SLOANREVIEW.MIT.EDU FALL 2019 MIT SLOAN MANAGEMENT REVIEW 11
What’s more, giving customers too
much influence over what front-line
employees receive in pay and their oppor-
tunities for career advancement risks
alienating workers, since customer feed-
back can be highly subjective, emotionally
charged, and potentially biased.^5 Customers
sometimes rate employees on factors out-
side the employee’s control (for example,
a slow computer system, long wait times,
or even the weather). When managers use
extraneous information like this to evalu-
ate employee performance, it can feed
perceptions of unfairness and encourage
employees to game the system.
- Foster a culture of respect for
front-line employees. Many organiza-
tions put front-line employees in a
position in which they feel they need to
dress up their performance for their su-
pervisors by begging customers for high
scores on surveys. At the end of a service
call, one employee at a global consumer
electronics company confided to one of
us, “We’re a week away from our annual
evaluations, and I sure would appreciate
you saying nice things about me.” Such
requests can unnerve customers and even
undermine the work the company does
to present a positive brand message. In
addition, when employees think they
have to beg customers for high ratings
to thrive, they do not feel like respected
members of the organization, they are
less motivated to make genuine efforts
to create customer value, and they start
questioning their role within the com-
pany. One informant, for example, told
us she felt undignified and often asked
herself, “Is this the job I so desperately
wanted to do?”
Organizations need to find ways to
create and reinforce a positive business
culture so that front-line employees
aren’t on the defensive and compelled to
engage in opportunistic, manipulative
behavior. Few companies have been more
effective at this than Southwest Airlines.
Over more than four decades, it has
worked at building a culture where em-
ployees — not customers — come first.
In its annual reports and corporate com-
munications, Southwest management
talks about value creation for “employees,
customers, and shareholders,” in that
order.^6 Knowing that the company values
the contributions of its employees, many
have shown a willingness to go the extra
mile to satisfy passengers.- Make employee well-being a real
priority. In addition to respecting front-
line employees, organizations need to
understand that these workers’ well-being
is essential to success and make sure
that message is clearly communicated
internally.
One way to do this is to have dedicated
staffers for dealing with employee well-
being issues, just as businesses do for
handling customer satisfaction issues. An
employee service counter that operates
independently from the performance
management team can support workers
who have experienced unpleasant cus-
tomer interactions and help them recover
from incidents like verbal assault, targeted
or stalking harassment, and the like. For
example, 3M organizes retreats at which
employees are encouraged to talk about
difficult customers. Sharing such experi-
ences with colleagues can help employees
reestablish a sense of equilibrium and feel
better about the value they are providing.- Confirm that the customer is not
always king. Managers need to identify
unacceptable customer requests and give
front-line employees protection against
such requests. In our research, we found
that many front-line employees worry
about speaking out for fear of retribution.
They feel constrained and frequently let
their frustration simmer. Across a wide
variety of employment categories in our
sample, including airline cabin crews and
financial and legal service providers, em-
ployees working on the customer relations
side of the business struggle to maintain
a sense of pride in their work. Positive
feelings quickly unravel when these work-
ers can’t do what they feel is right and
are expected to bite their tongue with
ill-mannered customers.
Companies can take steps to show
workers that they don’t need to take
abuse from irate customers. In Korea,
Hyundai Card, a credit card company,
drastically reduced turnover and absen-
teeism of front-line employees and
increased productivity by eliminating
policies that forbade employees from
hanging up on customers.^7 Under the new
guidelines, an employee can terminate a
call when the customer is unreasonable or
abusive. The new policy humanized and
validated the needs of front-line employ-
ees, without diminishing the importance
of customers. Recently, the call centers of
several Korean companies have startedGiving customers too much influence
over employees’ pay and opportunities
for career advancement risks alienating
workers, since customer feedback can
be highly subjective, emotionally
charged, and potentially biased.