Survey about being micromanaged
Here are the results I got when I put up a survey about being micromanaged and asked people to take it
In 2023 I created a survey in Google Forms about being micromanaged at work, and put out the link in various groups I’m in, and asked people to take it “if you’ve ever been micromanaged at a paid job.”
I didn’t want to attempt to calculate the frequency of being micromanaged, mostly because I knew my sample of respondents was skewed toward knowledge workers with college degrees, but also because I’m less interested in how many managers micromanage and more interested in what the effect is on the teams of people that are micromanaged.
I also wasn’t trying to do replicable academic research, although I bet anyone doing a similar survey through a research organization with an IRB would get similar results. I was mostly interested in finding out if micromanaging is a serious enough problem for managers who micromanage that it would be worthwhile for them to learn how not to do it. I didn’t really think about whether micromanaging was a problem for the HR people at the org where a manager was micromanaging, until I got responses back and figured out that micromanaging looks like a much bigger problem than HR people know.
Havng said all of that, here are the questions and results I got. I got 299 responses to the survey.
Question 1: “Have you ever been micromanaged in a paid work situation?”
Yes: 99.7%
No: 0.3%
Question 2: “Being micromanaged made you feel ______ for the person who was managing you.”
“more trust”: 0%
”less trust”: 95%
”The same amount of trust”: 5%
Question 3: “Enter three words that describe how being micromanaged at work made you feel:”
The top 16 most frequent words entered, in descending frequency, with frequency of mentions:
frustrated (82)
angry (64)
annoyed (41)
incompetent (37)
belittled (28)
anxious (25)
untrusted (2)
resentful (16)
untrustworthy (14)
unmotivated (14)
stressed (14)
small (14)
undervalued (12)
stupid (11)
irritated (11)
disrespected (11)
Question 4: “Which of the following did being micromanaged lead to? (Check as many as apply to you.)”
Lower morale at work: 89.3%
Lingering bad feelings about the manager: 86.6%
Actively looking for a different job: 72.9%
Lingering bad feelings about the company or work organization: 68.9%
Leaving the job: 62.5%
Doing less work: 45.5%
Stopping or slowing down work: 44.1%
Trying harder to please your manager: 25.8%
Doing lower-quality work: 25.1%
Engaging more with your work: 1.3%
Becoming more loyal to the company: 0.3%
Respecting the manager more: 0.3%
Planning to stay at the company for the length of your career: 0.3%
Question 5: “When you were being micromanaged, did you have anyone you could report that to with a reasonable expectation that it could be fixed? “
Yes, and I did and they helped: 5.4%
Yes, and I did and they recorded it but nothing changed: 13.7%
Yes, and I did and I was punished in some way: 7%
Yes, technically, but I didn't feel safe reporting to them: 14.7%
No, there was no one I could tell safely: 51.8%
I didn't consider telling anyone else about the micromanaging: 7.4%
Just reading through these answers, you can see that people who were being micromanaged felt very negative about it, and it caused barriers in their work relationships with their managers. It also turns out that over half the people surveyed didn’t feel there was anyone in the organization that they could tell safely, which means that the perception is that HR won’t do anything to help managers stop micromanaging. In fact, only 5.4% of respondents were able to tell someone (presumably HR) and have the issue resolved in a helpful way.
Next week I’ll do a little more analysis of what I see in these numbers. If you have questions, go ahead and post them as comments or email me.
If this is making you think “Ack! What if I’m micromanaging or someone in my organization is micromanaging and causing all this misery in the people we’re managing??” just stay tuned. I’m going to be doing a standalone class on how to determine if you’re micromanaging and how to figure out why so you can fix it without hurting your own feelings or looking like a jerk, that’s going to be something you can sign up for on your own or as professional development, in August. And you can become a paid subscriber to this newsletter right now and get the one-hour workshop on micromanaging and how to deal with it live on July 25 or watch the replay starting the next day. Being a paid subscriber is a great deal, because it’s a pithy, interesting workshop with actionable steps, every month, for only $120 a year or $12 a month. You can use education funds to pay for it, and it gives you enough to think about without overwhelming you or giving you another job on top of your job.
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