A few years ago, a young lady knocked on my door in Hawaii. She happened to be a volunteer from the Census Bureau, and I spent about 30 minutes answering Census Bureau questions. Unlike most of the other door to door surveys that I promptly ignore, I actually wanted my voice heard by the Census Bureau. About halfway through the survey, I was asked by the surveyor “Do you approve of smoking in the home?”
Me: “Uhm, in my home or other people’s homes?”
Surveyor: “The question doesn’t specify.”
Me: “Well, that’s kind of important. I don’t smoke, and I don’t let people smoke in my home, but I really don’t care if they smoke in their homes.”
Surveyor: “The question only has a Yes or No answers.”
Me: “Then my answer is Yes, I’m OK with smoking in the home.”
Not surprisingly, the overall results showed something like 85% of people disapproved of smoking in the home, which was then used as proof that we should conduct more smoking cessation programs.
I’m willing to bet that more than a few people felt the same way I did but chose “No.” When you design a survey question without allowing for nuance or more than a binary answer, you skew the results. That’s not good from a simple truth perspective, but its really not good if you intend to base financial and policy decisions on the results. With that in mind, flash forward a few years and I receive an email asking me to take the Health of the Force survey for the Navy. I wrote about this survey before and how it showed that the Navy is VERY unhealthy in so many ways, so I was hopeful the survey would dig further to identify the areas where the Navy can improve.
Yeah….not so much. I took screen shots as I completed the survey so you can see just how bad it was.
Let’s start with the question “What factors are or would most likely influence you to get out of the Navy?” That’s a legitimately good question, and you get to select your top five options. Maybe the Navy should put something in the survey about readiness and shipyard issues, given the massive amount of news coverage on ship schedules slipping and Sailors committing suicide in Newport News. Or what about wokeness? Or the COVID “vaccine”? Maybe people are particularly incensed about it, or maybe they aren’t, so listing it as a choice would help shed some light on it.
Nope. All the answers are super generic responses that don’t ask any hard questions. They have responses for “Leadership at current command,” but nothing about shipyards, logistics, medical, or other support services that Sailors constantly complain about.
The best option I had was “Senior Navy leaders.” I selected that, and I expounded in the comments, but again, super generic, and not going to result in anything actionable.
Another set of questions asked about Command leadership, still focused on the local command. They did bring in enlisted leaders, which is good, because in the past they often only focused on the Command Triad (the Commanding Officer, Executive Officer and Command Master Chief). But there are no support questions. Plenty of Sailors are frustrated with Navy’s Mandatory Crappy Internet (NMCI), or the lack of investment in our shore facilities, but neither of those issues are the command’s fault. Those decisions are made by top brass, who are never held accountable for how miserable they make Sailors.
What about “How I feel in the Navy” questions? Again, touchy-feely stuff, but nothing that gets at the hard issues we have going on.
And then the DIE questions. That’s like a full 30% of the survey, but I’ll spare you the agony of reading the questions. All of these ask about sexual harrasment and racism and such, which are important…but aren’t the reasons Sailors commit suicide in their baracks room.
This survey was frustrating. I wrote paragraphs in the free-form section, which I am sure will be promptly ignored by the non-warfighter HR officer bent on using the survey to justify more white supremacy training in the fleet. This survey will provide no useful results and will continue to ignore the actual problems in the fleet. It will be used by the Department of the Navy to justify more money in DIE and other stupid programs when we need more efforts towards fixing ships and training our Sailors to be ready for combat. As a taxpayer, you should be angry over this survey and demand better from your elected representatives.
This post represents the views of the author and not those of the Department of Defense, Department of the Navy, or any other government agency.
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Exactly the same type of questions sent to officers and board members of corporations, by the WSJ, IRO ESG.
All offer (beg?) only positive responses to ESG, such as, ‘Check all that apply: which (of these) benefit(s) did your corporation receive from the ESG standards implemented by your corporation?’
Ah, two things: what if it were that, my corporation didn’t implement any ESG standards? This was a question that, I had answered prior to this question on my corporation’s benefits from implementing ESG; yet, I couldn’t skip this question, because it wouldn’t allow for my continuation of answering the survey’s questions, without me answering this question, on the corporation’s benefits from the ESG standards, that never were implemented by it.
Second, what if it were that, my corporation implemented ESG standards, but saw no benefit(s)? There wasn’t an option to select ‘no benefit(s),’ or to select, ‘negative results from ESG.’
How many dummies completed the WSJ survey?