Enough of the idiot surveys, already

I'm a big fan of surveys. Many a journalist has thanked their lucky stars for surveys on a quiet news day, and a good, timely survey can help get your client in the press even when there's no hard news. But seriously, guys - there's a limit even to my willingness to read some of the rubbish that gets churned out.

Today this gem popped in to my inbox:

"Britons Spend Two Months a Year Looking for Emails"

Hmm. Let's take a second to think about that shall we? Do I believe that workers spend one sixth of their year looking for emails? That's four hours a day, or 28 hours a week. If I work Monday to Friday, that means I spend over five and a half hours every day just looking for emails that have been put in the wrong place. With an hour for lunch, that gives me about 90 minutes a day to do some, you know, work.

The survey goes on to claim that this giant task is costing British employers £11 billion a year. Wow.

On top of the £66 billion businesses spend on red tape, the £22 billion cost of 'telephone tag', the £180 billion cost of staff organising their personal lives in the workplace, the £2.4 billion cost of high-tech crime and the £12 billion cost of sickness, it really is amazing anybody can afford to actually stay in business these days.

I've been in PR agency offices and watched staff desperately trying to come up with these figures on the back of an envelope, usually by multiplying some analyst prediction or client claim with a UK average hourly wage. Please, please, please, just stop it. If you need stats in a press release, surely there's a more credible way to do it. How about:

• the rise or fall in spending on a particular product/service/market sector?
• the average amount of time saves per day adopting a new working practice?
• the percentage of businesses/people affected by an issue?
• a measure of how important people consider an issue to be, tracked over time?

Anything please apart from the: "It's costing UK businesses £250 gazillion and workers are wasting 23 hours a day".

Comments

[Danny Bradbury]

It drives me bonkers as well. I can't quite work out whether people keep on doing this stuff because it works, or because they need to show clients with no new activity that they're earning their retainers. Either way, it clutters up the inbox with stuff I won't use.

I haven't quite figured out a way of programming an email rule to kill that stuff, though, because there are some surveys that are quite useful. Institutions do still come up with good, solid, statistically valid surveys (BERR's Information Breaches Survey is a recent example). Simply searching on the word 'survey' and having my releases@ account kill everything on sight would be throwing out the baby with the bathwater.

Perhaps we should develop a standard response email that a bunch of journos could reply with. Something along the lines of:

'Please explain in detail how you arrived at figure x. What were the data sources contributing to your conclusion? How many people were surveyed? What method did you use? What were the exact questions that you asked, and how did you avoid phrasing them to lead the respondent in a certain direction? What is your margin of error for this survey?"

If enough journos mailed back to nail stuff like that down, it might reduce this fluff once and for all.