Are Britain’s worst brands also the worst employers?

By Neil Patrick

Here’s a question for you. If a firm serves its customers poorly, does that also mean they treat their staff poorly?

According to a new piece of research, this is exactly the case. The research by Belinda Parmar of LadyGeek led to the creation of what she calls ‘The Empathy Index’. I also think it’s a useful way of deciding who you really don’t ever want to work for…

It used a UK nationwide poll of 1,000 members of the public, online feedback from 25 employees per company and analysis of 100 of each firm's tweets.

Whilst we have to be careful to not mix up cause and effect, I think it’s fair to assume that if a firm tops the index, it is almost certainly a better employer than one from the bottom. Moreover, whilst I have no direct personal experience of working for any of these firms, I know people who do and I also have experienced most of them as a customer. The index certainly ‘felt right’ to me.

These are the firms that topped the Index :

Congratulations to Linkedin! I was also pleased to see John Lewis coming in at number 4 – their employees are always exceptionally helpful and deliver great service. It’s no co-incidence that they all seem to be happy in their work.

But it’s the bottom of the list that I was more interested in. This hall of shame contained few surprises for me:

The bottom firms on this table are fully deserving losers in my view. At the very bottom are Carphone Warehouse who ignore data privacy requests and Ryanair who advertise cheap "no-frills" flights to secure bookings and then upsell us “options” at the airport when we have no choice. If you have a musical instrument with you, that’s an extra £60. Airport check-in fee - £70. More than one bag - £40.

Ryanair’s chief exec Michael O’Leary's disdain for his customers and "colorful" language makes for headlines of the wrong sort. He must subscribe to the idea that there's no such thing as bad publicity. In 2012 Ryanair got a pasting on social media for charging a customer £236 to print out five boarding passes. He claimed that “99.98 per cent” of Ryanair passengers printed their boarding passes in advance: “To those who don't, we say quite politely: ‘B***** off’”. Just how exactly is that polite Michael?

In 2013, Ryanair was also voted by consumer group Which? as having the worst customer service in a survey of 100 of Britain’s biggest brands. Angry customers took to Twitter to tell the Irish aviation boss personally what an ‘a***hole’ they thought he was.

‘I am an a***hole,’ he admitted. ‘But they still love me.’ Erm, I’m not so sure about that, Michael…

I’ve never been a customer of Carphone Warehouse, but here’s what Wikipedia has to say:

During 2005, customers who bought mobile phones from Carphone Warehouse retail outlets alleged that their landline accounts were subsequently switched without their consent.

On 15 August 2006, the Information Commissioner's Office issued Preliminary Enforcement Notices for breaches of PECR (The Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations) against Carphone Warehouse and TalkTalk for making marketing calls to people who are signed up to the Telephone Preference Service (TPS) or people who have asked that the company make no further calls to them.

On 28 October 2006, in a Times interview, Richard Thomas, Britain's Information Commissioner, stated:

“We're taking action against some of the telecom companies, Talk Talk and Carphone Warehouse… because we've had a lot of complaints that they've been telephoning people with marketing calls, people whose name is on the telephone preference service. And then we do these prosecutions, particularly with private detectives. We've got a big case coming up.”

And finally we have BT. One of my friends worked for them and described the culture he experienced as “Daily agony.” A bullying culture that set unrealistic goals and punishing schedules. An expectation that people would work seven days a week and be grateful. The outsourcing of customer service to India where unintelligible workers in call centres would robotically read scripts to customers making helpdesk enquiries.

I think it’s fairly safe to say that the daily working experience for staff of the firms at the bottom of this index is just as miserable as it is for their customers. In fact probably worse, because they have to endure working with unhappy customers day after day after day.

In case you wish to discover how your current or potential employer performed on the Index, here’s a link to the complete document.