Team negative feedback being suppressed

Question

We're two scrum teams in an office of about 15 teams, within a wider global company. As things go, our office is a relatively small player from a global company scale point of view.

Quarterly, all teams within our office are required to fill in a survey detailing how we feel things are going. This is anonymous, and the results are unique for each team (the same questions are asked for each team).

Our team has had consistently poor survey results since the survey started.

It has come to our attention that all survey results are published on a company-wide Confluence page, with the exception of our team. Our results are explicitly marked as hidden.

Looking at the results of other teams, we can clearly see that our team is far less satisfied with how things are than other teams, but that metric is hidden to everyone else.

We have a high rate of attrition from our team, which can be attributed to why we score so low in the survey. We're in no way happy that our results are being hidden from everyone else. It seems like we're being censored to prevent other people from being dissuaded from joining our team.

As team lead I feel like it is my responsibility to escalate this to management.

How can I do so professionally?

Answer 1

You need to understand why your team is losing people.

Without knowing the scores for the questions, it's difficult to see what's wrong here, so try to find that information out if you can.

And yes, speak with your manager about your concerns. This may result in learning some hard facts about your own leadership or processes, so use the information to learn and adapt your own skills.

There's not really enough to go on from your question here.

So, I'd:

1) Find out which metrics your team is low on
2) Establish the reason for the high attrition rate
3) Speak with your manager

Answer 2

You know how things like books and movie posters only put on quotes from favorable reviews that paint the subject in a good light? Well this is the same thing, and to be honest I can see why they might not want to publish survey results that paint a negative picture company-wide.

You could ask them why they aren't publishing them or ask them to publish them for you but that would be the wrong thing to focus on because whether the rest of the company can see whether your team is happy or not isn't really going to make any difference to getting the issues that are currently affecting your team resolved and that's never the point of these survey things anyway.

What you need to be doing (either yourself, or collectively as a team) is addressing the issues about why you are unhappy directly with your manager, no survey is ever going to take the place of that whether the results get published or not.