Are you happy in your work? In 37 years of journalism I don’t remember once being asked that question by my bosses. Nor did I expect to be. But in the civil service there is a bureaucratic machine to make sure employees are asked once a year if everything is all right, dearie. At unpublicised cost, the People Survey invites penpushers to complain. Guess what – they do.

Three mandarins explained this time-consuming exercise to the Commons public administration select committee. They were: Alex Chisholm, the civil service’s chief operating officer; Fiona Ryland, ‘government chief people officer’; Dr Claudia Roscini, head of the civil service People Survey team.

The survey covered 100 departments, 17,000 business units and 350,000 souls. It was ‘an extremely useful tool’. Tools need oiling, so a review was held. This was ‘a very substantial piece of work’ and took three months. The committee’s chairman, William Wragg (Con, Hazel Grove), suggested a rolling survey of the survey. Chisholm was one move ahead of him. Each survey already contained three evaluation mechanisms and there were consultations with survey managers in all departments. ‘Feedback and input from other stakeholders’ was sought. Benchmark comparisons were held with other public–sector leviathans, best practice shared. More admin. More meetings.

Our national debt is hideous yet hundreds of clerks are being paid to survey surveys and benchmark benchmarks. And not just in this country. Roscini’s survey team is part of an ‘engagement group’ at the OECD, the organisation for economic counterproductive doodling. Not all countries bother with an annual survey of bureaucrats. Denmark, Switzerland and others only do it once every few years. The maniacs.

Chisholm (Downside, Oxford and Insead), a murmuring beanpole with basso voice, dwelt creamily on this and other aspects of the People Survey. I need to be careful when writing about Chisholm because last time I gave him a tickling in the Times, there arrived a steaming missive from his mater. Mother Chisholm told me the nation should be proud of her 55-year-old. When it comes to seamless waffle, he is certainly a champ. Chisholm purred about pulse surveys and a centralised basis and measuring assessment against local issues and consistent, year-by-year, cross-civil-service comparisons. Wragg: ‘Thank you, that is helpful.’ In committee room eight at the Palace of Westminster, a bluebottle rendered itself insensible by flying directly into the riverside window pane. Kamikaze job. Couldn’t take any more.

Roscini mentioned a report called ‘Engaging for Success’ which stated that ‘the values we preach should be visible day by day’. Do you want our civil service to ‘preach values’? The People Survey measured ‘how much our staff are inspired by the work they do’ (they actually do some work?) and ‘how well led they have been’. It was a ‘core mine of data’ for thinktanks and parliamentary committees. Trade unions were ‘very interested in it’, too, and were shown the data well before it was made public, in good time for annual pay negotiations. A typical survey respondent would write: ‘I asked to be paid more money and I have not been. Therefore I am a bit disappointed.’ Staff filled in the surveys anonymously. This means it is ‘relatively free of biases’. Chisholm indicated that when staff complained about pay, it was ‘taken very seriously’ and rises often ensued.

The survey was published twice a year in ‘a number of internal products’ with ‘data packs, interactive dashboards, action planning templates and knowledge hubs’. ‘Is this the standard dashboard, the intermediate dashboard, the advanced dashboard or the fourth dashboard?’ demanded Ronnie Cowan (SNP, Inverclyde), chewing his beard. Roscini, cryptically: ‘It depends.’ Staff could ‘play with the findings, apply filters, compare themselves against business units and give their own interpretation to the data’. All this in office time. Daily log-ins on the dashboard from civil servants’ computers last year reached 17,000.

Some 12,000 teams were able to ‘cut the data by demographics’. ‘We also share the microdata with organisations that have analytical support,’ vouchsafed Roscini. ‘This takes time.’ ‘It requires a lot of extra work,’ confirmed Chisholm, wearing his serious face. Roscini: ‘We quality-assure our findings.’ A survey is taken. The survey is itself surveyed. Then it is quality-assured. Just to be on the safe side.

What a wonderful belly-button fluff inspection.