I'll go ahead and defend blind. It's absolutely negative to the extreme, but it gave me the heads up on a layoff and has all sorts of relevant information. I've come to realize I (we?) trust companies so little that many people would never even complain in a private direct message to a coworker -- pretty hard to commiserate if you're remote.
Most coworkers I know refuse to fill out any "how happy are you at work?" surveys or fill out max scores because they think (and I don't doubt them) that any and all information could be used by management to jeopardize their career -- basically they see their work an totalitarian information state...
> I've come to realize I (we?) trust companies so little that many people would never even complain in a private direct message to a coworker
We claim to live in democracies, while in fact we spend good part of our adult life in parallel societies where we can't even express dissent in private.
This right here. Blind contains a lot of noise but also some signal. Internal corporate comms are 100% noise and unless you have a trusted and informed coworker the grapevine doesn’t tell you much.
Most coworkers I know refuse to fill out any "how happy are you at work?" surveys or fill out max scores because they think (and I don't doubt them) that any and all information could be used by management to jeopardize their career -- basically they see their work an totalitarian information state...