What Drives Parent Satisfaction: Part I

After spending several days in the past three weeks conducting focus groups with parents and teachers at independent schools, I came across a John Di Julius quote from his book, Customer Service Revolution (2015): "Your customers will never be any happier than your employees are." This maxim certainly applies in the airline business, where disgruntled and bitterly unhappy flight attendants can make even a short flight miserable for everyone on board. I have the opportunity to watch this play out every week on multiple flights.Nowhere is the Di Julius maxim more true than in small schools, where unhappy teachers can easily foment a disturbance in the ecosystem that quickly becomes toxic to school health. However, parents are much quicker to defect to another school than I am to another airline; after all, airlines have frequent flier programs and elite benefit schemes to laminate us them, whether we are happy or not. Parents are much more willing to flee because of two factors that heads (sometimes) and boards (often) overlook:

1. Parents experience the school through their child's eyes and the teacher's statements more than through marketing materials and greetings from the head of school; and
2. Because their child's future seems to be at stake, parents are much less tolerant of disturbances in the school ecosystem than they would be of unhappy flight attendants or sales clerks in a retail business.

In a showdown with management, parents are more likely to side with teachers who appear, often falsely, more credible and less scripted and rehearsed. And, because buying-in to a given school is as much an exercise in emotional bonding as in rational decision-making, events that reflect poorly on the school tend to fray what holds families in the community. In short, I am arguing here that unhappy school employees can do even more damage than unhappy employees in most other industries. I heard some form of this during every focus group last week (and most others over the years): parents talking about teachers whose unhappiness with how their schools run is becoming infectious. Sometimes even a facial expression is enough to telegraph the message, just like on an airplane.This does not mean that boards of trustees and heads of school should cater to every faculty whim; rather, it means that the health of the relationship between, if you will, labor and management is not something to be taken lightly. In fact, maybe even thinking of the parties as "labor" and "management" is part of the problem. Remember, your employees have the customer's ear in ways you never will.