By Hank Marquis

IT Satisfaction Has a Perception Problem

Image Credit: Me!

Satisfaction has a perception problem. When I talk to people about it, we usually have to spend the first part of the conversation just agreeing on what “satisfaction” even means.

Some IT folks equate satisfaction with workstation health and uptime. Others see it as an occasional survey asking, “How satisfied are you?” Some narrow it to the Service Desk. In reality, none of these definitions is wrong — they’re just incomplete.

Satisfaction is subjective. What feels satisfying to one person may feel unacceptable to another. Expectations, attitudes, culture, and context all shape how people interpret the same experience. That’s what makes satisfaction tricky to discuss and even harder to measure.

We can only know authentic digital employee satisfaction when we measure ourselves the way employees experience us — not just the way IT monitors itself.

Two people doing the same job can feel very differently about it depending on what they expected, what they value, and what options they believe they have. The same is true for the digital workplace. One employee may feel “fine” about a tool, while another feels it slows them down and undermines their work — even when the technical performance is identical.

For those of us who grew up inside IT, it’s easy to hold on to internal assumptions about what “good enough” looks like. We lean on operational metrics because they’re familiar and objective. But that inside-out view belongs to an earlier era. It doesn’t tell us how the experience feels to the people doing the work.

Shifting to the perspective of today’s digital employee — often hybrid, mobile, and deeply dependent on a portable digital workplace — is no longer optional. It’s central to staying relevant and keeping the business open.

Most IT teams understand that an outside-in view matters. Where many struggle is in changing how they measure. It’s tempting to believe that “better dashboards” or more monitoring of service delivery technologies will eventually reveal what employees feel. But that approach hasn’t worked well for a long time, if it ever truly did.

Doubling down on the same operational data and expecting a different outcome is not progress. The organizations that are moving ahead know that traditional Quality of Service (QoS) metrics are necessary but not sufficient. They complement QoS with Quality of Experience (QoE) — measuring satisfaction as the gap between what people expect and what they actually perceive.

This expectation–perception relationship is at the heart of Completely Satisfied. It’s also the basis for moving from “IT satisfaction” (how IT thinks it’s doing) to “experience satisfaction” (how employees feel about the digital workplace they live in every day).

The good news is that you don’t need to throw away your operational data. It’s both possible and practical to keep your existing metrics while beginning to build humanistic experience data for specific digital employee groups. You keep the inside-out view and add an outside-in lens.

This has multiple benefits:

1. We learn new skills. By focusing on digital workgroups or pods where experience clearly needs to improve, IT can link changes in the digital environment to real business outcomes, setting the stage for broader scale.
2. We integrate for impact. Combining operational and humanistic metrics gives decision-makers a more complete picture. It allows leaders to see where “all green” dashboards coexist with poor experience.
3. We empower positive change. HR and people leaders can see the impact of better experiences in engagement, retention, and productivity, reinforcing the case for continued improvement.

What matters most to an employee is being able to do their job when they need to do it. Anything that gets in the way — lag, confusion, rework, unnecessary steps — lowers their perceived satisfaction and quality of experience. Your operational metrics can be 100% correct, every light green, and still your customers and employees can be frustrated and vocal about it.

To summarize: focus on experience satisfaction, not just IT satisfaction.

Here’s my advice:

• Create a clear, shared definition of satisfaction that everyone can understand and use. Anchor it in how expectations and perceptions relate over time, not just in single moments.
• Identify the main factors that influence satisfaction — expectations, attitudes, work context, and technology — and be explicit about how each one shows up in your environment.
• Put in place measures that track both sides: the operational performance of IT services and the emotions and perceptions that shape experience for digital employees.

This is exactly the distinction that Completely Satisfied makes, and it’s why Hailee’s workgroup digital twin focuses on expectations, perceptions, and gaps rather than IT’s internal view alone. Doing this work manually takes time: surveys, interviews, analysis, and careful interpretation. Hailee applies the same experience model automatically, helping leaders move beyond “IT satisfaction” toward a clearer understanding of the experience their employees actually have.

Please comment or reach out and let me know what you think, I'd love to talk with you!

Best,
Hank

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