The marketplace logic of producers and consumers has swept society. Many years ago, it was Rajni Bakshi’s Bazaars, Conversations & Freedom (Penguin India, 2009) that brought alive for me quite starkly how civil society and citizenship had been supplanted by the marketplace and the consumer.

Everyone today professes to be customer-focused. References to VoC, or the voice of the customer, are oft heard in any organisational conversation. Every department/role-holder is encouraged to be responsive to their customers’ needs. This wasn’t the case till a couple of decades ago.

Taking a Step Back

Till recently, we did not treat our children as customers. We did our best to make their lives comfortable. We did what was possible to prepare them for what lay ahead—sometimes unilaterally, and many times, through consultation and dialogue. We drew boundaries, told them what was on offer, what conduct was desirable, and the consequences of breaching the limits. We didn’t pander to every whim. The last was perhaps essential to maturation—the difference between the infantilised and the pampered on the one hand, and the maturing, showing adult-like behaviours of volition and restraint on the other.

Our educational institutions didn’t treat students as customers. They didn’t treat its teachers too as customers. They were governed by ideals and a mission that went beyond the likes and dislikes of students, and their whims and fancies. If faculty popularity and likeability become critical criteria for faculty retention from a ‘student as customer’ perspective, or student feedback bears a disproportionately high weightage without dialogue and substantiation, then, getting an education—which used to include values, traditions, practices, and ways of thinking and being – will need significant redefinition.

A healthcare institution is interesting. Typically, a hospital’s patients and staff weren’t seen as its customers. Increasingly, this isn’t so. Viewing patients as customers poses a variety of daily ethical dilemmas and tricky choices that patients may be unhappy with, or, it may pit consultant physicians’/surgeons’ professional views against commercial considerations or hospital policy. This is made worse when institutions deal with celebrity specialists and staff as ‘customers’, and hospitality sector perspectives take over; the patient as a cash register and the doctor who keeps accountants happy could take away the focus from alleviating the suffering of the patient, and the doctor’s Hippocratic oath.

Are Employees of an Organisation its Customers? 

The employee–employer relationship has similarities to an organisation’s relationship to its customers. Employers don’t like employee attrition as a rule, much like organisations don’t like customers’ migration to competitors. Employees ‘consume’ some services offered, much like customers do, except the latter are asked to pay for it. Today, both are wooed assiduously—customers with freebies, upgrades, offers, etc., and employees, with their equivalent. Customer satisfaction/delight is seen as one of the goals of business. Employee satisfaction and engagement are a means to creating happy customers. Treating employees as customers has consequences, not all of which are understood or acknowledged.

At the core, it seems perverse to think of employees as customers, or more starkly as consumers, when one wishes for them to be organisation architects at every level, imbued with curiosity, a sense of purpose and values, and a willingness to challenge oneself. Just as it seems odd when participants in a learning event are assumed to be an audience—passive consumers with critiquing rights, whose moods, appetites and preferences must be whetted by the ‘performer’, the trainer—rather than as active learnera, participating and exploring, inquiring, questioning, challenging, listening, reflecting…

Employees, including mid–senior managers, are not always adequately aware of history, strategic intent and the rationale of specific action design elements, say, a learning event. Under these circumstances, some participants’ feedback may reflect a lack of attention, understanding, or ignorance. It may also reflect a personal preference based on one’s own orientations and experience. An exploratory dialogue may help ‘understand’ first. It would be perverse to suggest that all feedback is valid ‘as is’ and actionable because ‘customer [the employee!] is king’. 

The modern corporation’s employee is spoilt for choice. Personalisation, customisation, self-service portals, loaded menus of learning materials, and wellness course offerings suggest that all bases are covered. Many an organisation become quasi-parents and mimic the behaviours of the indulgent, anticipating every need, nay whim, of a temperamental child that alternates between being an entitled brat and a dissatisfied, craving and petulant one.

Employee survey-feedback is common. Satisfaction surveys are old-fashioned. Engagement surveys are in. All forms of feedback survey data have noise and wisdom that need to be distinguished. Further, all survey design rests on intentions, assumptions and a theory (or a bunch of them) that is contextual. The data may suggest a very different set of hypotheses leading to a new framing of a theory at work. Working with partial feedback or in a piecemeal, fragmented way, devoid of intent and context can be unproductive.

Responsiveness to feedback when approached unimaginatively, even dogmatically, can create problems and betray an inability to sift through feedback for i) unsubstantiated assertions, ii) random opinions that don’t find wider resonance in the sample, and iii) patterns that point to actionable interventions.

The essential point that bears repetition is that feedback needs to be put through a sieve, while also taking a holistic view. One can’t rush to conclusions or action without asking, ‘In what was said, what was really being said?’ So having an action item against a feedback response—this one-on-one correspondence is unnecessary. It may create the illusion of ‘customer [employee] responsiveness’, and numerous takeaways and action items that may just be a case of missing the woods for the trees. 

The People Function

Where the People function is anxious to please, score high on responsiveness and ‘give them what they want’, no dialogue is possible to truly understand and clarify, or educate and engage with a counter-perspective. Indeed, the latter risks being seen as code-breaking since its customer, the employee, is believed to be ‘always right’. One further point: it would be premature to initiate change/corrective measures in some nook or corner based on early trends. One also risks the integrity of an offering if one tinkers piecemeal to respond to stray feedback.

Seldom do functions like Finance, Procurement, Marketing, Sales, Legal, Information Systems, view colleagues as customers, except in the broadest sense in relation to a throughput they are part of, where they treat the ‘next is’ as a customer for their outputs. While generally, a service orientation is desirable and being responsive to others’ needs is a prized asset, drawing boundaries and educating those being served is perhaps as important. However, the latter is often unacknowledged and undervalued. The People function would do well to pay heed to this.

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