Customer vs Employee Responsiveness

Most companies forget that customer satisfaction data is notoriously slow to change. Some of the opponents of measuring satisfaction site that slow change as a way of reducing the value of trends, as it may take years to see substantial changes in your data, and while by and large most companies understand how important customer satisfaction really is, there is no denying that it can take a long time before the data changes to a degree that you’re comfortable with. Cognitively this makes sense for a variety of reasons: Customers are rarely so personally invested in a company that they have emotional fluxes.

Customers are less likely to experience a pronounced change with any satisfaction effort. Customers are not generally as responsive to company outreach. Customers have little financial incentive to invest much emotion into how they feel about a company, so even if the company releases extensive satisfaction efforts, the benefits of those changes are presumably going to occur gradually.

The same may not be true of employees and their response to satisfaction changes. Employees spend 40+ hours a week with a company, and depend on that company for the entirety of their wellbeing. One can see a scenario where an employee’s satisfaction level can change dramatically overnight.

If you offer each employee a $100,000 raise, and fire all of the supervisors that upset them, chances are they’ll go from unsatisfied to very satisfied in a matter of hours. What is unclear, however, is how long those changes last. Bonuses at the end of the fiscal year are often used to improve employee’s satisfaction, but how much benefit does this really have in the long term? That answer may not be as clear, because there are likely to be other factors that affect how the employee views the particular workplace at any given moment, and while a small effort may improve satisfaction of the workplace, time has a tendency to lessen the impact of that satisfaction after the novelty has worn off.

If anything is to be taken away from this, it is that long term trends in the data are going to be even more relevant to employee satisfaction than they are to customer satisfaction, because employee satisfaction can change rapidly and a single study may be providing you with only a temporary satisfaction change – one that will wear off once the novelty of your efforts wear off. Employee satisfaction has always been a process, but it’s difficult to say how the effects of that process are working without extensive, long term research.