Satisfaction as Quality Measure

Both employee and customer satisfaction have become well recognized factors in successful business models, but the belief that they are important to a thriving company are not necessarily universally accepted. There are some researchers that believe that satisfaction results may not matter as much as people claim.

The thought of this line of thought is that the most important factors in a successful business may be elsewhere, and that customer satisfaction and employee satisfaction are merely results of these efforts. Researchers put forward the idea that instead of investing money into satisfaction, the company should invest money into product quality. By improving product quality, the customers would be happy, which in turn would lead to more revenue, which would allow companies to offer more money to their employees, which would lead to greater levels of employee satisfaction.

Leaving aside all of the additional ideas brought up by those researchers, this thought itself is certainly intriguing. By making the best product available, revenue would increase and employees would presumably receive a financial benefit that would ultimately improve their happiness.

Assuming this hypothesis is correct, however, would have other implications. Namely, if employee satisfaction and product quality are linked in this way, then employee satisfaction itself would also be an indirect measurement of product quality, because – as the author and other researchers believe – product quality is enough to lead to greater levels of employee satisfaction. It is an interesting idea, but the probability that it will actually be a useful measurement tool is fairly slim.

It simply seems too unlikely that the two are so directly linked that employee satisfaction can be ignored. Satisfaction can never be that simple, and it brings forth numerous other questions as well (for example: how do you create a quality product without satisfied employees?) that have no easy answers.

However, if one was to subscribe to this belief, at the very least it would give employee satisfaction surveys an entirely different use. Rather than use them as a way of learning if your employees are satisfied, one could use employee satisfaction (and customer satisfaction) to find out if the product is of high quality. The surveys themselves would still be useful, even if what they are measuring has changed.