Microsoft omits key salary question from employee survey results

For years, an internal Microsoft employee survey question served as a reliable pressure gauge. He asked if the staff felt they were getting a “good offer on microsoft”, defined as “a reasonable balance between what I contribute to Microsoft and what I receive in return.” When the scores dropped enough, the company responded with significant salary increases.

When Microsoft released the results of its latest employee sentiment surveys, that question didn’t appear anywhere in the main report. Employees noted that trust in the company’s leadership was also not questioned. Workers took to an internal message board to ask why, according to Business Insiderwho saw copies of the comments.

“Can you clarify whether the question was removed or not and why?” one employee wrote in a post that attracted more than 200 approving reactions. Another responded with an A Few Good Men meme: “You can’t stand the truth!“

The official explanation

A Microsoft employee whose title is “Head of employee listening“replied on the internal forum that the questions had not been removed. They were simply asked in different surveys, sent to subsets of employees,”so that we can cover more topics without increasing the length of the survey,” according to the answer confirmed by Microsoft.

The explanation didn’t land well. He “good deal“Historically, the question had been reported as a primary metric. Burying it in a subset survey, regardless of the methodological rationale, eliminates the one number the entire company could point to when compensation is deemed inadequate.

That number has a history. In 2022, after low and declining scores on the question, Microsoft announced company-wide salary increases and increased stock awards. By 2023, the mood had changed: the company frozen salarieseliminated 10,000 jobs and redirected resources toward AI.

A survey that does not match the room.

The results of the broader survey, drawn from 71% of employees and approximately 265,000 comments, painted a mostly positive picture. Employees reported feeling included in their teams, excited about their work, and aligned with Microsoft culture. The item with the highest score, 88, was “In my role, I prioritize addressing security challenges.” according to HR Grapevine.

But some employees said the results didn’t match what they were seeing elsewhere within the company. “It appears that employees essentially have no concerns about the company.“, wrote one in a comment with more than 70 approving reactions, “but in every public forum, AMA, petition, etc., thousands of employees express their concerns about Microsoft’s contracts with the Israeli military, ICE, the US military, etc..”

The disconnect between survey data and lived experience is not unique to Microsoft. But in a company that has spent the last year offers voluntary retirement to 7% of its US workforce.tightening performance expectations, and invest tens of billions in AI infrastructurethe gap feels especially marked.

The Compensation Question Microsoft Would Rather Not Answer

Under CEO Satya Nadella, Microsoft has committed more than $80 billion to AI data centers and computing capacity. It spent $37.5 billion on capital expenditures in a single quarter. Nadella has described the company’s workforce of more than 220,000 employees as a “huge disadvantage” in the AI ​​race.

That framework tells employees something specific about where they fall on the company’s priorities. When the single survey question designed to measure whether workers feel fairly compensated is no longer reported to the entire company, it’s hard to misinterpret the message.

Across the tech industryThe pattern is the same: record revenues, record spending on AI, and a workforce being asked to do more with less certainty about what it gets in return. Microsoft may still be asking the “good deal“Ask it somewhere, in some survey, to some subset of employees. But by removing it from the results that everyone sees, has answered it.