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Recently I was in hospital for a major operation and was asked afterwards during my week of enforced stay: “How would you rate your pain on a scale of 1 to 10, one being hardly any and 10 being unbearable?”
Happily my scores seldom reached more than four or five during that post operative week. Meanwhile, two beds away a young man, also post operative, regularly declared his pain to be on the scale of 8, 9 or even 10. Each day though, he bravely walked around the ward only occasionally giving a moan or any sign that he was suffering terribly.
That was when I began realising just how subjective and individualised scaling can be. There was no realistic way you could for example, combine my score of 4 out 10 with his pain at eight or nine. No “average” would make sense or provide much useful information to anyone.
Since people have different pain thresholds their individual scores would only make sense in relation to them, not anyone else. You could produce a frequency distribution of course of how many people score a particular number, but even that would probably not allow you arrive at anything useful or reliable.
If you are involved in or merely interested in staff surveys, you will know that these often rely on some kind of rating scale. By this I mean some sort of continuum from say 1 to 5, 1 to 10, or even 1 to 100.
Continuums can also be expressed in words such as strongly agree, agree, neither agree nor disagree, disagree, strongly disagree. Continuums seem to make considerable sense. If you know for instance that two thirds of your staff have rated their level of engagement with work as “not very engaged” you can be fairly sure something is amiss.
Many people in HR happily use such continuums and seldom have the time or the inclination to think too deeply about what these really mean. I plead guilty to this too, and recently experienced at first hand just how dubious and subjective these continuums can be.
From now on I shall look at surveys of engagement for example with a rather more critical eye or perhaps an advanced level of scepticism, say around 7 out 10. What level would you choose?
See also:
What Are Your Staff Trying to Tell You, by Peter Hutton, BrandEnergy Research Limited, 30 Nov 2008
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