If your company is focused on a great workplace culture, the odds are high that employee satisfaction comes up frequently.  Are employees expected to complete a reasonable amount of work?  Are their working environments comfortable?  Do managers respect employees when interacting with them?  Ideally, your employees are motivated and challenged by the work they complete each day, but are not beaten down by it.

There’s one area with major impact that’s often ignored, however. The companies you elect to do business with will impact how enjoyable a day is for nearly every one of your employees.

It’s true that we don’t always get to choose our customers – while outrageously mean customers may be shown the door, employees do need to be understanding when assisting angry customers with their problems, especially if your company is responsible for the problem.  Companies do, however, get to choose their service providers.

For key service providers that interact with the executive team, such as lawyers or accountants (and technology partners!), it’s important for management to feel comfortable providing sensitive information to them.  These outside professionals will be responsible not only for providing high-quality service but also keeping information safe and secure.  If these companies seem disinterested in customer service, they are, or at least should be, quickly replaced.

For other service providers, however, cost containment is often seen as the key factor.  For countless vendors – mailing services, janitorial services, couriers, coffee suppliers – if the service is provided cheaply, executives may never experience the other differences between two providers.

While it might be rare for you to interact with these companies, your employees interact with them every day.  If their employees are terse, difficult to reach, or require constant prodding, it will have an impact on your employees.  For some employees, it will be a single unpleasant interaction.  For others, much of their day may be consumed by interactions with these vendors, dragging them down day after day.

One way to keep employee satisfaction high is to consider the interactions that they have with people outside of the company – both service providers and customers – and think about whether those interactions make their day worse, or better.  Removing interactions with only a couple of these companies may make your employees more productive and happy in a way that your customers will experience every day.  You’ll experience it too, both in your interactions with your employees and in your bottom line.

To learn how WingSwept can help improve the lives of your employees, call us at 919.779.0954 or email us at Team_WingSwept@WingSwept.com.