The Ritual of Sanitization

My thumb is hovering over the ‘Submit’ button, and there’s a bead of sweat tracing a slow, itchy path down my spine. The cursor pulses at a rhythm that feels suspiciously like a countdown. I’ve spent the last 48 minutes sanitizing a single paragraph. This is the Annual Employee Engagement Survey, a digital confessional where the walls are made of two-way mirrors and the priest is an algorithm designed by a firm in Palo Alto. I want to say that the new project management software is a labyrinthian nightmare that has added 18 hours of busywork to my week, but instead, I type: ‘There is a significant opportunity to streamline our workflow integrations.’ It’s a lie. It’s a beige, flavorless, corporate-approved lie.

I’m Hazel L.M., and in my day job, I’m a grief counselor. I deal with the heavy, jagged edges of reality-the things people say when there’s no longer any reason to pretend. But here, in this fluorescent-lit ecosystem, the truth is treated like a hazardous spill that needs to be contained rather than a catalyst for change. Last Tuesday, my supervisor, a man who wears vests regardless of the temperature, told a joke about ‘the inherent scalability of a ham sandwich.’ I didn’t get it. I didn’t even think it was a joke until he paused for the expected reaction. I laughed anyway. It was a sharp, performative bark that felt like sandpaper in my throat.

The Pressure-Release Valve

That’s the core of the problem: we are all performing. We are all pretending to understand the joke, pretending the survey is anonymous, and pretending that our feedback matters more than the $888 we might save on insurance premiums by checking the ‘satisfied’ box. We are living in the age of the ‘Voice of the Employee,’ a term that sounds noble but functions as a pressure-release valve. By asking for our feedback, leadership creates a temporary illusion of agency. If they ask, they must care. If they care, they will change.

But when the results of the 58-question survey are eventually released-usually 8 months late and distilled into a series of soothing blue charts-nothing actually shifts. The software remains broken. The vests remain. The ‘Voice’ is recorded, digitized, and then quietly buried in a shallow grave behind the server room.

The Death of Trust

In my counseling practice, I see the fallout of this ‘performative listening.’ When someone feels ignored, they experience a specific type of micro-grief. It’s the death of trust. You offer a piece of your reality-a genuine concern about a process or a culture-and when it’s met with a pre-written response or, worse, total silence, a small part of your professional investment dies.

Trading Truth for Safety

There’s a contradiction in my own behavior that I haven’t quite reconciled. I complain about the vacuum of the corporate survey, yet when my own clients ask me for feedback on our sessions, I find myself offering the same platitudes I despise. ‘Everything is fine,’ I say, even when I feel like we’re circling the same drain we were 18 weeks ago. Why do we do this? Because honesty is expensive. It requires the recipient to change and the giver to risk their safety. In a corporate environment, where ‘culture’ is often just a synonym for ‘compliance,’ safety is the only currency that matters. We trade our truth for the quiet comfort of not being the ‘problem employee.’

This erosion of trust is expensive. You see a 4.8 out of 5 on ‘Employee Happiness’ and you think you’re doing great, unaware that the deficit represents the people who were too tired to lie and the rest are just terrified of the HR department’s ‘follow-up’ meetings.

The Relief of Unvarnished Fact

We crave the opposite of this. We crave the objective, the unvarnished, and the real. We want answers that don’t have an agenda. It’s the reason why, when I’m not navigating the complexities of human sorrow, I find myself looking for clarity in places where the facts don’t care about my feelings. When you look at a resource like Zoo Guide, you aren’t met with a sentiment analysis algorithm trying to figure out how to make you 8% more productive. You’re met with the reality of the natural world.

There is a profound, grounding relief in being told the truth, even if it’s just about the migration patterns of a wildebeest. It reminds us that there is a world outside the cubicle where facts still exist and where a question receives a direct, honest answer.

Suffocated by Jargon

I remember a specific instance during a ‘Town Hall’ meeting-a term that always implies a level of democracy that the setting never provides. A junior analyst, probably no older than 28, raised her hand and asked why we were still investing in a product line that had lost $18 million in the last fiscal year. The CEO smiled, that practiced, glassy-eyed smile that only appears in boardrooms, and talked for 8 minutes about ‘strategic pivots’ and ‘long-term brand equity.’ He never answered the question. He just suffocated it with jargon.

Beyond the Survey: The Cost of Comfort

Truth is the only bridge between a boss and a human being. If we want to fix feedback culture, we have to start by admitting that it’s currently a failure. We have to stop asking for honesty if we aren’t prepared for the consequences of hearing it. I’ve made mistakes in my counseling practice by trying to protect my clients from the ‘hard truths’ of their situations, only to realize that I was doing them a disservice. I was being a ‘corporate counselor,’ prioritizing comfort over growth. It took me 18 months to realize that a painful truth is infinitely more valuable than a soothing lie.

Organizations need to make the same realization. They need to stop treating their employees like a demographic to be polled and start treating them like partners to be heard.

What If We Stopped Asking?

What if, instead of 58 questions, we had one real conversation? What if, when someone said ‘this process is broken,’ we actually stopped the machine and looked at the gears? It would be chaotic. It would be uncomfortable. It would probably cost more than $888. But it would be real.