3 Studies of Employee Satisfaction Benefits

There is a lot of controversy within employee satisfaction research about the benefits of employee satisfaction on revenue. While there is little doubt that a harmonious environment is a great way to reduce turnover and help the company run more smoothly, the question is the degree that employee satisfaction is linked to ROI, and whether the amount of effort it would take to improve that satisfaction is a worthwhile investment when compared to other methods of improving revenue. Yet there are many researchers that strongly believe that employee satisfaction and revenue are strongly linked.

Here are three examples of studies that support that theory. S&P Survey In his book, “The Enthusiastic Employee: How Companies Profit by Giving Workers What They Want,” David Sirota speaks of research he and his colleagues completed of publicly traded companies in 2000 and 2001 based on their employee satisfaction survey scores. In 2002, after the S&P stock market collapsed, he then analyzed how these companies did based on these morale scores.

He found that all of the companies that had “high morale” marks performed 20% better as a whole than those that didn’t. FPPMM The Forum for People Performance Management and Measurement has compiled several of their own studies. Some of their findings include a study of over 100 US Media companies, which found that employee satisfaction was linked to employee involvement, which in turn was linked to customer satisfaction.

Interestingly this study also included those with no customer contact, indicating that if the overall workplace is content, that attitude will trickle down to the customers. Practice What You Preach David Maister, author of Practice What You Preach also had similar findings. He found that 69 of the 74 questions he included in his survey were high in companies with good revenue, and low in companies with poor revenue.

These findings fit in line with the S&P survey, and showed that the profitable companies received better scores all around.

All of these findings indicate one thing – that happy employees will ultimately lead to more satisfied customers. Both finding out if your employees are satisfied and doing what it takes to create a content workplace should be an important part of your company’s business plan. However, it should be noted that these studies do have a few weaknesses that may affect your own findings with regard to employee satisfaction. These weaknesses will be explored in an upcoming article.