Madamji pls rating 5 star de dena said the cab driver. The daily rides from the app based cab service providers, have now made me attune to this statement. The next day, before I booked my next cab, I gave the much desired 5-star rating to the previous day’s driver. This action of clicking on 5 stars has become so ingrained in me that even if I don’t remember who the driver was, how my ride was, I invariably give a 5.
As a HR professional, I smile every time I give a 5. It always reminds me of the innumerable employee engagement surveys I would have filled, and not given a 5 this easily. Throughout the year, we in HR would keep making all our efforts to ensure teams are engaged and that they know that they are engaged. At the end of the year, employees would be filling an employee engagement survey where they would rate the working culture, the team, the leadership on a 5-point scale, where 5 was the highest. And as an employer, the most sought after.
While doing the action planning for teams’ basis the received engagement scores, we would sometimes realise that there weren’t a lot of major problems but still the employees just didn’t “feel” like giving a 5, assuming there must be something wrong. Getting a 5 was the most difficult thing.
Gallup would call it a top box score. And best places to work survey results would be based on which organization gets the highest percentile in this top box. As years passed and we had a lot of data points in hand, we realised that in India it’s very difficult to get a 5/5 rating. Our beliefs, systems, thinking or some unknown thing that works in our collective minds, do not let us give a top score easily to anybody. 4 was the 5 in their mind, and mostly 3 was the common average. And hence organizations also started looking at the 4s, the top 2 box score.
However, with the advent of Ola/Uber and all the app based delivery providers, I wonder if apart from providing us convenience, are these new age companies also changing the way we think? If I don’t think much while giving a 5 on an app, how likely am I to use the same thinking steps in my brain while rating my employer during the next employee engagement survey?
A 30 min ride compared to a 300-day tenure in an organization, am I ignoring the time factor? May be not. I remember my initial few experiences of rating these drivers. I would be hesitant giving a 5, there has to be something wrong, nothing is ever perfect. But then the first 5 happened, and then the second and then the brain stopped processing the reasons for giving anything less than a 5. Unless, of course the driver came really late or drove at irrational speed.
Giving 5 became normal in my head. It no longer is something exceptional. 5 has become the new average! If there wasn’t anything to complain about, I was okay to give a 5. Earlier I wouldn’t give a 5 because there has to be something wrong that I didn’t look at. Now, I would give a 5 because there wasn’t anything visibly wrong.
I know that there are still a lot of data points required before this hypothesis of a positive correlation between the app based 5 rating to employee engagement 5 ratings can be proven.
However, the changing mindset of how we look at 5, makes me believe that HR fraternity would soon start seeing the visible impact in the way employees look at the coveted 5!
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