Job Satisfaction

An example from the retail sector is one that many people can probably recognize from their own empirical evidence of shop assistants who are happy in their roles and in the company of like-minded colleagues, but who perhaps are not always alert to the possibility of delighting the store’s customers. Moving on from those situations in which the intrinsic job-interest to an employee may cut across notions of service that are deemed acceptable to customers, an all-too-frequent cause of difficulties is an ill thought through system for targeting and possibly rewarding employees. A classic example of this is drawn from call centres, where the agents are paid according to the number of calls fielded. The superficial business logic is easily understood: that is, it is driven by a desire to eliminate waiting times on the telephone for customers. However the law of unintended consequences takes over, as can happen, and the agents make sure that they keep the length of the calls to a minimum so they can move on to the next one. Unfortunately, for many customers this means there is not enough time for their problems to be addressed, let alone solved, and it will probably result in them having to make further calls until they achieve a resolution.

There are many examples available that seek to demonstrate this ‘happy’ combination and IT is a fertile area. Where employees understand what matters to customers and use this intelligence to identify the problem, they can fix it and take the necessary action to prevent it from recurring. This significantly reduces the impact of IT failure on their clients’ businesses.

In ‘Managing and measuring for value: the case of call centre performance’, the Cranfield School of Management highlighted some notable examples of organizations adopting an approach that sought to capitalize on such intelligence. First, the European airline bmi took this approach, and reduced queues at ticket offices, check-ins and boarding gates. The airline’s IT director Richard Dawson is quoted as saying: ‘Over the last two years calls have been reduced by 40 per cent and time to fix by 70 per cent.’

Another instance comes from Fujitsu, the IT solutions provider, which had a self-imposed time limit on calls. When it got rid of this time limit staff were in effect given permission to fully resolve customer queries. This had the effect of reducing the number of unnecessary calls by as much as 60 per cent, and increasing customer satisfaction. Moreover, staff turnover fell sharply, from 42 per cent to 8 per cent, as staff gained more job satisfaction, while operating costs were reduced by 20 per cent.

Continuing with this theme, Joy LePree reported a case involving the Naval Air Depot at Cherry Point, North Carolina. The depot struggled to meet deadlines for getting aircraft repaired and back in service. When the situation was analysed it was found that the facility’s overall business philosophy of keeping a lid on costs was at the root of the problem. This was then changed so that the depot’s most important business metric became throughput, or the number of aircraft repaired and returned to service in a given time period. That number doubled in a year, clearly pleasing the depot’s customers. The employees and managers at the depot were also happy as they were able to improve customer service without a significant impact on their budgets. Above all else this is another demonstration of how important and interconnected the business strategy is to the happiness of employees and customers.

Despite the anecdotal evidence, for many it remained unclear whether there was a causal link between employee and customer satisfaction. In 1996 Ryan et al warned that there was ‘insufficient evidence for the popular wisdom that employee attitudes cause customer satisfaction’. They acknowledged the commonsense argument, and that some research testified to employee and customer attitudes influencing each other, but argued that this could be because one was reflective rather than predictive of the other.