Coffee Chats

Today and yesterday I participated in series of employee events at Spirit Mountain Casino called "Coffee Chats". These are essentially informal meetings held in conference rooms between management and staff where employees have the freedom to ask whatever they want, to express concerns, and clear up rumors and misunderstandings. There were two yesterday, one in the early morning and the other mid-afternoon. The two today were mid-afternoon and evening. There is coffee, too.
I guess these meetings have been held several times over the past year. Some have told me they can be confrontational at times, and mellow at others. Employees can attend while on the clock, and all attending are given raffle tickets for drawings of prizes that usually go to regular patrons. In this case, those prizes were "rocket grills", which from what I could tell is supposed to be a takeoff and competitor of the George Foreman Grill. Haven't used one, but I can see how they might be handy.
Bottom line is employees are allowed an opportunity to air things out with management, and if they choose can be paid to do so. This has to be a good thing. Personally, I do not ever recall having these coffee chats while being an employee myself, though that was admittedly long ago (2003) and my own work experiences have been mostly pleasant at the casino. Still, I am trying to figure out why there is such a gap between my own experiences and those of people who are drawn by some powerful urge to broadcast their casino workplace struggles at Council meetings or through emails and phone calls to us, like we are the Human Resource equivalent of Don Corleone.
Can't say the two coffee chats I attended provided many answers. For one, most of the workers said nothing. Two, if between these four meetings maybe 100 employees chose to show up, it's hard to take comments and questions as fairly representing any general sentiment of the roughly 1600 workers at Spirit Mountain. Three, most of the questions were innocuous and readily answered. I would be curious to know how the employee surveys play out.
Regardless, they were interesting to sit through, even if some of the faces, and complaints, were familiar.