We Have a Learning Disability

Recently, it has struck me that we have a collective learning disability.

In the early 1960s, Xerox did some landmark work on customer satisfaction. What they found was this: employee satisfaction yields customer satisfaction, which in turn yields profitability. We have all studied this; we all believe it; we virtually all ignore it.

In Practice What You Preach, David Maister performed his own study on professional service firms (PSFs). He found that employee satisfaction yields customer satisfaction, which in turn yields profitability. More specifically, he writes in Chapter 9, entitled The Path to Performance, "It turns out that we can prove that if an average office increased its performance by going from an average of 'somewhat agree' (a 4 of 6 on his scale) to 'agree' (5 of 6) on the staff's rating of quality and client relationships, this would cause a doubling of its financial performance." (Italics his, bold mine.)

It is important to note that both the Xerox study and Maister's study establish causal relationships, not correlative, but causal. In short, increasing the satisfaction of your employees will cause an increase to financial performance!

In my speaking engagements, I have begun asking how often the participants measure financial performance. The answer is most often monthly. I then ask how often they measure employee satisfaction. The answer, most given, is not at all, and at best, yearly. Is this not insane?

My proposal would be to begin doing a monthly employee satisfaction survey. I suggest as a model, the survey used by Marcus Buckingham in his book, First, Break All the Rules. It is a 12-question short-answer survey that takes about 5 minutes at most to complete.

I have implored organizations to do this. No one has. Why? I can only think of two possible answers:

1. We really do not want to know.2. We have a learning disability.