One thing we all know about customer experience is that happy, satisfied employees tend to deliver a better experience to customers. You know, the companies with employees who leap for joy, who high-five because their jobs are so fulfilling. And who go out of their way to make their customers equally happy.

So it would seem that companies listed on one of the many “Best Places to Work” would be candidates for “Best Customer Experience” as well.

There’s just one glitch in this.

Apparently, not all of the “best places to work” are really the best places to work. In fact, as business journalist Joanne Cleaver exposed in an article in the BNET Insight Newsletter, some of the companies that make these lists are anything but places with satisfied employees.

Cleaver cites Novartis.

They made the “Best” list many times. But all along, they may have been practicing discrimination against female employees.

In mid-May, Novartis went from a “best places to work” list to a black list: Companies No Sane Woman Would Work For. The company’s fall from grace came by way of a class-action discrimination lawsuit it lost — and a $250 million fine it subsequently gained.  The jury found that Novartis paid female salespeople less than male reps and had demoted some of them when they were pregnant. As part of its defense, Novartis paraded its ten-year tenure on the Working Mother “100 Best Companies for Working Mothers” list.

There are reasons for such discontinuities.

Cleaver cites them as “dirty little secrets” in the BNET newsletter article. For one, most of these lists are compiled from company-reported data; not by researching directly with the employees. We would add that another way of determining a best place to work would be to look at how well customers regard the company. Unhappy, discriminated employees would not be motivated to pass along great customer service.

Could there be a correlation?

Lists citing companies that are best places to work (such as Novartis) and best customer experience. That was always my assumption when my fingers ran down the columns of company names on these lists. So, as with any research findings, the first thing we should do is read the methodology for the research. If it is self-reported data or data that a company pays to submit into a public relations contest, it is time to turn the rock over and look for the real truth.

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