has a writing style, and that writing style has a Slack history.
So they do the rational thing: polite 4s across the board, empty comment field. The people with the sharpest criticism - usually your most engaged people, because indifferent people don't bother critiquing - self-censor first. The survey systematically filters out exactly the signal you need most.
And here's the survivorship bias on top: the truly miserable already left. You're surveying the people who stayed, then congratulating yourself that the people who stayed haven't left. Peak analytics.
So what actually works?
The dashboard is not the employee. The map is not the territory. If you want to know how your people feel, you need signals that are expensive to fake - because anything cheap to fake will be faked, per Goodhart, every single time.
Watch revealed preference instead of stated preference:
- Your employee referral rate is the most honest ESAT you will ever get. People do not invite friends into a burning building. If your senior engineers stopped referring people two years ago, that's your survey result, and it didn't cost you a single questionnaire.
- Regretted attrition of your top performers. Not overall attrition - losing people you wanted to lose is hygiene. Losing power horses 🐎 is hemorrhage, and one of them is worth more signal than a thousand anonymous 4-out-of-5s.
- Internal transfer requests away from a specific manager. Voting with your feet inside the building, before voting with them outside it.
And if you insist on asking questions, at least do it right: short pulse surveys on specific topics instead of the annual 100-question monster. Behavioral questions with trade-offs instead of feelings. Skip-level conversations where a director actually talks to engineers without the middle layer sanitizing the message - because middle management's job description quietly includes making sure bad news arrives pre-softened. And most importantly: visibly fix one real thing per cycle. One. People forgive you for not boiling the ocean. They do not forgive being asked the same questions every year while nothing changes - that's how you manufacture the "survey fatigue" you'll complain about next year.
👉 Compare your ESAT against your own five-year trend, never against a company average that can sink alongside you.
👉 Replace feelings questions with behavioral ones. "How many hours did you lose to broken process last week?" beats "Do you feel supported?" every time.
👉 Assume every score that feeds into a manager's KPI is being gamed. Because it is.
👉 On small teams, anonymity is fiction, and everyone knows it. Price that into every green dashboard.
👉 The real ESAT is behavior: referral rates, regretted attrition, and internal transfers. Expensive to fake, impossible to campaign for.
Your survey tells you what employees are willing to say. Their referrals and resignations tell you what they actually believe. Only one of those two shows up in your slide deck.
👇 What's the most creative pre-survey "morale campaign" you've ever witnessed? Anonymized answers only - ironically.
This article is also available in German.
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