Angry Employees (Updated)

“A happy worker is a productive worker”; every company with a half decent HR department knows that’s true. An unhappy employee can be dangerous, not only because his productivity stalls but also because he can diffuse his dissatisfaction into the work environment and turn others against the company as well. Yet there is another area of your business in which an unhappy employee is even more dangerous; word of mouth marketing. People tend to put twice as much trust in the word-of-mouth of an employee that trashes the business than a peer who recounts a bad experience. This is because of two reasons; firstly, we always consider the possibility that our peers’ bad experience is a one in a hundred occurrence, whereas the employee gives us a survey of the history of the company’s service quality. Secondly, we assume that a company has to be pretty bad if its employees are putting their livelihood at risk by scaring away potential clients.

I was reminded of this fact last week when I was on a boat trip on the Aegean. The anchor broke and our captain, unable to get the proper guy to fix it since the owner of the business told him to go cheap, made us stay in the same spot for an entire day. The cook took the opportunity to trash the captain and the owner of the business, telling us about ‘the great boat’s he’s worked on before’. Suffice it to say, this really gave us a strong bias throughout the rest of our trip to everything that went wrong, and we were already talking about using one of the boats the cook was talking about next year. If this happens to every tour group that gets on board, I can’t imagine the business prospering. So what’s the bottom line: keep your employees happy, there’s more at stake than productivity!

UPDATE: A friend of mine who was on the boat with me shared some interesting information ysterday; apparently the cook did not stop at trashing the tour company but went so far as to give the contact numbers to other tour companies later that evening (I, of course, was asleep when this happened). FYI